Dear Editor,
The Maroon’s Mark DeMeo is a fine writer and an excellent rhetorician; unfortunately, he is not much of a realist or an empiricist, as he is woefully out-of-touch with the world that exists outside of New England or the 18- to 25-year-old demographic.
Three rhetorical devices pepper his most recent column and conspire to distract the reader from the issue at hand: syncrisis, innuendo and apodixis. Syncrisis is a rhetorical “not-this-but-that” comparison. “Morals no longer the issue,” is the headline on DeMeo’s column, and he explains that semantics are the source of the “primary dispute” concerning homosexual unions. The problem, of course, is that this conclusion is wrong, but for now we can only press on with our rhetorical analysis.
Innuendo is that wonderfully effective rhetorical device whereby ideas are implanted in a reader’s mind without so much as a single word spoken in support of those ideas. DeMeo accomplishes the belittling of opposing positions through careful word choice. He begins by matter-of-factly mentioning “gay marriage,” which his opponents would argue is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. He continues his subtle attack by applying connotation-riddled terms of endearment such as “sentimental,” “nostalgic” and “misunderstanding” to characterize the anti-“gay marriage” position. What a delightfully passé position those silly old conservatives hold in continuing to maintain the immorality of homosexuality.
Apodixis puts the proverbial nail in the coffin of DeMeo’s straw-man opponents by offering the ever popular “everyone thinks so” argument when, in point of fact, relatively few people seem to “think so.” “Many Americans,” he claims, “have finally accepted that this isn’t a conflict over morals, but a misunderstanding over language.” Which Americans would those be, exactly? Would those be the Americans in the 43 states that, according to the Human Rights Campaign (www.hrc.org), currently have no legal support for homosexual couples, regardless of the terminology used for their unions? If this is “no longer” a moral issue, then why do 86 percent of our legal charters seem to say otherwise?
The fact of the matter is that the issue of homosexual unions is still a moral issue, because many Americans still feel that homosexual unions are immoral. A constitutional amendment that defined marriage as the union between one man and one woman would not change these underlying moral disagreements; neither would a state legislative decision to apply that same term, marriage, to legally-recognized homosexual unions. Semantics are neither the problem nor the solution.
Nate Straight
Business graduate student
