Scary black presidents have the same effect

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum considers the politics of "disgust":

I look at the various arguments that have been made against same-sex marriage. And always in the back of the picture is the analogy to miscegenation. In both cases the arguments look like public arguments, but they're driven by a deeper loathing. Some of them look perfectly OK within a given religion, but that doesn't lead to making something illegal for everyone. They're like Jewish arguments against the eating of pork. Then there's another class of arguments that look public, but they always have a flaw, like the argument that marriage is about procreation. That's not something we've ever believed in our history or, in our case, law. People who are above the age to conceive, who are sterile, who never see each other, like prison inmates serving life terms, people on their death bed--they've all been held to have a constitutional right to marry. Then I look at the argument that children do best when raised with one mother and one father; and if that were true, that would provide a public reason for fostering that institution, although it's not clear it would provide a reason for opposing others. But psychological research shows that when you define child welfare in a nonreligious way, children do just as well. Then there's finally the argument that legalizing same-sex marriage will degrade or defile straight marriage. What's that about? It looks something like the claim that admitting all these baseball players who use steroids to the Hall of Fame would degrade the achievements of the genuine competitors. It taints the achievement. But what can that be about? We don't think that heterosexuals who are flaky, silly or awful, Britney Spears marrying on a whim and then divorcing almost immediately, we don't think that that taints the institution of heterosexual marriage. By the same token, people do think that the marriage of two gay people of good character does taint the institution. We can't understand what's being said without going back to some kind of magical idea about stigma or taint.