The social sciences are, in general, easier to ignore than the harder sciences if you don’t like their conclusions (not that this stops people from ignoring inconvenient aspects of physics, chemistry, or biology.) Where social issues are concerned, our abilities to convince ourselves of whatever we already believe are rather magnificent in their scope and brazenness. Anyway, George Will apparently doesn’t like to pay attention to what social science has to say about the lack of negative impact gay people have on society. It’s not that he discounts the research that has occurred. He apparently prefers to ignore it or pretend it does not exist at all.

Nathaniel Frank at Slate offers a good analogy for Will’s basic refusal to engage on the issue:

Suppose a group of people claim that redheads can’t enter the town square because they’ll drive away commerce, badly harming the economy—and then this group gets a law passed barring redheads from public spaces. To reverse the discriminatory law, they then argue, redheads must spend however long it takes to amass definitive proof that entering the town square won’t cause harm (which is impossible since you can’t conduct research on scenarios you won’t permit). When redheads nevertheless begin to produce a growing body of research that points conclusively to the fact that their presence does not harm commerce, the law’s defenders consistently reply, “It still might; more research is needed.”

That is the position Will is defending in the gay marriage debate. The very idea that gay equality would cause serious harm is the kind of belief you hold if you’re already inclined to think, usually for moral reasons, that homosexuality is harmful, that is, if you’re anti-gay. Otherwise, there’d be no better reason to assume gay marriage is harmful than there is from letting redheads go to market.

I cannot add much of value to this analogy, except to point out that each one of us views the world in a unique way, and for me, redheads are much more potentially distracting than gay people. (Redheads are pretty, right? It’s an Amy Pond thing, I think.) I’m sure more than a few people would agree that the sight of freckly hotness has, at one time or another, constituted a serious impediment to productivity, right? (Of course, Frank was presumably not limiting his analogy to attractive redhead women, but I’m trying to phrase this in terms George Will can understand.) A marketplace full of redheads might devolve into anarchy, right?

Well, no. At least, it should not. And if it did, that is in no way a justification for infringing on the basic liberties of redheads, because it is not their problem. It is the problem of the person who gets distracted by the existence of redheads. In fact, it completely dehumanizes attractive female redheads to treat them as objects of reverent beauty.

I hope that analogy is clear.

To further illustrate my point, or something, here are a few pictures of redheads that I found by searching “redhead” on Wikimedia Commons:

I also learned from Wikimedia Commons that an event known as “Redhead Day,” or Roodharigendag, takes place every year in the Netherlands. Good to know.

Surprisingly (to me, anyway), Wikimedia Commons has quite a few NSFW search results. Be warned.

Photo credits: By Frank Kovalchek from Anchorage, Alaska, USA (Portrait of a lovely redhead, Uploaded by russavia) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons; Eddy Van 3000 from in Flanders fields – Belgiquistan – United Tribes ov Europe (portrait of a German girl) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons; Eddy Van 3000 (Originally uploaded on flickr by Eddy Van 3000) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.