Edward Feser (Pasadena City College), author of the pro-discrimination petition to the APA, offers some insight into how religiously inspired bigots think in his curious book The Last Superstition. I quote some selections from the Preface:
At the time of this writing, exactly one week has passed since the Supreme Court of the State of California decreed that homosexuals have a "basic civil right" to marry someone of the same sex. Whether these Golden Gate solons will follow up their remarkable finding with a ruling to the effect that an ass is the same as a horse, it is too early to say; but they have already gone well beyond the sophistical orator of Plato's dialogue in "confoudning good with evil," not to mention reason with insanity....
[T]he most important thing to know about the belief that God exists is not that most citizens happen (for now anyway) to share it, that it tends to uphold public morality, and so forth. The most important thing to know about it is that it is true, and demonstrably so. Similarly, the most important thing to know about "same-sex marriage" is not that it has been lawlessly imposed by certain courts even though a majority of citizens happen (again, for now anyway) to oppose it. The most important thing to know about it is that the very idea is a metaphysical absurdity and a moral abomination, and (again) demonstrably so. It is no more up to the courts or "the people" to "define" marriage or to decide whether religion is a good thing than it is up to them to "define" whether the Pythagorean Theorem is true of right triangles, or whether water has the chemical structure H2O. In each case, what is at issue is a matter of objective fact that it is the business of reason to discover rather than democratic procedure to stipulate.
The "demonstration" consists in recycled Thomist arguments (with no meaningful attention to their now familiar refutations and the repetitive rhetorical trope that everyone [except Professor Feser] has failed to grasp the real import and nuances of these arguments) and some premodern Aristotelian metaphysics, recycled through the lens of Professor Feser's sad obsession with where sperm ends up. The publisher of this strange "philosophical" tome: St. Augustine's Press in South Bend, Indiana. It is not, I should add, uninteresting as a sociological and psychological document, and it does throw a somewhat clear light on the distinctive features of 'modernity' that are so frightening to those still living in the "dark ages."
ADDENDUM: For motivated readers, pp. 132-153 are particularly remarkable, and might be useful for those wanting a good example of bad philosophy in the service of religious dogma.
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