apologies in advance for length...
Well, news of Scruton's appointment has now hit the pink press, which has reminded me how this thread got started.
Scruton has argued, in print, that homosexuality should be illegal, because that might encourage homosexuals to become priests (essay 'sexual morality and the liberal consensus' 1989), and believes that heterosexual attraction is a good thing, while homosexual attraction is perverse (book 'Sexual Desire' 1986).
More recently, he wrote this article in the Telegraph (a clue, methinks!):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/pers ... ldren.htmlI will not copy out the whole article here, but will tackle portions of it.
First, I do realize that a newspaper article is not subject to the same level of academic rigour as an article in a peer-reviewed journal, and there is no obligation to cite sources, but there are several instances where he says things like this:
(The British people) may not be comfortable with its more demonstrative expressions, but they are prepared to tolerate the homosexual way of life, provided it keeps within the bounds of decency, and does no violence to fundamental norms. However, this attitude does not satisfy the activists.
which are not only unsupported by evidence, but contravene the evidence available. A government-backed survey in 2008 found that, while 36% of British adults felt homosexuality to be wrong, 49% felt it was not wrong. More people (38%) disapproved of working mothers than disapproved of homosexuality. And I have no idea how he determined the mindset of the un-named activists.
He liberally peppers his article with terms in "quotation marks", which rather reminds me of macgamer avoiding the word homosexual when he is referring to a homosexual, preferring instead to refer to people with same sex attraction, and indeed felt that to use homosexual as it is defined in the dictionary was to "cater to sensibilities." Such efforts, both in the article and elsewhere, are an effort to discredit perfectly good terminology by implying that it is somehow suspect.
we wake up to the fact that, although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.
Again, he has used the 'we' to monolithically lump the rest of British society in with his own views. Moreover, he is guilty of, at least, a linguistic error. Homosexuality is normal. It may not be the norm, but it is normal. Perhaps he has simply confused the words 'normal' and 'norm' and used the wrong one. But I suspect that is not the case, and he is actually insisting on a factual inaccuracy. I hate to have to provide links here, but I suspect failing to do so will produce an angry reply from someone, so here are links to the Royal College of Psychiatrists (who agree with similar bodies in the US), and to the Australian Psychological Society. Presumably they know what they're talking about, backed by as they are by voluminous scientific and medical evidence. Nowhere do they say that homosexuality is abnormal... rather the opposite, in fact. It is this kind of scientific evidence which Scruton calls "propaganda" in his article.
This truth (ie that heterosexuality is normal and good and homosexuality is abnormal and bad) is recognised by all the great religions, and is endorsed in the Christian view of marriage as a union created by God
He seems to have condemned all of the non-Abrahamic religions to being less than great, and furthermore employed slight-of-hand by thus ignoring their views of sexuality, which are less condemnatory than the religions he selectively chooses to use. I won't comment further on the narrow-world view that suggests, nor on the bias inherent in his selection. Second, he again refers to a "truth" which is, in fact, false. This is not to suggest that he has got the wrong idea about the positions the Abrahamic faiths hold (they do, by and large, oppose equal rights for LGBT people to various degrees), but rather to point out that there is no factual basis for that position.
He concludes the article with some unfounded assertions and some equally unfounded implications.
it is no more an act of discrimination to exclude gay couples (from adoption) than it is to exclude incestuous liaisons or communes of promiscuous "swingers".
He argues this on the basis that
Anything else (other than a mother and father adopting together) would be an injustice to the child and an abuse of his innocence.
Again, this is not only unsupported by evidence, but flies in the face of the evidence, which indicates precisely the opposite.
I would like to cite someone I have already pointed out to macgamer. Professor Michael Lamb, head of the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, and formerly, for seventeen years, the head of the social and emotional development section of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Washington DC. He has recently presented expert testimony in California, where he testified that
"all available evidence shows that children raised by gay or lesbian parents are just as likely to be well-adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents and that the gender of a parent is immaterial to whether an adult is a good parent."
He is backed by his veritable mountain of peer-reviewed publication, amounting to some 500 articles. He also edited 40 books on developmental psychology. Unsurprisingly, the court deemed him "amply qualified" to proffer expert testimony.
Now, that critique of the argument, the factual errors, and the linguistic slight-of-hand in the article over, I will sum up by saying that he is entitled to hold whatever views he wants on homosexuality. If he wants to think it wrong, let him. That he thinks it wrong bothers me (slightly) less than his efforts to rationalise his view with pseudo-science and falsehoods, especially since he ought to be able to recognise the difference between true and false. Either he is ignorant enough to be unable to tell evidence and fact from opinion and mere dogmatic insistence, or his argument is knowingly intellectually dishonest. Either way, hiring this man to teach at this university is a very poor service to the students. Especially interesting is the idea that if he has resorted to such poor argument and such flimsy (indeed, false!) evidence to support his view, he was unable to muster anything better to support his view, and that despite this, he was unwilling to jettison his view.
I think it very revealing that an academic, widely published, writing in a national newspaper, and putting forth a view prejudicial to gays and lesbians, resorts to such rubbish to bolster his views. It indicates just how lamentable the basis of such views is.
To make myself perfectly clear, I do not argue that he should be denied a lectureship on the basis of his views. There is an academic, John Charmley (at Cambridge, if memory serves) who has published works arguing that appeasement was a brilliant policy, that Chamberlain did better for Britain than Churchill, and that the Munich agreement was a defeat for Hitler. My thoughts on the matter are almost diametrically opposite, but I do not for a moment suggest that he should not be at one of the best institutions in the world. He should be kept around as long as he cares to continue in academia (and not just to provide some much-needed comedy in a dark subject). While I disagree with him and his views, I have been unable (despite some effort) to find any factual errors in his work, and his argumentation, while I disagree with his conclusions, holds water in terms of its logical progressions from a to b to c, etc.
What I do strongly and unreservedly object to is someone like Scruton who is guilty of at least one of the following:
a. an inability to critically examine evidence or determine whether it is true or false
b. an inability to base his opinions on evidence, and worse, an (possible) ability to hold them in the face of contradictory evidence
c. a possible ability to be knowingly dishonest in presenting an argument backed by assertions he knows to be false
A man with such failings has no business in St Andrews, particularly when, in moral philosophy, he will be spending at least some portion of his teaching time presenting such abysmal views and their abysmal support to his students. True, I would expect his students to see through this and recognise this as the joke that it is, but I do think we have the right to expect that the university would not hire incompetents to teach in the first place.
