"The Ick Factor" and the Anti-Intellectualism of the Right

Mike Huckabee got himself in deep shit this week by insisting that one of the best arguments against gay marriage is the "Ick Factor," disgust--god-given evidently--at the very idea of homosexual sex. He attributed the phrase to U. Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has now taken the former Arkansas gov to school:

I use the term "projective disgust" to characterize the disgust that many people feel when they imagine gay sex acts. What does that term mean, and to whom does it apply? The view I develop, on the basis of recent psychological research, is that projective disgust has its origin in a discomfort with one's own body and its messier animal aspects, including sexuality, and that, in a defense mechanism, disgust is then projected outward onto vulnerable groups who are characterized as hyperphysical and hypersexual. In this way, the uncomfortable people displace their discomfort onto others, who are then targeted for various forms of social discrimination.

Thus the people to whom the term "projective disgust" applies are the insecure and emotionally stunted people who campaign against equal rights for gays and lesbians, not gays and lesbians themselves.

So Huckabee's embrace of "projective disgust" as his argument is self-incriminating. Leaving aside my wife's observation that imagining Huckabee himself having sex would likewise produce ickiness x 10, we should note that Huckabee's error is yet another example of the blunt instrument minds of so many on the right. His use of Nussbaum's term is not unlike Reagan using Bruce Springsteen's anti-Vietnam war anthem "Born in the USA" as his raw-raw-America entrance music as if it were something schlocky by Lee Greenwood.