It Takes a Family

In “It Takes a Family,” Rick Santorum uses the analogy of a plane to help reinforce his idea that a traditional marriage (meaning the union of a man and a woman) was superior to that of a “liberal” homosexual marriage. To this end he describes the traditional marriage as the perfect airplane, which always gets you to the correct destination. It is here that he stresses the idea of always in that the plane is reliable and will always do the best thing for its family. He then described a non-traditional family as a plane, which would sometimes get its family to the correct destination. He used the term sometimes to allow for what he would call anomalies, which better suits his tunnel-vision idea that only a traditional family can consistently turn out a good family. I believe this is a false assumption because every type of family will have its anomalies. Just because a family is headed by only one parent or by a gay couple doesn’t mean it will automatically fail, because they are just as capable of raising families as everyone else, however, many incorrect assumptions still prevent this truth from being common knowledge. It is also due to many of these misconceptions that the injustice of a ban on gay marriage has continued to permeate this country and prevent homosexual couples from reaching true equality. Thus, I find his analogy of planes to be an ill begotten and flawed argument, which did not help to prove his case of the “evils of gay marriage.”