Quote (excerpt) for the day!

Hysterically funny, if only this weren't true!

New Hampshire state Rep. Nancy Elliott, at a recent state Judiciary Committee meeting on a proposal to repeal the state's same-sex marriage bill, described the issue of gay marriage as follows: "taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement." Rep. Elliott continued, irrelevantly, "and you have to think, I'm not sure, would I allow that to be done to me?" (Elliott has since apologized for the portion of her remarks in which she falsely claimed that because gay marriage had been legalized, New Hampshire's fifth-graders were being taught to have anal sex in the public schools.)

This is the best introduction, I have read in a long time, to an essay .... in this case, the essay is by my favorite legal issues commentator, Dahlia Lithwick, writing about Martha Nussbaum's book From Disgust to Humanity

Time and again, Nussbaum argues, societies have been able to move beyond their own politics of disgust to what she calls "the politics of humanity," once they have finally managed to see others as fully human, with human aspirations and desires.

I can relate to one of the examples of disgust cited there--that of untouchables in India.  My grandmothers grew up in a world where they believed that they ought not to even accidentally touch one, or be touched by one .... and, it was fantastic to watch them go through a transformation and they shed that thought.  It was wonderful in fact that the doctor who treated my grandmother--this was back in the late 1970s--when she was in the hospital was not a person whose physical touch would have been appreciated fifty years prior .... this doctor later was elected as a member of the Parliament as well.  With the other grandmother, the moment I knew she had let go of the old ways of thinking was when we were watching on television a movie (can't recall the name!) about the very caste issues--it featured a phenomenal actress, Sharada, who was a Meryl Streep in her own ways.  Somewhere along in the movie, I heard my grandmother comment very sympathetically towards the lower caste character.  That empathy for the lower caste character in a movie meant a lot to me ... I think this is the humanity that Nussbaum refers to ....

We might have our own biases--because of the contexts within which we grew up.  I suppose the key is what happens when we are presented with evidence to the contrary.  It is those folks who refuse to discard their biases who worry me--not any bias by itself.