Today on Public Discourse, Sherif Girgis (co-author of What is Marriage? One Man, One Woman: A Defense) argues that we need to reason about what marriage is--to understand its essential features and why the state has an interest in promoting them--before we can craft sound marriage law:

Everyone has blind spots. It is philosophy’s ambition to cure these by canceling them out, through dialogue and scrutiny of assumptions. But even academic philosophy has its dogmas. One current example is support for same-sex marriage: To question it is to be anathematized by those occupationally averse to anathemas.

So I was both pleased that Alex Worsnip reviewed my co-authored book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, and unsurprised that he misunderstood it. My former classmate in Oxford’s philosophy master’s (B.Phil.) program, Worsnip is sharp and serious about arguments, and consistently blind to arguments of certain sorts.