Consider Colin Powell's indignant reaction to the suggestion that the exclusion of gays from the military is analogous to the exclusion of African Americans from the military. Powell angrily insists that there is no analogy here — that gays simply do not have the rights claimed by blacks. As soon as the issue is phrased in rights talk, those who agree with Powell and oppose what they like to call "special rights for homosexuals" start citing the Supreme Court's decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. The Court looked into the matter and solemnly found that there is no constitutional protection for sodomy. So people arguing against Powell have to contend that Bowers was wrongly decided. This leads to an argumentative impasse, one that suggests that rights talk is the wrong approach.

The Brown v. Board of Education decision was not a discovery of a hitherto unnoticed constitutional right, or of the hitherto unnoticed intentions of the authors of constitutional amendments. Rather, it was the result of our society's long-delayed willingness to admit that the behavior of white Americans toward the descendants of black slaves was, and continued to be, incredibly cruel — that it was intolerable that American citizens should be subjected to the humiliation of segregation. If Bowers v. Hardwick is reversed, it will not be because a hitherto invisible right to sodomy has become manifest to the justices. It will be because the heterosexual majority has become more willing to concede that it has been tormenting homosexuals for no better reason than to give itself the sadistic pleasure of humiliating a group designated as inferior — designated as such for no better reason than to give another group a sense of superiority.

Richard Rorty, The Intellectuals and the Poor
An address given in February 1996 at Pomona College, Pomona, California, reprinted in Harper's Magazine, June 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Richard Rorty. All rights reserved.

Posted 18 May 1996

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