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aaronde comments on Is Politics the Mindkiller? An Inconclusive Test - Less Wrong Discussion
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That analogy conflates two things: The fact that the man doesn't know why the fence is there, and the fact that he doesn't care. If I were the mayor, I'd dismiss his request simply because he hadn't done his research. This is not analogous to tearing down laws or social norms so old and complicated that no one could reasonably be expected to know why they were made in the first place. Maybe laws against homosexuality made sense once upon a time, or maybe they were always a bad idea. But I don't need to know that in order to establish that homosexuality should be allowed and accepted today. If there really were a fence, with no record of who built it or why, that just seemed to be inconveniencing everyone, we really would be justified in tearing it down. Sometimes 2 + 2 is just 4.
Is this relevant to a norm whose invention was explicitly documented six years ago?
How confident are you that an argument for abolishing a social norm that is thousands of years old that makes no charitable reference to why the norm survived thousands of years is calm, dispassionate, and complete? (I should note this is a general response, and I am entirely uninterested in discussing the specifics of homosexuality in this thread.)
"Need to know" is a strong condition, and I probably agree with you that you don't need to know the relevant history in order to establish that a particular law is a bad idea. But I would also agree that if I'm actually trying to determine whether a law ought to change (rather than trying to justify my pre-existing belief that the law ought to change), trying to understand how the law came to be in the first place seems like a really good place to start.