They are not unicorns

This is just bad logic.



Here Rick Santorum is trying out the tired, old, nonsensical argument against marriage equality that if two women can marry, then 47 women can marry and OMG WHAT THEN???

It's a classic argumentative fallacy that every pre-law student gets quizzed on two weeks into their first semester. The question is this, but I'm going to pretend that it's this other thing and then answer the question I just made up that you didn't actually ask in the first place. And, in this case, doing so quite badly.)

What this college student asked the guy who just nearly won the first contest to be the GOP presidential nominee was this: why can these two people take advantage of the thousands of legal protections that come with marriage, and not these two people over here? What Santorum pretended she asked was "Why can't unicorns marry aliens if that's what makes them happyyyyy?"

We're not talking about unicorns or aliens. We're talking about individual adults who happen to be attracted to those of the same sex, and Santorum knows it. Some of those adults have kids from previous relationships, and some want kids for the first time. Their families are no less stable than any other, and there's no logical or legal reason that the law shouldn't protect them the way it does my family.

Santorum is deliberately belittling these families either for political points or because he genuinely believes they don't matter as much as his family. Either way, it's disgusting and sad, and while we're on the subject, un-Christian. If he's genuinely unable to see a same-sex couple as a couple just like he and his wife - as if they're unicorns or something else unhuman - then he has no business in a position of power.