Word: pappin
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...spam mail these days. With the breadth of philosophers, political scientists and sociologists many of us study here at Harvard—and with the ability to interpret their words in any of a million directions (thanks, Derrida)—it is no more a surprise that Pappin can offer a “philosophical” foundation for discrimination than that some religious leaders can offer a theological foundation, or that the Supreme Court can offer a legal foundation. If Pappin had failed to be inspired by the theory of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, he would have merely...
...were somebody to sink to the challenge of Pappin’s philosophical argument, just a question or two could raze his entire theoretical edifice. First, what happened to human happiness? Pappin argues that the only end of all human intimacy is a new human being. He’s wrong. A human being’s right to find happiness in this world is a sacred one, enshrined in our own Declaration of Independence...
This leads to the second question: When did Pappin get to decide what end the human body must have—or, for that matter, what the end is of anything other than his own life? Imagine for a moment the kind of Orwellian nightmare we would live in if Pappin’s utopia were ever to take shape: a world where all individual human actions had to fulfill some pre-determined “end” prescribed by editors of The Salient...
What is most worrisome is that Pappin and his peers propose to give the blind ignorance of homophobia an intellectual foundation. I doubt that the vast number of Americans who fear or hate homosexuality can easily glide into a discussion of classical European thought to support their beliefs. Most of them, I would venture to say, are homophobic because they are products of their environment. They likely grew up in a culture where it was an accepted fact for homosexuals to be discriminated against. Perhaps they were told that the God they worship believed homosexuality was sinful. For these Americans...
Perhaps this is being too much a worrywort. Pappin is hardly the first—nor will he be the last—to stitch together academic knowledge and an ideology of discrimination. But I fear that when we leave Harvard, we will not have the privilege of living in a community which so naturally rejects homophobia. Out there, it will take a gathering of all of our intellectual resources to wage war against hateful discrimination and to reshape our society into one of genuine equality...