Customer Reviews

From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Inalienable Rights)

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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.

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.

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?

I highly recommend this book with only one caveat. Rather than repeating what the previous four reviews have already covered well, i will focus on the one nit i have about the book. This book clearly focusses very much on sex with very little mention of love. I raise this because i think the book misses one of the key elements of homophobic heterosexuality, these people believe that they believe that love is more important than sex, and, that LGBT people do not believe that love is more important than sex. The key point is not the truth of the belief, but that homophobic heterosexuals believe it is true. That homophobes frame everything in terms of sexuality as a way to deny the equality of LGBT people is made clear in this book. However, the book continues to focus on sexual behavior, attempting to justify how LGBT people have sex rather than focussing on how homophobes deny the ability of LGBT people to love, and from that commit to relationships in the same manner that they believe that they do. Love is only covered vaguely under the idea that it is one of the things that people should be allowed to do, rather than as a keystone of our development as individuals and as a society. I think that covering this issue in far more detail would have been a much stronger statement than focussing on sex. We all know the joke about the drunk who searches for his missing keys under the lamppost only because there is more light under the lamppost. I appreciate that it is easier to discuss sex than it is to discuss love and i'm sure that is one of the reasons that we tend to argue for sexual freedom rather than the freedom to love, however, my experience is that love is far more foundational than sex both to the individual and society.

I think that everyone can gain from reading this book for the same reasons the preceding reviewers praised the book. My criticism is not meant to deter you from reading this book, but it is to make clear its limitation. By framing everything in terms of sex, rather than love, the author has allowed the homophobic community (sorry, couldn't think of a better word) to frame the discussion in a manner that will only continue the debate and at best produce little more than tolerance, rather than respect as equals, for members of the LGBT community.

Martha Nussbaum is suddenly the legal/religious thinker du jour, a writer of such fearlessness and logical clarity that she takes on the really impossible subjects without flinching. She's a very clear writer, but it's probably easier to get a sense of her thought by watching YouTube videos of her. This book is part of a series from Oxford University Press and she was asked to write it. Her ideas of disgust come in large part from thinking about untouchables in India, who were originally "untouchable" because they handled excrement and the dead, among other "lowly" and repetitious jobs. Now that even much of India has proper plumbing, the family names identified in the public mind as "untouchables" remain a stigma. There is even more disapproval of people who change their names.

The basic idea is that considering the nature of some people to be "disgusting" is a way of controlling them, keeping them in their place. Though it seems as though the objectionable qualities are objective descriptions, justified in the public mind by associating them with nastiness like excrement, stink, bugs, ooze, slime, disease (J.K. Rowling's "mud people") , it often becomes obvious that calling them disgusting is a prelude to treating them like animals, excluding them, beating up on them, defunding them, and in the most extreme herding them into the prison camps and gas chambers of the Holocaust. Retarded and otherwise disabled or crippled people, gypsies, gays, Jews, dissidents, and so on were all considered "disgusting" and therefore their extermination could be called "cleansing."

It is so powerful a kind of terrorism that it can drive the missionary-minded, empire-seeking, power-invested, domination-obsessed into apoplectic violence. The law must deal with it constantly. Literature and art address it everywhere. But the academic "humanities" people are afraid to, which is why they've become irrelevant. Except that they are now part of the problem, defining every nonconformity as "disgusting." Or to use their phrase, "so ugly."

Nussbaum is not afraid of ugly.

Prairie Mary