Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee stepped in it, big time, recently. First he explained that he's against gay marriage, at least partyly because of the "ick factor":
"I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes," Huckabee said in a recent New Yorker profile. "Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the ick factor, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn't work the same."
Huckabee goes on to say that "some pretty startling studies" show that "monogamous marriage" is the way to end poverty.
Needless to say, Huckabee is wrong about poverty & marriage, too. But let's stick to his "ick factor" thing for this diary. Naturally, some folks found this insulting, to say the least. So Huckabee naturally, being such a personal responsibility type of guy naturally looked around for someone else to blame. How about the gay community itself? And some fancy-pants intellectual? Viola! Or not so much:
When former Arkansas governor and presidential contender Mike Huckabee used the phrase "ick factor" in describing his opposition to gay marriage, news organizations jumped on the comment and Huckabee defended himself by attributing the phrase to the LGBT community.
In particular, he cited Chicago philosopher and professor Martha Nussbaum. "Nussbaum has often made reference to the 'ick factor' in her professional writings and is credited with applying the phrase to the GLBT community," Huckabee wrote.
But Nussbaum, in an email to Politico, said she has never used the phrase and demanded an apology from Huckabee.
"I have never used the phrase 'ick factor' in any of my three books dealing with the emotion of disgust, or in any articles," Nussbaum wrote.
She then went on to explain the philosophy behind the phrase she does use:
I use the term "projective disgust" to characterize the disgust that many people feel when they imagine gay sex acts. What does that term mean, and to whom does it apply? The view I develop, on the basis of recent psychological research, is that projective disgust has its origin in a discomfort with one's own body and its messier animal aspects, including sexuality, and that, in a defense mechanism, disgust is then projected outward onto vulnerable groups who are characterized as hyperphysical and hypersexual. In this way, the uncomfortable people displace their discomfort onto others, who are then targeted for various forms of social discrimination.
Thus the people to whom the term "projective disgust" applies are the insecure and emotionally stunted people who campaign against equal rights for gays and lesbians, not gays and lesbians themselves.
"Mr. Huckabee has gotten bad information about my work and has completely turned its meaning upside down, imputing to me a position (that gays and lesbians are disgusting) that I criticize as childish and morally deficient," she wrote. Huckabee "owes me a public apology," she added.
So, utterly and completely wrong, irresponsible, and totally misrepresenting the work the expert he cited. All in all, compltely typical of a conservative politician. So why write about it?
Well, it struck a nerve. You see, I'd recently been reminded of Jonathan Haidt's work on liberal and conservative value systems, and it struck me as quite obvious that conservatives have a much bigger "ick factor" thing going on than liberals do. According to Haidt, there are "five innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of 'intuitive ethics.'" Conservatives draw on all five of them, while liberals focus on just two. The "ick factor" fits very neatly into one of the five that liberals don't cotton to.
This started off as a response to a comment in my previous diary, "Karen Armstrong On Bill Moyers Journal", but after posting it, I realized that it deserved more prominence, not least because of the fact Chris has been hammering home for years on end--the religious pluralism (including atheism, agnosticism and secularism) of the progressive coalition.
There is a strain of atheism, represented by folks like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which sees religion as a threat to be attacked in the name of science. This is, I would argue, a form of secular fundamentalism that misunderstands almost as much as religious fundamentalism does.
Science and religion are two quite different things, and trying to judge them both by one standard is guaranteed to produce all sorts of confusion. On the flip, I'm reproducing part of an article from Science magazine that indicates a different way--it's a brief passage dealing with a scientific approach to understanding how religion functions in human society, based on our evolved biology. It clearly recognizes that the purposes and methods religion employs are quite different from those of science, and thus it's easy, in light of this approach, to see how foolish it is to judge religion in terms of science, as simply an inferior form knowledge-gathering.
I have long been deeply skeptical about some of Barack Obama's core political assumptions revolving around the culture wars-that they are a more or less symmetrical, irrational distraction from real, pragmatic problem-solving perpetrated by left as well as the right, which are rooted in the 60s and the Baby Boom generation, but have no real relevance to the problems of today.
Having lived through the entire period from the 1960s onward, it seems quite clear to me that the 1960s represented a fundamental rupture with the past, in which fundamental and pervasive institutionalized forms of prejudice-most notably against women, blacks and other racial minorities-were dramatically challenged, morally delegitimized, and largely dismantled. In response to this, political conservatives organized a sustained backlash, and used it to attack not just the breakthrough advances of the 1960s, but a wide range of New Deal political advances and their extensions as well, which largely benefited the working class whites, and helped to create the modern middle class. As such, there was never any sort of symmetry between the sides in the culture war, nor was there anything irrational in fighting against the politics of reaction. Finally, given that the 1960s saw the fall of age-old structures of race and gender oppression, it was quite clear that culture wars didn't start in the 1960s, except in the terms of "bully logic"-"It all started when he hit me back!"
The main thing I'd ask you to take from this is that conservativism and liberalism exist at a fundamental level of human brain function. They are facets of ingrained human psychology and not pure constructs of thought and rationality. You cannot discuss the roots of these two ideologies (separate from others IMO) without looking at human evolutionary psychology.
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