Background:
In 2016, North Carolina passed a law that requires people to use public restrooms based on the gender on their birth certificates. Many people feel that such laws infringe on the rights and freedoms of transgendered people. Warriors point guard Steph Curry, who grew up in North Carolina, was asked about the law in an article in the SF Chronicle. Below are three comments from the comments section that followed the online article. I have preserved the comments as they existed online (meaning the typos, if there are typos, are not mine).
Directions:
For each comment, analyze the argument being made—identify the main techniques and/or fallacies, and determine whether it is/they are reasonable. Use the terminology you have learned in class. Your answers probably won’t go over a page, single spaced, for all three combined (350 words max).
Internet commenter #1: 130 words
There was a time when a Man was a Man and a Woman was a Woman. What happened to those days? […] Can you imagine if a teenage boy or girl was able to take showers in the opposite sexes bathroom? What kind of complications would that cause? And can you imagine a Woman afraid to use the public bathroom because someone who looks like a man followed her in the Ladies bathroom? Have you ever heard of Dexter Bell, Richard Allen Davis or Ted Bundy? So by requiring all people to use a public bathroom that matches the gender that they are born as and is stated on their birth certificate is not discriminatory, it is common sense.
Internet commenter #2: 100words
Hasn’t anybody gotten a statement from Mr. Curry on his position on CBS cancelling “CSI: Cyber”?
Internet commenter #3: words
Discrimination is wrong, period. There probably wouldn’t be a Steph Curry if some of those old anti-interracial marriage laws were still on the books….
*Answer the questions separately.
