The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process. ....
One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust....
“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”
Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions. Gay rights were probably advanced largely by the public’s growing awareness of friends and family members who were gay.
Basically this argues that the "ick factor" IS a huge problem for conservatives to get over with respect to GLBT rights, and stresses the importance of coming out to everyone . Because when their "ick response" conflicts with their knowledge of you as a good person, maybe....just maybe....we'll start making progress.
3 comments:
As a liberal, I have to confess that the idea of anti-gay Republican Senator David Vitter being diapered by a female sex worker really prods my own "ick factor" into overdrive. Then there was the anti-gay Republican christianist minister Rev. Ted Haggard who had weekly phone calls with President Bush as part of the GOP's Taliban. I was totally icked out by the idea of him smoking crystal meth and having sexual contact with a male sex worker, the same type of person he condemned regularly from his pulpit. As much as I try, my human interactions with conservatives who condemn gay people and promote "traditional values" via legislation and then "come out" as people who engage in the same behaviors they condemn... This is a huge ick factor for me to overcome. I wonder if Mr. Kristoff has thought about the "ick factor" of these folks I mentioned, plus hypocrites like anti-gay GOP senators Larry Craig and John Ensign. But from where I sit, I had no positive perceptions of these folks (before they "came out" as hypocrites) that conflicted with my "ick response" when I learned about their double lives.
Hi Marko
I have to say that the attitude of those folks exceeds my "ick" factor too...but them I'm a boring person in a faithful monogamous relationship, apparently a hotbe of sexual immorality. go figger.
Actually, the schadenfreude factor far exceeds the ick factor in those two cases. Remember Dick Morris and his dominatrix foot fetish?
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