Mark Murphy (Georgetown) has posted a draft letter to the APA here, developing some of the points that he debated with others in the earlier thread. The quality of argument and reasoning here is certainly more substantial than in the counterpetition--not surprising, giving that Murphy is a very good philosopher of law--though, for reasons addressed by others responding to Professor Murphy here, not ultimately compelling. I will comment on just the final paragraph, which perhaps touches the central issue:
The APA is a diverse association marked by deep pluralism. Its members can rightly expect that the APA will respect the deep differences among them in judgments about how it is reasonable for individuals to live and for communities to organize themselves, and it is far from clear that the suggested change in course does respect those differences. It has been correctly claimed by some who argue for the change in policy that any such respect has its limits: the APA of course would not respect colleges the common life of which was built on racist norms. In our view the appeal to this argument highlights what is involved in excluding or marking as bigoted the job advertisements from these Christian colleges. There is no serious reasoned disagreement on racist norms; the APA can rightly feel free to speak on behalf of its members to condemn any such. What would be involved in changing the APA’s policy with respect to these Christian colleges is that the APA would be taking an official stand, speaking on behalf of all of its members, on what are still matters of deep and reasoned controversy among them: whether so-called traditional marriage has any privileged normative status, and whether sexual activity outside such marriage is thus morally suspect. For the APA to take such a stand would be a grave error and an injustice.
Professor Murphy is right that there is some "controversy" within the APA membership over these issues, but the worry is that it is not "reasoned controversy," even if some very able philosophers have, on occasion, taken it upon themselves to offer embarrassingly bad arguments on the subject. (Without exception, these arguments are proferred by adherents of religious traditions which disfavor or condemn homosexuality or homosexual behavior; the arguments are, to all the world, obviously post-hoc rationalizations for the religious convictions.) The APA, having already included discrimination based on sexual orientation among forbidden practices, has also already taken a stand on this issue, notwithstanding the fact that the religious beliefs of some APA members lead them to believe this is not pernicious discrimination.
I won't open comments here, but Professor Murphy is soliciting feedback at the site linked above.
UPDATE: When I first posted this item yesterday, there was a parenthetical comment about the crank Ed Feser, author of the counterpetition. Apparently Feser sets his homepage to my blog, since the fact that I deleted the parenthetical a couple of hours later (since it was tangential and made the sentence in which it appeared unwieldy) immediately caught his attention, leading him to post lengthy ripostes on at least two different blogs to a parenthetical comment that lasted all of two hours on this site. I would like to assure Professor Feser that I do indeed think he is a crank--how could one not? The latter link supplies some evidence for thinking he is a liar too, but on that question I'm agnostic: I'm happy to believe that his religious zealotry has so wrecked his mind, that he is noncuplable for his false statements about the nature of universities and the like. And like so many other intellectual lightweights who populate the blogosphere, Professor Feser also doesn't know what an "ad hominen" is: this grad student offers some help. I'm sure that within 24 hours, there will be several more cyber-treatises from Professor Feser. Yawn.
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