Sexism

PRINCE RABARA

PROF. MARAH BLAKE

TAKE TWO

ROUGH DRAFT

TAKE ON SEXISM (HOMOSEXUALITY) AND ANALYSIS UPON IT’S ETHICAL AND       JUST SENTIMENTS AND OPINIONS

Note: this is only my rough draft and I am yet to complete it and provide more evidences, I have only by far written around 815 words and aim to complete it around with 1600 words by the due date of final draft .

We are no longer even capable of having an actual debate about moral substances. The expectations that once uphold any rational discussion on ethics-, Alasdair Macintyre said, are no longer approved or universally communal. The result is that, in regard to questions of what is right and wrong, we simply talk past one another, or more often, scream at each other. 

I thought of Macintyre’s remarks when I read an article on the Supreme Court’s consideration of the much-vexed issue of gay marriage. It was described that, in the wake of the oral opinions, Justice Elena Kagan stated, “Whenever someone expresses moral disapproval in a legal context, the red flag of discrimination goes up for me.” Notice that the Justice did not say that discrimination is the result of a bad moral argument, but simply that any appeal to morality is equivalent to discrimination. Or to mention it in Macintyre’s terms, since even attempting to make a moral argument is an exercise in futility, doing so can only be interpreted as an act of antagonism. I will consent to the side of radical contradiction involved in saying that one has an ethical doubt (discrimination!) to the making of an ethical objection, but I would certainly like to draw attention to a very hazardous suggestion of this jumbled situation. If argument is indeed a non-starter, the only option we have in the settlement of our disputes is violence and chaos, either direct or indirect. This is exactly why a number of Christian leaders and philosophers, particularly in the West, have been conveying a deep concern on this routine of thinking. Any minister or journalist who risks to make a moral argument in contradiction of gay marriage is inevitably judged as a source of “hate speech” or criticized as an intolerant, and in extreme cases, he can be subject to legal sanction. This intuitive, violent reaction is a result of the breakdown of the rational framework for moral discourse that Macintyre so lamented. 

A significant sign of this breakdown is our obsession with survey statistics in regard to this question. We are relentlessly told that ever increasing numbers of Americans specifically among the young support gay marriage. This is certainly one of great importance sociologically or politically, but it has nothing to do with the question of right or wrong. Lots of people can support something that is in fact morally objectionable, and an insignificant minority can support something that is in fact morally fine. For example, if surveys were taken in 1945 regarding the morality of dropping atomic bombs on Japan in order to bring the war to a quick end, I am rather sure that overwhelming majorities would have agreed.  And if a survey had been taken in, say, 1825, regarding the validity of slavery, I would bet that only a small minority of Americans would have come out for abolishing the practice. But finally, in either case, so what? Finally, an argument has to be made. In the absence of this, the reference of survey statistics in respect to a moral issue is nothing but a form of intimidation: we’ve got you outnumbered.