Not the Same
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that a good catchword could stop people from thinking for 50 years. Something similar seems to be true of the “it’s the same as race” argument. The argument is most prominent these days in matters relating to homosexuality, but it’s hardly confined to such discussions. Similar analogies have been made by everyone from proponents of deaf culture, to animal rights activists. In a society without many examples of moral righteousness, it is perhaps not so surprising that people would want to trade on the positive connotations of the Civil Rights movement by associating with it their own pet projects and causes. Such analogies, however, are almost always quite problematic.
Consider: next to racism, no discriminatory ‘ism’ is subject to more widespread opprobrium than is sexism. Yet both law and society treat differential treatment based on sex very differently from differential treatment based on race. With regard to race, for example, the Supreme Court declared in Brown that “separate but equal is inherently unequal” and has struck down laws mandating such things as separate bathrooms and sports teams based on race. When it comes to sex, by contrast, we have separate bathrooms and sports teams that are required by law to be separate but equal. The military has been racially fully integrated since the 1940s, and blacks have served in combat roles since the Civil War, while even today women are exempt from the draft and unable to serve in combat. Few people would be willing today to belong to an all white club, or to a church with an all white priesthood, yet many organizations restrict their membership by sex, and many church do the same with their ministers. One might think in some of these cases that the distinction drawn on account of sex is unwarranted (or, less likely but still possible, that such distinctions based on race are fine and dandy), but anyone who thought all of them were wrong has, in my view, let his reason be overwhelmed by a faulty analogy.
To discriminate is to treat differently. No one is against discrimination absolutely. Everyone thinks it just and proper to discriminate against certain groups at least in certain cases (say, in giving drivers licenses to the blind). The real question is whether a given case of discrimination is or is not unjust. And given the differences is permissible discrimination even between race and sex, we ought to be wary of any attempt to draw a direct analogy between race and some other, even less connected category.
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Discrimination based on race is not “the same” as discrimination based on sexual orientation, and neither is “the same” as discrimination based on gender. However, it doesn’t follow that they share nothing at all in common or that analogies can’t profitably be made between one “ism” and another.
To discriminate is to treat differently. No one is against discrimination absolutely.
This is semantic trickery. The word discriminate has more than one meaning. When used to mean unfair treatment based on irrelevant distinctions, everyone who cares about justice should be against it. Speaking of “unjust discrimination” is at best redundant, and at worst a subterfuge to rationalize the kinds of discrimination one is in favor of.
No, the semantic trickery comes when people equivocate between using “discrimination” to mean different treatment, and using it to mean unfair treatment. In the sense of unfair treatment, for example, separate but equal is discrimination when it’s done on the basis of race, but not when done on the basis of sex. My sense is that most people aren’t doing this deliberately, but are simply confused as to the different senses of discrimination and how they apply. By pointing this out, I aim to eliminate the confusion.
Blackadder,
I am going by the dictionary, which makes a distinction between the two meanings
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discrimination
I understand what you are saying, but it certainly doesn’t sound right to me to talk about “unjust racial discrimination,” as if there were also “just racial discrimination.” It seems to me that Vatican documents and the Catechism, in speaking out against “all unjust discrimination against homosexuals,” are leaving open the door to “just discrimination,” which in fact the CDF does seem to endorse in “Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Lesiglative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons” in which they advise against nondiscrimination laws and say things like, ” There are areas in which it is not unjust discrimination to take sexual orientation into account, for example, in the placement of children for adoption or foster care, in employment of teachers or athletic coaches, and in military recruitment.” And then, of course, there is the matter of celibate homosexual men being excluded from the priesthood.
…the semantic trickery comes when people equivocate between using “discrimination” to mean different treatment, and using it to mean unfair treatment.
Precisely. The problem is that we’ve made ‘discrimination’ rather than ‘unjust’ into the term carrying primary moral weight, which is precisely backwards. (Indeed as a substantive matter we could simply drop ‘discrimination’ entirely, since what we oppose is treating people unjustly).
The reason we’ve done this is that modernity is supposed to banish substantive matters of good and evil from the public square, because it is better to have a public policy of official nihilism than it is to allow for the possibility that the triumph of the will of the free and equal modern superman might require authoritative circumscription.
it certainly doesn’t sound right to me to talk about “unjust racial discrimination,” as if there were also “just racial discrimination.”
Unless one is opposed on principle to all affirmative action programs, it would seem that one would admit the possibility of just racial discrimination.
I’m not sure if they still do it, but military police (this was probably 10 years ago approx.) used to go to the ‘gay part of town’ and take down license plate numbers to ‘catch’ gay servicemen. That’s when a friend of mine, who used to be an officer, retired. I also know another officer who’s gay and still serves. It’s amazing that you can fight (and die) for your country but if they find out your orientation – see ya!
As far as types of discrimination goes – of course sexism, homophobia and racism aren’t ‘the same’. They are alike. I’ll grant you that hatreds differ in their details :P
David Nickol, have you read the Ratzinger document from 1986 ? http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19861001_homosexual-persons_en.html
I think he used James Dobson as his ghostwriter.
Zippy,
I am not sure how much the meaning of discrimination has to do with modernity. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “The adverse (usually racial) sense [of the word discrimination] is first recorded 1866.”
David Nickol is right.
1866 is most definitely a part of the modern period; possibly even moreso than today, which is more of a befuddlement of modernity with postmodernity.
The point though wasn’t etymological or historical. Certainly ‘unjust’ has been a connotation of some (though not all) uses of the term ‘discrimination’ as a matter of fact. At issue though is whether that is helpful or harmful to our discourse: does it tend to hide the truth or reveal it, to harm our politics or help it?
In our present state it seems to me mainly to hide the truth and to harm our discourse, for reasons already stated.
“The military has been racially fully integrated since the 1940s, and blacks have served in combat roles since the Civil War, while even today women are exempt from the draft and unable to serve in combat.”
This is incorrect. Women pilots are flying bombing missions and attack helicopters in combat, there was a story in the Washington Post about it within the past year.
Blackadder – thank you for both this post, and for your (continuing, I hope?) series on race. It is helping to clarify my own thinking on these issues.
Matt,
The series on race has gotten a little sidetracked as I have gotten caught up doing other things. Rest assured, however, it will continue.
Good to hear you will be continuing it, Blackadder. My own thinking on it has been a sort of imprecise, “I know it when I see it” type understanding, based on my direct experience.
So, let me present a situation from my own life.
Back in about 1974, a friend’s (black) father made an offer on a house in a white neighborhood about a mile away from our mostly black neighborhood. His prospective neighbors got wind of who was moving in (or more exactly, his race), and several of them pooled their resources and made a counter-offer a few percent above my friend’s dad’s, and bought the house out from under him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so terribly hurt, before or since. He was denied a place in a neighborhood just because of who he was (the melanin content of his skin).
If you made it a gay couple, and the neighbors bought the house out from under them, the scope, manifestations, and history of discrimination against gays are different than discrimination against blacks, but the essence of the offense (discrimination based on what you are) is the same, I think.
This, of course, is premised on the belief that homosexuality is a part of who you are, in the same way that I’m Irish, my friend’s dad was black etc.; and this seems to be the heart of the issue – is homosexuality a choice, or is one born that way? If homosexuality is a choice then discrimination is legitimate; if not, not.
Of course, not wanting gays in the neighborhood is a terribly stupid thing, financially speaking :) I remember a Will & Grace episode where all the neighbors courted them to stay :P
Matt – good Catholic will respond: but being black isn’t immoral. And I don’t blame them, it’s what they’re taught. If you accept that someone else knows everything better than you, that’s the result.
I think that just about any reasonable orthodox Catholic would say that it would be not merely rude but also “discrimination” in the unjust sense for a group of people to get together and buy a house out from under a gay person in order to keep them out of the neighborhood of their choosing.
But the thing which I think it is important to remember is that there are some fundamentally different types of things which are sometimes thrown together under the title “discrimination” — and Gerald Augustinus is intentionally adding to this confusion in his comments.
If I refuse to sell a person a computer in my store because that person is gay, or because that person is black, or because the person is a woman, I’m refusing to provide that person with a completely reasonable and normal service because that person is a member of a group I don’t like. That is, I would argue, wrong.
If I say that the state should not recognize same sex marriages, I’m not saying “these people shouldn’t be aloud to get married because they’re gay” but rather ” that’s not what marriage is.” No one has suggested that “straight” people be allowed to contract same sex marriages — nor that “gay” people be denied the ability to contract opposite sex marriages. So in that particular case, the thing being described as “discrimination” is not a case of refusing someone a service you provide to everyone else, because that person is a member of a group you don’t like, but rather of refusing to provide a different service, which no on else is allowed to get either, because you on principle believe that such a service is not good for society.
(As an aside — my neighbors actually are lesbian, and we get along with them just fine, though we don’t see a whole lot of them except when we’re working on the gardens together. Indeed, I know my lesbian neighbors better than any of my straight neighbors.)
Thanks for your response, DC.
This in particular jumps out at me:
If I say that the state should not recognize same sex marriages, I’m not saying “these people shouldn’t be aloud to get married because they’re gay” but rather ” that’s not what marriage is.” No one has suggested that “straight” people be allowed to contract same sex marriages — nor that “gay” people be denied the ability to contract opposite sex marriages. So in that particular case, the thing being described as “discrimination” is not a case of refusing someone a service you provide to everyone else, because that person is a member of a group you don’t like, but rather of refusing to provide a different service, which no on else is allowed to get either, because you on principle believe that such a service is not good for society.
While I would agree that opposing gay marriage is not discrimination, for the reasons you describe, I think it’s important to make a distinction between Matrimony (the sacrament) and marriage as a civil matter. That’s where it gets a bit more difficult; you can’t just say, “Gay marriage ought not to be recognized, because my religion doesn’t recognize the possibility of a sacramental relationship between two women.” – the obvious response would be to quote the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law…” etc.
How does society define marriage? I think the current understanding is not terribly sacramental (and given the Protestant history of the United States, this is to be expected, not to mention the shabby state of non-gay marriages in the US) – thus, as a civil matter, gay marriage turns out to be not too much of a stretch from the current understanding, I think.