Posts on facebook expressing a point of view with bad arguments aren’t totally useless. They’re very useful to illustrate common fallacious arguments that crap like this is based on.
So this one says either you want the government in your life or you don’t. If you want the government out of your bedroom, you shouldn’t get assistance paying for contraceptives or abortion. If you want assistance paying for abortion or contraeptives, you shouldn’t want them to stay out of your sex life.
This is an easy one. It’s a very common logical fallacy known as the “false dichotomy” or “false dilemma”. The assumption forces a black and white choice and excludes anything in between, in a case where there is clearly a huge middle ground. It makes the assertion that it’s wrong or ridiculous for someone to want good medical coverage and civil liberties at the same time, since one involves government social programs, and the other a lack of government involvement. If we go along with this idea, then in order to not be a hypocrite, anyone wanting to keep their sex lives unregulated by the government must be an anarchist and anyone who wants comprehensive health care must want CCTV cameras in every bedroom and laws on every sex act. It doesn’t make much sense, does it?
It might also be considered a non-sequitur, since it puts two things that are not necessarily related to each other in direct opposition. The level of involvement and control of government in the moral decisions of a person’s private life have little to nothing to do with good, comprehensive medical coverage. But this image forces them into a single continuum of government involvement. It’s quite a bit more complicated than that, of course.
For more about this stuff, check out the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe’s awesome comprehensive page on logical fallacies.
