The Monarchy of Fear by Martha C. Nussbaum

Author:Martha C. Nussbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Now let’s turn to gays, lesbians, and transgender people. Here again, there is a thread of bodily disgust running throughout the political propaganda against equal rights, which bears a strong similarity to other instances of projective disgust. I was present in a Denver courtroom in 1994, during the bench trial of the case that later became the landmark Supreme Court case Romer v Evans, on the day when Will Perkins, chief proponent of a referendum known as Amendment 2 that had denied gays and lesbians the right to seek protection from local antidiscrimination ordinances, testified. He admitted that in support of the referendum he had circulated pamphlets that said that gay men eat feces and drink “raw blood.” Fifteen years later, writing about constitutional law and same-sex rights, I studied the pamphlet literature circulated in the early twenty-first century by opponents of gay civil rights and found that little had changed. Here’s a typical example, from a pamphlet by Paul Cameron (a leading anti-gay activist) entitled Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do:

The typical sexual practices of homosexuals are a medical horror story—imagine exchanging saliva, feces, semen and/or blood with dozens of different men each year. Imagine drinking urine, ingesting feces and experiencing rectal trauma on a regular basis. Often these encounters occur while the participants are drunk, high, and/or in an orgy setting. Further, many of them occur in extremely unsanitary places (bathrooms, dirty peep shows), or, because homosexuals travel so frequently, in other parts of the world.

Every year, a quarter or more of homosexuals visit another country. Fresh American germs get taken to Europe, Africa, and Asia. And fresh pathogens from these continents come here. Foreign homosexuals regularly visit the US and participate in this biological swapmeet.35

To the canonical references to bodily fluids and dirty surroundings, Cameron adds the idea of foreign travel as source of contamination, surely an idea that resonates with many Americans.

Okay, let’s now step back and analyze this specific case of projective disgust. First of all, it is not aimed at achieving total separation of facilities, for the obvious reason that this would be impossible to police, given the closet. Second, the disgust formation has little to do with a general aversion to same-sex conduct as such, since women are standardly omitted from disgust propaganda and sex between two women is a titillating staple of pornography directed at straight men. (In Britain, sex between two women was never illegal. In the US it often was, but it’s fair to say that hate literature gave this option short shrift.) The propaganda is also, obviously, not directed at preventing gay men from having sex with and marrying women. Indeed, that would be a “good” outcome for the anti-gay movement. The propaganda depicts gay men as rapacious and sex-crazed, but not as threatening to our “sweet little girls.” Indeed, the bigot wishes they would take a greater interest in those girls, and sexual orientation “conversion therapy,” though discredited, continues to attract support. However, gay men are

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