--- On Sat, 23/5/09, Kiran K Karthikeyan <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Kiran
>
> -original message-
> Subject: [silk] On the rights of (harmless) bigots
> From: Pranesh Prakash <[email protected]>
> Date: 23/05/2009 4:06 am
>
> Flogging dead horses, I know, but this article caught my
> eye, and
> reminded me (quite illogically, I must admit) of the overly
> long
> thread "Need some help".
>
> But, it makes many interesting points, whether you agree
> with the author or not.
>
> ---
> From the Balkinization blawg:
> <http://balkin.blogspot.com/2009/05/support-your-local-bigot.html>
>
> Support your local bigot
> Andrew Koppelman
> I have written several times that there should be
> accommodation for
> religious conservatives who have conscientious objections
> to
> recognizing same-sex marriages. Religious exemptions from
> antidiscrimination laws are fairly costless, I’ve argued:
> as long as
> the religious dissenters are idiosyncratic outliers – and
> they
> generally will be, based on the scant number of
> accommodation claims
> we’ve seen – they’ll have no effect on gay people’s
> opportunities, and
> so they can harmlessly be left to live out their ideals in
> peace.
>
> This has elicited the following objection from several
> friends: why do
> you want to accommodate bigots? The issue is now being
> squarely
> presented in New Hampshire, where opponents of religious
> accommodation
> are now ready to let same-sex marriage die in that state
> rather than,
> as one supporter has put it, “enshrine homophobia into
> the statutes of
> the New Hampshire Legislature.”
>
> What is bigotry, anyway, and why is it a bad thing? The
> answer to this
> question will provide an answer to my skeptical friends,
> and also show
> why the legislators resisting religious accommodations in
> New
> Hampshire are sadly mistaken in their priorities.
>
> Bigotry is wrong for two reasons. First, it harms the
> people who are
> its objects. Second, it is a moral failing on the part of
> the bigot.
> It is important to distinguish these.
>
> The most obvious harm of bigotry is that people are hurt by
> it. Racism
> hurts racial minorities; sexism hurts women; homophobia
> hurts gay
> people. This harm occurs even if the people who are doing
> the
> discriminating are innocently deluded about what they are
> up to.
> “Honest to God when I was a kid, I believed that junk,”
> a white
> southerner, Hugh Wilson, explains in Jason Sokol’s recent
> book There
> Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil
> Rights,
> 1945-1975. “I was just like everybody else. Too many of
> us thought
> that, we knew individual blacks to be awful fine folks but
> we thought
> of blacks as a race as being sort of an Amos and Andy
> situation . . .
> . I began to get a lot older before I began to realize.”
> Perhaps, in
> his situation, Wilson can be excused for his ignorance. But
> excusable
> or not, his attitudes were profoundly destructive. Calling
> young
> Wilson a bigot is not to say that he’s a bad person who
> should be
> punished. It’s saying that he’s a deluded person who
> needs to be
> stopped from damaging others.
>
> A second wrong of bigotry is the wrong of unjust
> perception. This is
> wrong even if it causes no harm at all. In a revealing
> little parable
> in her 1971 book, The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch
> elegantly
> refutes a then-fashionable school of moral philosophy that
> concerned
> itself only with the appropriateness of conduct, and which
> was
> entirely indifferent to people’s internal mental states.
>
> A woman, M, feels hostile toward her daughter-in-law, D. M
> thinks that
> her son has married beneath him, and finds D unrefined,
> brusque, and
> rude. However, M always behaves beautifully toward D, and
> keeps her
> real opinion well concealed. And then suppose that the
> young couple
> emigrates, or D dies, so that whatever happens after that
> happens only
> in M’s mind. M now reflects on D, moved only by love for
> her son and a
> desire to be just. She concludes that D has many good
> qualities that M
> had failed to appreciate: she is not undignified but
> spontaneous, not
> vulgar but refreshingly simple, and so on. In the course of
> these
> reflections, Murdoch insists, M has been “active, she has
> been doing
> something, something which we approve of, something which
> is somehow
> worth doing in itself.”
>
> The relevance here of Murdoch’s point can be made
> clearer, perhaps, by
> considering the odd case of Japanese anti-Semitism, which
> our host
> Jack Balkin describes in his book Cultural Software.
> “[A]nti-Semitic
> books and comments have appeared continually in Japan over
> the years,
> often repeating the most vicious claims of Nazi ideology
> and Eastern
> European anti-Semitism. Especially popular are beliefs
> about a secret
> worldwide Jewish financial and media conspiracy of enormous
> scope and
> power.” This nonsense functions for the Japanese as a way
> of
> accounting for and complaining about the power of the
> United States,
> which is taken to be controlled by the Jews. It does not,
> however,
> have much impact on anyone: “There are very few Jews in
> Japan today
> and thus very few opportunities for discrimination against
> them.”
> Bigotry is bigotry in Germany or in Japan, but it doesn’t
> matter for
> the same reasons in both places. In Japan, the complaint is
> entirely
> Murdochian: it is wrong to judge people unjustly. But why
> should the
> law care about this kind of harmless injustice?
>
> There is, of course, a moral category of reprehensible
> ignorance,
> recognized as far back as Aquinas, who thought that error
> was culpable
> if it were either directly voluntary (because the agent
> deliberately
> avoided uncomfortable information) or if the agent were
> negligent
> about knowing what he ought to know. And one can be
> reprehensible in
> this way both for one’s private thoughts, in the
> Murdochian sense, and
> for one’s actions that ignorantly damage other people. I
> have no doubt
> that there are some homophobes who are culpable in just
> this way. I
> also think that there are others who are in the grip of a
> world view
> according to which homosexuality just can’t imaginably be
> morally
> acceptable, and who aren’t penetrable by any data to the
> contrary. I’m
> less inclined to blame them, particularly since, as the
> struggles of
> those within the “ex-gay movement” shows, there are
> some gay people
> among them.
>
> Finally to return to the question of religious exemptions!
> The
> objection to religious exemptions can’t be that they’ll
> harm gay
> people, because they will only be invoked by a few people
> and won’t
> have much effect on gay people’s opportunities. It is
> rather that we
> shouldn’t accommodate bigotry. Now, I disagree with the
> views of
> religious conservatives who think homosexual conduct to be
> morally
> wrong. I think that these views are mistaken in just the
> way that M’s
> views had been in the early part of Murdoch’s story. I
> even think that
> some of those who hold those views are morally culpable.
> But does this
> mean that the law ought to be used to punish them?
>
> Retribution is appropriate only if there is harm. Imagine
> you discover
> that someone has spent all afternoon sticking pins in
> dolls
> representing some people he doesn’t like (but has no just
> complaint
> against), hoping that this will cause their painful deaths.
> You’re
> entitled to decide that he’s a nasty person. But does he
> deserve
> punishment? For what, exactly?
>
> If they can be rendered harmless, antigay bigots, even the
> morally
> reprehensible ones, will be just like the guy with the pins
> and the
> dolls. Nasty, maybe (though I know people on that side of
> the
> political divide who, I’m convinced, are honestly doing
> their best to
> pursue the right as it is given to them to see the right).
> But why is
> it important for the law to beat up on them?
>
> More pertinently, why is beating up on them so important
> that it’s
> worth letting same-sex marriage die in New Hampshire
> altogether rather
> than give those people any accommodation?
>
> There are people who are reprehensibly embracing
> self-aggrandizing
> fantasies that are hurting real people. But I’m sorry to
> say that
> they’re not the Christian conservatives. They are the
> people on my
> side, the gay rights side, who are willing to sacrifice the
> hopes of
> New Hampshire gays who want to marry, out of pure malice
> toward their
> political opponents.
>
> From: Kiran K Karthikeyan <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] On the rights of (harmless) bigots
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Saturday, 23 May, 2009, 12:02 PM
> Since you're flogging it anyway
> - who exactly are you alluding to be the harmless
> bigot in that thread? I'm sure its not me since I'm anything
> but harmless :).
Harmless indeed, also gormless.
Nobody will hurt you - promise - if you render that 'I'm sure it's not I...'
rather than the way you did serve it up.
Cricket on your mind? Visit the ultimate cricket website. Enter
http://beta.cricket.yahoo.com
