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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cogent, thoughtful, and above all humane, March 4, 2010
This review is from: From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Inalienable Rights) (Hardcover)
Into the vitriolic debate about homosexuality and society, esteemed philosopher Martha Nussbaum's "From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law" arrives like a breath of well reasoned air. Combining rigorous logic, thorough research, and humanity, Nussbaum examines our legal tradition to explain how the insidious notion of "disgust" is offered as a basis to deny rights to the "unworthy." Few will read her history of invectives used to demonize "the other," whether black, Jewish, or immigrant by association with disease, bodily fluids, odor, germs, and excrement, without feeling a chill.
Examining the legal status of homosexuality, she contrasts the views of two British thinkers. Philosopher John Stuart Mills, "abhor[ed] the tyranny of public sentiment over personal choice," and thought government had no place in regulating the activities of equal, competent, consenting adults. In opposition to Mills, she offers Lord Patrick Devlin, a British judge and Neo-Burkian, who opposed ending the legal sanction against homosexuality arguing that the state can and should use force to encourage social solidarity and enforce a common morality. Devlin saw sodomy laws as just and necessary, setting bounds on what is acceptable; according to Nussbaum, Mills would have seen them as nothing less than an assault on liberty. And though at times casting Devlin against Mills can feel like an intellectual middleweight taking a beating from Mohammed Ali, one's sympathy quickly passes.
"From Disgust to Humanity" explores the jurisprudential history of our "right to privacy," explaining cogently how the justices grounded it in the Constitution. In matters of privacy in general and homosexuality in particular, she demonstrates how jurists are divide followers of Mills and Devlin. In the case of the latter, arguments always track back to disgust, homosexual being "others" and "deviants," engaging in behavior that exists only in deranged fantasy. Thinkers such as Justice Scalia and Leon Klass, Chair of the Bioethics Council under President Bush, both of a Devlinian bend thinking disgust as a basis for sound ethics, receive an intellectual drubbing. Nussbaum continually beats them with a simple question: given their views of homosexuality, how can they claim they wouldn't have felt the same way in 1967, when the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia invalidated miscegenation laws, at a time when an overwhelming number of Americans thought interracial marriage wrong and unnatural?
Against various arguments as to why homosexuals should not enjoy their fellow citizens' rights to marriage and intimacy, Nussbaum brings an irresistible vanquishing logic, wielding Equality and Liberty as her foil. In places she demonstrates a sharp sense of humor, as when she muses about why legislators (doubtless mostly men) seem so often preoccupied with gay male sex, but are inclined to give lesbianism a pass.
Yet more thrilling than Nussbaum's rhetorical skills and the soundness of her argument, is how she weds both to an appeal to our basic and essential humanity, to reject the hyperbolic language of hate and oppression in favor of recognizing the essential rights with which we are all endowed.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moving from the "politics of disgust" to the "politics of humanity", March 11, 2010
This review is from: From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Inalienable Rights) (Hardcover)
The first half of the title neatly sums up Nussbaum's central argument regarding public opinion and public policy as it relates to the LGBT community, same-sex relations and their push for legal redress though the courts and the legislative process. Nussbaum explores how those opposed to the LGBT community and public policy granting them equal rights have used emotionalism, particularly the disgust and revulsion attached to gay sex to rally supporters to their cause, often using factually incorrect, but emotionally charged statements. Nussbaum includes a number of recent statements made by state legislators, activists, and others that driver her point home. They are by turns irrelevant, childish, bizarre, and often just factually incorrect. In the process those opposed to same-sex rights have created what Nussbaum terms "the politics of disgust". If you can stigmatize, demonize, and otherwise vilify your opponents causing others to share in your revulsion of them, then mission accomplished. As was done to blacks generations before, the "politics of disgust" is bound up in the fear of disease, contagion, and blood, an argument heard in defending segregation in the Jim Crow era.
Nussbaum, a prominent professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of many books, does an outstanding job of explaining the evolution and creation of the "politics of disgust" and that sort of demagoguery is nothing new. But the larger philosophical question Nussbaum poses here is whether pursuit of "the politics of disgust" is a sustainable political tool. Nussbaum points out how societies have eventually transitioned away from the "politics of disgust", such as in India's abandonment of the caste system, the decrease in Antisemitism in some parts of the world, and the ending of legally sanctioned segregation in the USA and South Africa. Nussbaum argues that societies have been able to transform beyond their pasts and transition to what she terms "the politics of humanity". In the process they come to see these vilified "others" as fully human, with similar hopes, fears, and desires. More importantly Nussbaum is probably the clearest thinker on this subject, avoiding the emotionally charged rhetoric of both sides, writing in a manner that is dispassionate and objective. But Nussbaum methodically picks apart the arguments against LGBT rights in such a manner that by the time she's done it's clear that the opponents are exposed as frauds, unsupported by any data, or as hateful demagogues basing their ideology on disgust, fear, and a manipulation of religion and history.
There have been many books written on the subject of gay rights, both pro and con, but of those I've read few have left as great an impact as "From Disgust to Humanity." Nussbaum clearly has hope for the future regarding LGBT equality and points to the changes in public opinion over time. As she points out equality will come in time, but it will require greater understanding of what both groups have in common and to empathize with each other more, ceasing to view each other as "other". In the end a sense of justice will win out although it may take many years as witnessed by the experience of other groups. As Nussbaum points out, making law and public policy out of fear typically never stands.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sharp, powerful, human., October 4, 2010
This review is from: From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Inalienable Rights) (Hardcover)
Quite simply after one cuts away all the rationalizations, the largest source of legal animus against LGBT people is "Queers are icky to me." With powerful arguments contained in the book Martha obliterates the idea the disgust is or should ever be considered a valid guide for legislating.
Furthermore, the politics of disgust goes farther than just being a crappy guide for making laws. With persuasive argument, Martha posits that in the past and present the politics of disgust has been used as a tool of persecution and oppression again a variety of groups such as Women, Jews and the Dalit's of India. By projection, a person/group can take all of the grose uncomfortable ideas about their sex life/anatomy/body and project it onto another person/group (It would seem to explain the almost obsessive attention paid to anal sex by certain advocates against gay rights that taken at face value would indicate that heterosexuals never engage in anal sex!).
Martha Nussbaum upholds John Stuarts Mill harm principle, which provides justified legal regulations on sexual behavior such as consent and the age of majority on identifiable harms to non-consenting parties as the only proper basis for legislating against personal liberties in a pluralistic democracy.
Equality under the law. We have a bill of rights to protect it.
If that bill of rights dissapears with the whiff of public discomfort as people feel uncomfortable imagining what people might/might not be getting up to in the bedroom, what is it worth?
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