 Cover | |
| Author | Martha Nussbaum |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | LGBT rights in the United States |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Publication date | 2010 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 978-0195305319 |
From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law is a 2010 book about LGBT rights in the United States by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
Nussbaum analyzes the role that disgust plays in law and public debate in the United States. [1] She primarily analyzes constitutional legal issues facing gay and lesbian Americans but also analyzes issues such as anti-miscegenation statutes, segregation, antisemitism and the caste system in India as part of her broader thesis regarding the "politics of disgust".
She posits that the fundamental motivations of those advocating legal restrictions against gay and lesbian Americans is a "politics of disgust". These legal restrictions include blocking sexual orientation being protected under anti-discrimination laws, sodomy laws against consenting adults, constitutional bans against same-sex marriage, over-strict regulation of gay bathhouses, and bans on sex in public parks and public restrooms. [2] Nussbaum also argues that legal bans on polygamy and certain forms of incestuous (e.g. brother-sister) marriage partake of the politics of disgust and should be overturned. [3]
Nussbaum identifies the "politics of disgust" closely with Lord Devlin and his famous opposition to the Wolfenden report that recommended decriminalizing private consensual homosexual acts on the basis that those things would "disgust the average man." To Devlin, the mere fact some people or act may produce popular emotional reactions of disgust provides an appropriate guide for legislating. She also identifies the 'wisdom of repugnance' as advocated by Leon Kass as another "politics of disgust" school of thought as it claims that disgust "in crucial cases...repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it."
Nussbaum goes on to explicitly oppose the concept of a disgust-based morality as an appropriate guide for legislating. Nussbaum notes that popular disgust has been used throughout history as a justification for persecution. Drawing upon her earlier work on the relationship between disgust and shame, Nussbaum notes that at various times, racism, antisemitism, and sexism, have all been driven by popular revulsion. [4]
In place of this "politics of disgust," Nussbaum argues for the harm principle from John Stuart Mill as the proper basis for limiting individual liberties. Nussbaum argues the harm principle, which supports the legal ideas of consent, the age of majority, and privacy, protects citizens while the "politics of disgust" is merely an unreliable emotional reaction with no inherent wisdom. Furthermore, Nussbaum argues this "politics of disgust" has denied and continues to deny citizens humanity and equality before the law on no rational grounds and causes palpable social harms to the groups affected.
From Disgust to Humanity earned acclaim in the United States, [5] [6] [7] [8] and prompted interviews in The New York Times and other magazines. [9] [10] One conservative magazine, The American Spectator , offered a dissenting view, writing, "[H]er account of the 'politics of disgust' lacks coherence, and 'the politics of humanity' betrays itself by not treating more sympathetically those opposed to the gay rights movement." The article also argues that book is marred by factual errors and inconsistencies. [11]
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case dealing with sexual orientation and state laws. It was the first Supreme Court case to address gay rights since Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), when the Court had held that laws criminalizing sodomy were constitutional.
Martha Craven Nussbaum is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department. She has a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights. She also holds associate appointments in classics, divinity, and political science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown.
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Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in Romania may face legal challenges and discrimination not experienced by non-LGBT residents. Attitudes in Romania are generally conservative, with regard to the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender citizens. Nevertheless, the country has made significant changes in LGBT rights legislation since 2000. In the past two decades, it fully decriminalised homosexuality, introduced and enforced wide-ranging anti-discrimination laws, equalised the age of consent and introduced laws against homophobic hate crimes. Furthermore, LGBT communities have become more visible in recent years, as a result of events such as Bucharest's annual pride parade and Cluj-Napoca's Gay Film Nights festival. In 2006, Romania was named by Human Rights Watch as one of five countries in the world that had made "exemplary progress in combating rights abuses based on sexual orientation or gender identity." The 2016 Pew Research poll found that 85% of Romanians said homosexuality should not be accepted by society.
The wisdom of repugnance or "appeal to disgust", also known informally as the yuck factor, is the belief that an intuitive negative response to some thing, idea, or practice should be interpreted as evidence for the intrinsically harmful or evil character of that thing. Furthermore, it refers to the notion that wisdom may manifest itself in feelings of disgust towards anything which lacks goodness or wisdom, though the feelings or the reasoning of such 'wisdom' may not be immediately explicable through reason.
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The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life is a book by Michael Warner, in which the author discusses the role of same-sex marriage as a goal for gay rights activists. First published in 1999 by The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, it was re-published in 2000 in paperback by Harvard University Press. Warner argues that the right to marry is an inadequate and ultimately undesirable goal for gay rights activism. As well as addressing marriage, he considers other areas in which public discourse stigmatizes certain sexual behaviors, including through sensationalist coverage of sex scandals, public zoning initiatives that marginalize the sex industry, and the attempted use of shame to manage sexually transmitted disease. The book has been described as a classic of the debates on normalcy as a goal for the gay rights movement, and as an important contribution to queer theory.
Disgust is an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious or something considered offensive, distasteful, or unpleasant. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that disgust is a sensation that refers to something revolting. Disgust is experienced primarily in relation to the sense of taste, and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling by sense of smell, touch, or vision. Musically sensitive people may even be disgusted by the cacophony of inharmonious sounds. Research continually has proven a relationship between disgust and anxiety disorders such as arachnophobia, blood-injection-injury type phobias, and contamination fear related obsessive–compulsive disorder.
Sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) are methods used in attempts to change the sexual orientation of homosexual and bisexual people to heterosexuality. They may include behavioral techniques, cognitive behavioral techniques, psychoanalytic techniques, medical approaches, religious and spiritual approaches, and, in some parts of the world, acts of sexual violence. According to the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, "there are no studies of adequate scientific rigor to conclude whether or not such methods work to change sexual orientation. The longstanding consensus of the behavioral and social sciences, and the health and mental health professions is that homosexuality and bisexuality are in themselves normal and positive variations of human sexual orientation." Research consistently failed to provide any empirical or scientific basis for regarding them as disorders or abnormalities.
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The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation is a 1999 book by the philosopher Edward Stein, in which the author critically evaluates scientific research on sexual orientation, discusses "social constructionist" and "essentialist" views of the subject and related ethical issues, and responds to criticism of social constructionism. Part of the "Ideologies of Desire" series edited by the queer theorist David M. Halperin, the book was published by Oxford University Press.
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List of works by or about Martha Nussbaum, American philosopher.
