John Holbo: The Steelwool Scrub���A Fallacy http://crooke...

John Holbo: The Steelwool Scrub���A Fallacy http://crookedtimber.org/2019/05/07/the-steelwool-scrub-a-fallacy/: 'There���s a common "religious liberty" trope... an invalid variant on a Steelman-style argument.... The Steelwool Scrub is quite bad.... Take same-sex marriage (more recently, trans issues): you can always rustle up some Ryan T. Anderson-type to spin up some Thomistic-ish natural law (Christian anthropology etc.) argument. Even if this is weak ���steel��� (I would judge), belated scholasticism, wandering the modern world, looks ornamental���harmless, innocent, unassuming. At worst, a curious mooncalf; at best, considerably more academically polished than old-school fag-bashing. Now comes the bait-and-switch (indulgence-by-proxy, steelman-to-absolve-all-sins.) If anyone now says ���opposition to LGBTQ rights is bigotry and irrational animus������the response comes quick. ���Unfair! Will no one think of poor Ryan T. Anderson! Of his elaborate, perhaps failed yet earnestly-exposited, to-all-appearances sincere arguments! Is the world so unable to tolerate a little [insert squirrel gaze GIF] DIFFERENCE? Can all this be dismissed as mere, base homophobia! Mindless bigotry! Surely not! Surely, then, it is those who call it ���bigotry��� who must be [squirrel GIF again] the REAL BIGOTS!���... Descriptively���sociologically���it���s absurd to steelman a socio-cultural order-or-group by conflating its practices and norms with unrepresentative, intellectual outliers. If you think the reason trans people struggle for respect, recognition, rights is that they are surrounded by well-meaning, rationally-convicted neo-Thomists, you���re nuts. Trans people struggle and suffer because they are members of a despised, oppressed minority group. SSM was a fight because gays face irrational animus, not a thicket of para-Aristotelian arguments. Spinning actually-existing bigotry as, ideally, the better angel of some natural law argument, is just a weird way to excuse what���s right there in front of you...

#noted #2019-12-06