Perhaps the most common argument against legalizing same-sex marriage in the 2000s and 2010s was the barnyard.
The OG of slippery slope arguments, the reasoning (using that word generously) was that letting two ladies or two dudes marry would mean that the government would have to let anyone marry anyone else, because reasons. That meant people would marry cats, dogs, donkeys… really any animal.
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Major evangelical predicted that marriage equality would cause fathers to marry their daughters
Two decades ago, people believed that marriage equality would erase all taboos around sexuality. It didn’t happen.
In 2013, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said that “there is no clear place to draw a line once you eliminate the traditional marriage,” so the government would have no choice but to acquiesce to “somebody [who] has a love for an animal.” Gohmert is still in the House today.
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In evangelical leader James Dobson’s 2004 book, it was man-donkey marriage that he was really worried about (apparently, he didn’t think women would succumb to the braying).
Rightwing commentator and serial sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly didn’t narrow it down to any species; same-sex marriage rights would “ultimately allow for a person to marry a goat, duck, or dolphin.” He also talked about marrying turtles on that 2009 broadcast.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) brought up box turtles in a draft of a 2004 Heritage Foundation speech, even though he later didn’t include the reference. Cornyn is still in the Senate, and Heritage is still providing ideas for administration policy.
In 2004, the current speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (R-LA), said that marriage equality would inevitably lead to allowing “a person to marry his pet.”
It was so prevalent that I remember a column being written by a more moderate Republican in a major newspaper telling her fellow conservatives to knock it off, that bringing up marriages with horses and starfish was making conservatives look silly. (Mercifully, perhaps, I can’t find this column today to link.)
Needless to say, human-animal marriage didn’t happen. There are no states that started giving gay couples marriage licenses and then realized that there’s no logical reason to deny marriage licenses to cats and dogs. There are no states considering legislation to this effect, no one has even introduced a bill in a state to allow human-turtle marriages, and there aren’t activists pushing for this.
There is no way that this prediction could have come true less. In the 10 years since Obergefell v. Hodges legalized marriage equality in all 50 states, it hasn’t even started to slightly come true anywhere.
But it was a clear prediction of the form “If X happens, then Y will happen,” and lots of people were making it.
So why would they say this? Why would they just lie?
One reason would be to induce feelings of disgust. There is no logical policy reason to prevent same-sex couples from getting married, and all the arguments made against marriage equality were created in bad faith. For either religious or hate-based reasons, conservatives didn’t like the idea of two men or two women marrying, so they made up concerns about divorce or fraudulent marriage in an attempt to convince others to agree with them.
So instead of creating a reason out of thin air, they chose to communicate and reify disgust. Conservatives like Johnson and Cornyn thought that gay people are gross, and sex with animals is something that almost everyone thinks is gross. They linked the two to make people think that gays are just as gross as people who have sex with animals.
They presented their argument as a prediction of what would happen because that was the rhetorical form demanded by their need to argue against marriage equality. But they knew it would never happen. Cornyn and Johnson, specifically, are both lawyers and legislators, and both of them knew that no court or legislature would ever allow contracts to be made between humans and animals.
This is perhaps one of the reasons so many LGBTQ+ people today find themselves on the left. While gay conservatives will often call other LGBTQ+ people single-issue voters, it’s more than that. It’s really hard to ignore the fact that a political party chose to lie for years for the sole purpose of getting people to hate you.
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