Smallholder: Bigot?

I have managed to stir up a little teapot tempest once again.

It all started with Ally's comment on KBJ calling homosexual couples' adoption of children through surrogacy "child abuse." Click through to the comments and note the strong exception I took to this (imagine that!). One of my favorite bloggers, Bill of Bill's comments has also been weighing in.

For the click-through challenged, here is my response:

The horror! The horror!

Children being given to parents who want them so much to go to the trouble and expense of hiring a surrogate?

Children being given to parents who have a high level of income (demonstrated by their ability to hire a surrogate) and are able to provide for all of their children's needs financially? They might even be able to pay for "extras" like piano lessons or horseback riding, the child abusers

Children being given to parents who most likely are highly educated, given their ability to earn the salaries that allow them to hire a surrogate? Heaven forfend!

Children being given to mature parents with life experience? Oh no!

KBJ ought to apply some of his vaunted "analytic reasoning" to his own bigotry.

Ally has a secondary post where she takes me to task. I don't think she'll mind if I add the text here:

A shaking head to Smallholder.... My dear friend, if the good professor is a bigot, then so are you. And me, for that matter. There are many issues you and I will not change our minds on. We stubbornly hold onto these ideas, even though others would say we should change our minds, according to their logic.
Keith has his opinion based on his own logic. I don't share his feelings towards gay parents. I do, however, believe that surrogacy is a sick practice, and absolutely offensive. It takes the process and sanctity of
bearing children and makes it into a capitalist venture. Sorry, I don't have the taste for such crass behavior. I don't think you or I or Keith are bigots, because we hold to our own logic. Those who hold to no logic and refuse to see reason are bigots, in my mind.

Here are my twin responses:

First of all, there is nothing about which I would not change my mind if given solid evidence. The hallmark of intelligence is being able to integrate new information and build new cognitive structures. If I find that the information I have previously assimilated is factually inaccurate or that new information forces a new interpretation, I will rethink my beliefs.

This sort of flexibility in front of the evidence is often derided as "squishy," but "hier stehe ich."

My Christian faith is not generally amenable to reasoned, scientific appeal. (Hence, "faith.") But my interpretation of what it means to be a good Christian or person is subject to reasoned appeal. In fact, I imagine that there are things that might make me modify my faith - if I turn on CNN and see images of a 600 foot Allah smiting the Jews before moving on to stomp the Pope, it would be severely discomforting. Luckily, I think the odds of that happening are a mite small.

This is not to say that I change my mind willy-nilly. On things I care deeply about, I have some pretty strong reasoning. But I can be swayed.

I won't use the way I'm rethinking the merit of community college due to Ally and others' evidence (a process accelerated by an admission officer's factual information I shared in a previous post), because it wasn't really an issue about which I have strong feelings.

But I do care about capital punishment and abortion. They are some of the most troublesome moral issues in our society. And, given more information, I have shifted on both. Right now I'm not sure where I stand on either issue; I am still assimilating new knowledge.

But as a brief guide, here are my evolving stands on the death penalty:

1980s: Strongly for. Retribution and deterrent.

Early 1990s: After a philosophy class, began to reject retribution as a permissible state action, but still supported as a deterrent. When shown evidence that the deterrent was minimal due to the frequency of execution, advocated increasing application to reach deterrent levels.

Mid 1990s: Became troubled over the inequities in the legal system, primarily access to competent legal counsel (which also translated into racial disparities). Advocated, partially tongue-in-cheek, killing more rich white guys.

Late 1990s: Became aware of the frequency of judicial error through the work of one of my wife's former Northwestern professors. Teaching many kids who were incapable of seeing other people as moral agents and could not actually form a perception of future consequences convinced me that many criminals are essentially undeterable. The injustice of ending the life of a man for a crime he did not commit counterbalanced the minimal deterrence of the death penalty, so I began opposing the death penalty.

Today: New evidence has been published arguing that the death penalty is a real deterrent. I will read the book skeptically, but if their methodology is sound, I may rethink my position yet again. While it is wrong to accidentally kill an innocent man, if it saves the life of 100 innocents, I'll have to think through the difficult moral problem of breaking eggs to make an omelet.

So, to sum up the first point: I will change my positions based on new information that shows my logic chain is faulty. We all ought to. The world would be a better place.

The second quibble I have with Ally's statement that KBJ bases his anti-homosexual stance on logic. I disagree.

The "logic" that KBJ has used to justify his inherent "gays are icky" knee-jerk reaction are based on faulty premises and weak analogies. Many people of good faith suffer under misconceptions and poor reasoning. As a philosophy professor and as blogger who intends to influence the public debate, KBJ can and ought to be held to a higher standard than the uninformed man on the street.

I have tackled the many of KBJ's errors in the past; I won't beat a dead horse. But I'll give a couple of examples. One premise that KBJ uses to justify deny gays access to the thousands of legal rights conferred by marriage is that marriage is universally solely a child-rearing institution. Anthropologically speaking, t'ain't so. Marriage has many purposes (love, support, shared labor, status, financial support, cultural safety net, etc.) and some cultures do allow same sex partners. But KBJ doesn't let that inconvenient fact sway his justification of his feeling that gays are icky.

KBJ also argues that tradition ought to be preserved. But this is a justification, not a core value, as shown by his willingness to overturn tradition when it comes to society's treatment of our furry little friends. Harm to people is okay if tradition is preserved, but we ought to overturn it to save the lab rat? This is a glaring contradiction, and one for which he ought to be called to account.

An example of weak analogy is KBJ's likening of allowing gays to marry to letting dogs vote. Several blogosphere commentators tore him up for that one. But KBJ wasn't really trying to provide a logical analogy; he was using what he had to know was poor logic in order to advance the "gays are icky agenda."

Question whether a philosophy professor would be so intellectually dishonest as to make an argument he knows was poor or factually inaccurate? Witness KBJ's continued posting of the vegetarian myth that meat=starvation. Once again, logic and truth take a back seat to advancing a faith.

UPDATE: Consistency also takes a back seat in KBJ's logic. He has often argued that we have a duty to prevent harm to animals because they are moral agents, yet when it comes to humans, he forgets that gays and the Sudanese are moral agents as well. Washing his hands of widespread suffering, he writes of Darfur in a recent post: "I have no obligation to help these people, or even to prevent harm to them." UPDATE ENDS

This is disappointing because one can make good, logical, consistent arguments to advance KBJ's positions. Bill's reasoned questioning of the impact of gay adoption on children is one which I respect. We have seen many studies showing the value of having a father and mother in the family. So we ought to promote childrearing in a household with both a mother and a father. Bill and I can have a reasoned debate. Having agreed on the moral premise that we ought to do what is best for children, we can then discuss if children are actually harmed. I can question the conclusion of whether it was the different genders that was actually measured by the studies or whether the closely correlated variables of parental education, family income, social stability, delayed childrearing, extra attention provided by two parents, etc., were what led to better outcomes for the children. If those variables are causal rather than just associational, than one can argue that allowing gays to adopt is fine; they can provide all of the above. (Though, on Bill's side of the ledger, I have to confess that the most important variable affecting a child's academic performance is the educational level of the mother, whether or not she is the primary caregiver in the marriage. Sorry stay at home dads, 'tis true). As we look at the data, Bill and I can have a reasoned, civil debate. It won't be one about arbitrarily denying rights to people to satisfy prejudice; it will be one about balancing rights of gays and their putative adopted children.

The key here was civility, something that is also lacking when you read the totality of KBJ's posts about gays. Note how he used quotation marks to mock gay marriage. This isn't civil, logical persuasion. It's making fun of icky people. Scroll through his archives - there are plenty of examples of KBJ's uncivil derisiveness.

It really is possible to disagree with someone else's position without launching cheap shots or mocking essentail personal characteristics of our ideological foes. Although they have at times passionately and vociferously disagreed with me, I don't recall Ally, Brian B., Bill, the Maximum Leader or the Minister of Propaganda ever putting quotation marks around Smallholder the "father" or Smallholder the "teacher" or Smallholder the "farmer" or Smallholder the "ecologist." Okay, maybe Mike and Rob have, but that was always to draw a laugh or give a dig to a friend, never to denigrate my personhood.

Ally defined bigots as "those who hold no logic and see no reason." I would submit to you that your definition applies completely to KBJ's position on gays.

And I'm not holding KBJ to an unreasonable standard of my own creation. The Analphilosopher himself sets the standard of analytic reasoning.

So I'll say it again and be damned:

KBJ ought to apply some of his vaunted "analytic reasoning" to his own bigotry.