Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick reviews University of Chicago law and philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum’s new book From Disgust to Humanity, which examines opposition to gay rights in America:
The philosophical question for Nussbaum is whether disgust of this sort is a “reliable guide to lawmaking.” She cites Leon Kass, head of the President’s Council on Bioethics in the George W. Bush administration, who has argued that it is; that visceral public disgust contains a “wisdom” that lies beneath rational argument. Then she proceeds to annihilate that argument by offering example after example of discarded disgust-based policies, from India’s denigration of its “untouchables” to the Nazi view of Jews, to a legally sanctioned regime of separate swimming pools and water fountains in the Jim Crow South. Time and again, Nussbaum argues, societies have been able to move beyond their own politics of disgust to what she calls “the politics of humanity,” once they have finally managed to see others as fully human, with human aspirations and desires.
Nussbaum is a clear, essential thinker and writer, and to anyone who cares about the debate over gay rights, she offers here an elegant—even dispassionate—defense. She systematically chips away at most of the policy arguments against gay rights in America until it’s clear they are either wholly unsupported by the data or rooted in disgust, fear, or a misreading of religious and historical texts.
It’s why I constantly exhort my readers to think critically, not emotionally, about all issues. And that includes religion, which must not be exempt from rational criticism.
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