In his post below, Mr. Rowe argues that the flaw in Harry Jaffa’s position with regard to homosexuality is his assumption that, in Rowe’s words, “the male-female distinction is [analogous to]...the distinction between man & beast on the one hand and man & God on the other.” This is true, but, as I write in Liberal Originalism: A Past for The Future, 27 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 489 (2004), I think even this rests on a deeper logical error—what Daniel Dennett calls the “nudist fallcy,” after the notion that because man is “naturally” naked, clothes are unnatural. Is it not self-evident? Yet clothes are natural for man, because human beings, by our nature, alter the “intentions” of Mother Nature in order to accomplish our own intentions:
What is nonsense is the idea that what Mother Nature intends is ipso facto good (for us now).... Myopia is natural, but thank goodness for eyeglasses. Mother nature intended us to eat all the sweet things we could lay our hands on, but this is not a good reason for going with that instinct. Many of the culturally evolved features of human life are quite obviously cost-effective correctives for one superannuated "instinct" or another—and other features, as we shall see, are correctives to those correctives, and so forth. The Darwinian processes are launched by the underlying competition among alleles in genomes, but in our species the adaptations leave the launching pad far behind.
Id. at 541 n. 201 (quoting Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves 185 (2003). Likewise, Jaffa argues that the “natural” use of sex is procreation, and that homosexuality, since it cannot result in procreation, is unnatural and therefore immoral. Yet,
by Jaffa’s theory, sex as a means of expressing love would be supremely unnatural; indeed, one would have no natural right to kiss or hug—behaviors which lack any such biological justification. Under Jaffa’s interpretation, infertile couples like George and Martha Washington, or James and Dolley Madison, would be committing crimes against nature every time they engaged in sex. Jaffa’s argument relies on biology to explain human nature, when human nature is to be found precisely in the fact that we, unlike all other known species, are liberated from our biological nature by our unique grasp of culture.
Id. at 529.
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