Sunday’s edition of the Portland Press Herald included a letter to the editor from First Baptist Church of Freeport’s pastor Sandy Williams, in which he struck down two “very subtle but fallacious arguments” of Bill Nemitz. The first?

“In his relentless defense of same-sex ‘marriage,’ Bill Nemitz now resorts to two very subtle but fallacious arguments. The first is an ‘argumentum ad misericordiam’ (an appeal to pity or sympathy). His story about Maya and her two mothers boils down to this: We don’t want children of same-sex couples to feel bad, and we certainly don’t want them to know that they have been robbed of normal family life by the self-serving interests of their ‘parents’; therefore we must embrace same-sex ‘marriage,’ and allow the word family to be claimed by anyone who wants it.

Sure, Maya and her mothers deserve to be treated with dignity – even compassion – but this is no argument for normalizing same-sex “marriage,” any more than kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard and the love she had for her daughters in any way makes that family even close to normal, and does not validate the horrendous way in which it came into being.”

Read his second point–and the full article–here.