Archive for the ‘Culture Wars’ Category

How to preserve women’s sports – Washington Times

OPINION:

Let us now digress from my usual preoccupation, which is politics, to the world of athletics or to the world of athletics as it is affected by culture wars. Of course, culture wars are politics by another name. Alas, we never can completely escape politics. If I wanted to write this week about cuisine at some point, I fear I would be capitulating to politics, for instance: how politics affects linguini or chop suey or beef. Politics is everywhere nowadays. I think the reason is that what was once called liberalism (and is now called the left) has spread into everything. Yet I shall restrain myself this week and talk only about athletics. Really, politics is a bore.

Now the sport I know best is swimming. I spent my early years swimming from one end of a pool to the other for as many as six miles a day. Swimming is one of those sports where men often train with women. Perhaps that is why I chose swimming. At any rate, we trained together. However, we did not compete with each other for obvious reasons at least they were obvious when I was young.

In every swimming event, the men surpassed the women. Men were stronger and this may seem controversial meaner or at least more competitive. Perhaps this is changing, but I am always reminded of a very dear friend who held many world records. One day she told me how she did it. It was elegance. She did not try to crush the opposition as men often do. She was concerned about her stroke mechanics: Her pull, her kick, and she usually won. Incidentally, by the time she entered college, she had dropped out of swimming. As I recall, it was something about her shoulders becoming too hefty.

This brings to mind another story from the world of athletics involving women. One evening I appeared on television with Pete Rozelle, the head of the National Football League. We were appearing with a leading feminist, who, by the way, was built like a linebacker. She proclaimed that the time would come when women would be as big as men, and they would be competing with men in the NFL. All that held womankind back, she said, was institutional sexism. That was some 50 years ago, and her promised epiphany has not taken place yet.

Today women who seek to compete in sports are faced with the most perverse threat imaginable: Biological males are dominating their sports events. And where are the feminists? For the most part, they seem to be supporting the male interlopers. What is more, where are the liberals? They remain silent, or they support the interlopers. The people claim to be transgender, and I guess they can compete as women in womens athletics or as men or whatever else they want to claim. How about as angels?

What can women do to preserve womens sports? I thought for a while the women swimmers could simply don flippers and power themselves through the water with a stronger kick than the trans crowd, but these fellows (or fellowesses) are smart. Their response is to strap on their own pair of flippers. What will the ladies do next, strap on hand paddles?

Well, I have come up with a solution that ought to placate everyone. Americans of a certain forward-leaning persuasion relish being on the side of progress. The trans crowd is certainly drawn from this sector of Americano. They and their advocates should claim that they represent the latest evolution of the species, the third sex, the trans sex. Why should excellence in sport be denied the third sex?

Henceforth there will be male swimming events, female swimming events and trans swimming events. Anyone who would deny trans people the right to compete against other trans people is simply behind the times. Surely the NCAA and the AAU will sanction the third-sex movement. It is only a matter of time before the United States Olympic Committee takes a stand for trans athletes everywhere.

At the outset of this column, I said that I would avoid politics, but I see that I have failed. As I also said, politics is everywhere today. It has even entered the swimming pool. Yet I have offered a solution to the trans threat. It is perfectly reasonable. We shall have a world record for the males, one for the females and one for the trans athletes. My only question is what sort of swimwear they might wear. I shall leave that question for the experts.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator. He is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the author most recently of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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How to preserve women's sports - Washington Times

Did the Fundamentalists Win? A Centennial Retrospective – Patheos

This year marks the centennial anniversary of one of the most famous sermons from the culture wars of the 1920s: Harry Emerson Fosdicks Shall the Fundamentalists Win?

The 34-year-old Fosdick, whose eloquent presentation of the modernist cause had already landed him one of the most prestigious pulpits in the nation, was eager to lead the charge against the fundamentalists, who he warned would destroy Christianity if they succeeded in wresting control of the Northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations from the irenic moderate liberals who did not want to make biblical inerrancy, substitutionary atonement, or a belief in the virgin birth a litmus test for the Christian faith. Fosdicks excoriation of the fundamentalists has become a classic primary source text on the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s, and many college history professors (myself included) have assigned it in our classes alongside one of William Jennings Bryans speeches against evolution in order to give students first-hand perspectives on both sides of the debate.

But that debate has not played out quite like Fosdick expected. Now that we have reached the centennial anniversary of this sermon, perhaps its time to ask the question: Did the fundamentalists win? The answer is not as clear as anyone would have likely expected at the time.

For the first half-century after Fosdicks sermon, many observers probably would have concluded that the fundamentalists lost. Fosdick had warned that the fundamentalists were engaged in a hostile takeover of the Northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations that would, if it succeeded, purge the denominations of those who wanted to harmonize Christianity with modern science and historical criticism of the Bible. Fundamentalists lost their fights in both of those denominations. While small groups of fundamentalists left each of those denominations to found more conservative groups (such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches), those denominations were tiny compared to their mainline counterparts, and they rarely made news headlines. The mainline continued to control all of the major seminaries and divinity schools that had been at stake in the intradenominational battles over institutional control. And their political influence appeared to be far stronger at least if measured by presidential church affiliations or media attention than the fundamentalists had.

Nor did the anti-evolution forces make much headway in the North. Although several southern states passed laws in the 1920s restricting the teaching of evolution, no state north of the Mason-Dixon line did so. And even if high school biology textbooks across the nation minimized their presentation of evolutionary theory in deference to southern preferences from the 1930s until the early 1960s, college classrooms with only a few fundamentalist exceptions taught evolution as accepted fact, and many college-educated Protestants in the North may have assumed that the controversy was more-or-less over. The anti-evolutionists won the Scopes trial; yet, in a more important sense, they were defeated, overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism, the historian William Leuchtenburg wrote in 1958 in his historical survey of the United States in the 1920s. Ostensibly successful on every front, the political fundamentalists in the 1920s were making a last stand in a lost cause.

But in the last half-century, the answer to Fosdicks question Shall the fundamentalists win? could quite plausibly be answered in the affirmative. In the late twentieth century, a politically resurgent conservative evangelicalism gained national political influence and replaced a numerically declining mainline Protestantism as the public representation of Protestant Christianity in much of the media. Conservative evangelicals revived the political fights over how human origins were taught in public schools, as well as over what was taught in seminaries. It might have been too late to reclaim Princeton Theological Seminary let alone the University of Chicago Divinity School but the conservative evangelicals of the late twentieth century made a successful bid to purge the evolutionists and advocates of historical criticism from places such as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and capture control of much of divinity training in the United States. And when a Gallup Poll asked Americans in 1983 whether they believed that God had directly created human beings in their present form (as opposed to a divinely guided evolutionary process or an unguided evolution that occurred without divine involvement, which were the two other choices in the survey), a plurality of 44 percent said that indeed, God had directly created humans in their present form, as young-earth creationists insisted. Perhaps the anti-evolutionists had not been quite as defeated as Leuchtenburg assumed.

Yet to say that the fundamentalists won would not exactly be true either. Instead, we have experienced a religious and cultural fragmentation, with a much greater range of opinions than Fosdicks sermon may have suggested.

Fosdicks sermon suggested that there were only two alternatives for Christianity: Either it could become irrelevant among educated modern people if fundamentalists insisted on making belief in unscientific ideas (such as special creation or biblical miracles) a litmus test, or it could update its views to accommodate modern science and remain a relevant force as a liberal religion. But, contrary to Fosdicks expectations, conservative (even fundamentalist) forms of Christianity continued to draw adherents from educated people in the late 20th century and beyond.

The ready acceptance of biblical literalism even in educated circles in the late 20th and early 21st century might have seemed to be a fundamentalist victory, but it was also aided by a religious pluralism that was the result of liberal Protestant epistemology that grounded religious truth claims in personal experience.

In the 1920s, many American fundamentalists, like most 19th-century Protestants, believed that truth claims about religion could be tested empirically and objectively. The Bibles claims could be tested with historical and scientific evidence, they thought. Liberal Protestants who accepted historical criticism did not agree. Influenced by the German liberal Protestant theology that could be traced back to Friedrich Schleiermacher, they wanted to reground the epistemological foundation for religion in experience.

By the end of the 20th century, most Americans of all religious stripes seemed to accept the liberal Protestant idea that religion would have to be grounded in personal experience. The liberal Protestants of the early 20th century had not necessarily believed that the experiential grounding of religion had to be strictly personal; collective societal experience also played a role. Nevertheless, in the individualistic culture of late 20th-century America, the idea that religious faith was based on experiences that were strictly personal became widely accepted among Americans of many religious faiths, as well as those with none at all. That helped fundamentalists (or, as most preferred to be called in the late 20th century, evangelicals) win a public toleration they had not enjoyed before at least if they avoided politicizing their religion or using their beliefs as justification for restricting the rights of others, which was not always the case. Fundamentalists might still feel like a beleaguered minority, but their biblical literalism per se rarely elicits the sort of public mockery that Clarence Darrow adopted at the Scopes trial or in which H. L. Mencken engaged. If religion is grounded in personal experience, its hard for anyone to critique anothers faith, which has helped theologically conservative Christians at times.

But within Protestantism, the result has been not only a widespread acceptance of religious pluralism (which liberal Protestants welcomed) but also an increasing religious fragmentation. Protestantism is not merely dividing into fundamentalist and liberal camps, as appeared to be the case in Fosdicks era; instead, there are a multitude of increasingly isolated camps that cannot form a unified coalition on the contentious cultural issues. Forty years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention was divided between conservatives and moderates. Twenty years ago, those conservatives began experiencing divisions in their own camp over Calvinism. Now even the conservatives who can agree on Calvinist doctrine are splitting with each other over exactly how to interpret and apply gender complementarianism in their congregations or how exactly the denomination should respond to critical race theory. Conservative Presbyterians who agree on Reformed theology and biblical inerrancy are at odds with each other over issues of racial justice.

Across the evangelical spectrum, one no longer finds two clear camps but instead a multitude of siloed parties that disagree with others on both their left and their right. One can find gender complementarian advocates of racial justice, for instance, who are alienated from anti-CRT people on their right and gender egalitarians on their left. One can find social justice-minded (but sexually conservative) gender egalitarians who are alienated from the social justice complementarians on their right because of their stance on women in ministry but also from advocates of LGBTQ rights on their left because of their opposition to same-sex marriage. And this does not even take into account the further divisions that might be occurring as a result of disagreements over COVID protocols or national politics. As a result, evangelicalism appears not merely to be splitting but to be dividing into several different camps. And while the mainline appears to be less divided than evangelicalism, it has not been able to escape the contemporary culture wars unscathed, as the splintering of the Episcopal and United Methodist churches over LGBTQ issues has demonstrated.

The contemporary divisions among Protestants have been exacerbated by a national cultural fragmentation that is partly the result of a loss of epistemological authority beyond the personal. In Fosdicks day, fundamentalists and modernists were battling over the future theological direction of northern Protestantism and, by extension, the nations leading institutions of influence. But today there are not many national religious lodestars over which to battle. American religion has become too fragmented, with too many competing options, for there to be a new fundamentalist-modernist division. Instead of two parties, we have a plethora of options, and it is too early to say whether these competing factions will be able to form unified coalitions with other groups.

So, did the fundamentalists win? They certainly endured for far longer than Fosdick had hoped. But neither the liberals nor the fundamentalists were able to capture control of American Protestantism in the way they had anticipated, and today were experiencing a fissiparous splintering of American Protestant Christianity on a scale that neither side in the controversy imagined. If the 1920s is commonly seen as the era when American Protestantism divided into two major factions, perhaps the 2020s will eventually be seen as the moment when American evangelicalism and, to a certain extent, American Protestantism in general split into multiple competing groups because of the culture war issues. So, perhaps were nearing the moment when the fault line between evangelicals and mainline Protestants will matter less than the multiple fault lines within these two camps. If that is the case, the question Shall the fundamentalists win? might be the wrong one to ask. Perhaps the real question now is: Will any faction in American Protestantism win?

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Did the Fundamentalists Win? A Centennial Retrospective - Patheos

Thursday headlines: Wintry mix, snow in forecast for this weekend in SC – Charleston City Paper

Ice? Snow? Itll depend on where you live in South Carolina, but a winter storm is expected to sweep through Saturday night, possibly bringing 2 inches of snow or more north of Interstate 85. The Charleston area could see some ice, while the Midlands is bracing for lots more ice and possible snow. More:WYFF,Spartanburg Herald-Journal,The State,The Post and Courier

In other headlines:

Latest school voucher push debated on state Senate panel.A Senate panel has begun debate on a new proposal looking to send South Carolina parents $7,000 yearly for private K-12 education. More:The Post and Courier,WCSC

Republicans liked this anti-LGBTQ bill until they saw it could impact unvaccinated.A bill aiming to protect doctors and other medical professionals from being fired, demoted or sued if they refuse to provide non-emergency services to which they morally object and also allow for conversion therapy in the state is now stalled over concerns it could backfire on COVID-mandate opponents who are not vaccinated. Meanwhile, South Carolina conservatives are jumping into anti-LGBTQ culture wars, identifyingthe issue as a top priority in 2022.More:The Post and Courier

S.C. House advances Republican-favoring congressional map.South Carolinas First Congressional District is looking a little safer for Republican incumbent Rep. Nancy Mace after the House approved a version that would move the district from leaning Republican back into a Republican stronghold. More:The State,The Post and Courier

State senators debate state law requiring state permission for hospital expansion.South Carolina senators began a debate Wednesday over whether to wipe a state law requiring hospitals and medical clinics to receive state permission to expand. The Certificate of Need program first sought to distribute medical care around the state, but supporters of a bill that would end the program said it is no longer needed. More:AP News,The State,The Post and Courier

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Thursday headlines: Wintry mix, snow in forecast for this weekend in SC - Charleston City Paper

If The Republican Party Refuses To Learn, Winning In 2022 Means Nothing – The Federalist

The days and weeks after the Trump administrations departure generated waves of think pieces from the right-of-center about what Donald Trumps election and tenure could mean for the future of the GOP.

Setting aside the obnoxious and hysterical bloviating about the end of democracy that dominated the mainstream press, pundits (myself included) opined about the opportunity for the GOP to make a pivot that embraced the working-class voters Trump brought into the party, to learn from his willingness to update the conservative platform to take on modern challenges, and to follow his fearlessness in the culture wars.

In this years approaching midterm elections, it appears congressional Republicans are poised to take back at least one congressional majority in the House of Representatives. The problem? Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader and presumptive Republican speaker, appears to have forgotten that the Trump moment happened at all.

In an interview with Fox News, McCarthy outlined the top priorities for the GOP should they be given a congressional majority: stopping the flow of drugs and human trafficking on the border, making it easier to start and grow a business, re-establishing Americas energy independence, and passing a parents bill of rights.

If youre sensing shades of elections ranging from 1984 to 2012, youre not alone. Minus the aberration that was Trump, the Republican Party has been promising the exact same set of goals for my entire lifetime, regardless of what is actually happening in the country. One suspects that a nuclear winter could befall the entire North American continent and Republicans would struggle mightily through the fallout to declare they have the solution to the problem: the reauthorization of the Keystone Pipeline.

Its not that these policies are wrong or even misplaced. Theyre simply mis-prioritized. Yes, more enforcement at the border, making life better for small businesses, securing American energy independence, and enforcing parental choice are good and absolutely necessary policy goals. But they also represent the absolute baseline expectations that voters should have from an even marginally competent Republican party.

What McCarthy is espousing as top policy priorities are the rote, daily business Republicans should be engaging in when running the country, not the bold, visionary agenda of a party that understands and acknowledges the forces that now threaten its voters, and that is prepared to do battle on their behalf.

In other words, Republicans need to present an actually compelling policy vision one in which the party is prepared to deliver tangible policy relief to conservative voters who are beleaguered by a host of new threats, ranging from the large and impersonal forces of deindustrialization and globalization to the intensely local damage inflicted on families by the petty corporate tyranny of public health czars.

This detachment between Republican politicians and their voters isnt new in Republican politics. The divide between the GOP and its base has been growing for years, and even when acknowledged by D.C. politicians, often misunderstood.

Former Republican House Speaker John Boehner either completely ignored or misread the frustration that drove the emergence of the Tea Party movement in 2010 and beyond, while the partys donor class co-opted the energy into solely fiscal concerns, neglecting voters expressed frustration with the GOPs failures to address Obamacare and the countrys health-care system, and Republican efforts to pass massive amnesty for illegal immigrants.

The Tea Party wave election of 2010, which saw the defeat of big-spending Republican incumbents and a rejection of establishment-selected successors to certain Senate seats, was the first shot across the bow. When that failed to resonate with DCs Republican leadership, Republican voters responded in 2016 by launching a nuclear missile in the form of Donald J. Trump.

McCarthy appears poised to repeat the same mistakes of D.C.s Republican ruling class by looking directly past the concerns animating the partys voters. And it couldnt come at a worse time. Now, more than ever, working-class voters find themselves vulnerable in ways theyve never been before.

The dominant Covid response exacerbated an already growing wealth gap between rich and poor. As the billionaires grow wealthier, middle-class families are having fewer children and increasingly living on a financial knifes edge.

Republicans still find themselves without a viable health-care plan as states and hospitals (both of which receive generous federal subsidies) condition access to Covid treatments on racial preferencing. The Department of Justice and the FBI have been turned into a politicized, perpetually rights-violating surveillance arms of the Democratic Party, while the Department of Health and Human Services casually greenlights the sale of aborted fetal baby parts.

The China shock has left middle America hollowed out, its once industrious middle-class manufacturing base impoverished, unemployed, and ravaged by a largely unaddressed opioid crisis. Meanwhile, American mega-corporations happily replace non-college-educated American workers with cheap foreign laborers, exploiting our countrys legal immigration system with impunity. These same corporations happily bend the knee to China, helping Americas biggest geopolitical adversary develop technology and looking the other way as China marches its minorities into forced labor camps.

Women as a unique and celebrated biological class are slowly being erased as their accomplishments in the classroom and on the athletic field are overtaken by men. Americans, including elected officials, are cut off without recourse from the digital public square.

Employees at Americas flagship corporations are punished if they dont submit to corporate race flogging from HR, while public institutions teach Americas kids that their worth is defined by skin color. Americans are now routinely fired, with the encouragement of the federal government, for refusing vaccines that have been widely available for less than a year.

In the face of all of this, congressional Republicans must do more than simply shrug. A party that cannot even acknowledge the emergence of these threats, much less commit to specific, novel ways of addressing them, is assigning itself to irrelevance.

A coherent Republican agenda has to tangibly deliver for its voters not simply through appeals to broad, free-market concepts, but by directly addressing the hurdles thrown down by the corporate, government, and geoeconomic forces that seek to do them harm.

Trump doesnt remain the most popular Republican in the party due to some coercion or bullying or mind control. He remains popular with the Republican base because of his willingness as president to speak directly to what was threatening people every day. Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, has exploded in popularity for the exact same reason.

Republicans would be wrong to think that voters are flocking to them in 2022 because theyve presented a clear and compelling vision for the future. Even political neophytes can see that Republicans are winning not on their own merits, but because Democrats are massively imploding in a spectacle of tone-deaf, racist woke-splaining overreach, unabated COVID power grabs, and legislative incompetence.

But as this Democratic majority has shown, its one thing to win power, its another to maintain it. The Republican party may have voters turning to them now in desperation, but theyre still waiting for a tangible reason to stay.

Rachel Bovard is The Federalist's senior tech columnist and the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. She has more than a decade of policy experience in Washington and has served in both the House and Senate in various roles, including as a legislative director and policy director for the Senate Steering Committee under the successive chairmanships of Sen. Pat Toomey and Sen. Mike Lee. She also served as director of policy services for The Heritage Foundation.

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If The Republican Party Refuses To Learn, Winning In 2022 Means Nothing - The Federalist

What Disgusts You? – The New York Times

How do you feel when you look at the image of moldy fruit at the top of this post? Are you disgusted?

How does disgust feel in your body? Is it a queasiness or nausea? Is it the sensation of creepy crawlies? What expression does your face make when you see something disgusting like that photograph?

In How Disgust Explains Everything, Molly Young writes about the science of revulsion:

Once you are attuned to disgust, it is everywhere. On your morning commute, you may observe a tragic smear of roadkill on the highway or shudder at the sight of a rat browsing garbage on the subway tracks. At work, you glance with suspicion at the person who neglects to wash his filthy hands after a trip to the toilet. At home, you change your childs diaper, unclog the shower drain, empty your cats litter box, pop a zit, throw out the fuzzy leftovers in the fridge. If you manage to complete a single day without experiencing any form of disgust, you are either a baby or in a coma.

Disgust shapes our behavior, our technology, our relationships. It is the reason we wear deodorant, use the bathroom in private and wield forks instead of eating with our bare hands. I floss my teeth as an adult because a dentist once told me as a teenager that Brushing your teeth without flossing is like taking a shower without removing your shoes. (Do they teach that line in dentistry school, or did he come up with it on his own? Either way, 14 words accomplished what a decade of parental nagging hadnt.) Unpeel most etiquette guidelines, and youll find a web of disgust-avoidance techniques. Rules governing the emotion have existed in every culture at every time in history. And although the input of disgust that is, what exactly is considered disgusting varies from place to place, its output is narrow, with a characteristic facial expression (called the gape face) that includes a lowered jaw and often an extended tongue; sometimes its a wrinkled nose and a retraction of the upper lip (Jerry does it about once per episode of Seinfeld). The gape face is often accompanied by nausea and a desire to run away or otherwise gain distance from the offensive thing, as well as the urge to clean oneself.

The more you read about the history of the emotion, the more convinced you might be that disgust is the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, from our never-ending culture wars to the existence of kosher laws to 4chan to mermaids. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.

The article goes on to discuss two important research papers on disgust from the Hungarian researchers Aurel Kolnai, whose paper came out in 1929, and Andras Angyal, whose work was published in 1941:

Nonetheless, Kolnai was the first to arrive at a number of insights that are now commonly accepted in the field. He pointed to the paradox that disgusting things often hold a curious enticement think of the Q-tip you inspect after withdrawing it from a waxy ear canal, or the existence of reality-TV shows about plastic surgery, or Fear Factor. He identified the senses of smell, taste, sight and touch as the primary sites of entry and pointed out that hearing isnt a strong vector for disgust. One would search in vain for any even approximately equivalent parallel in the aural sphere to something like a putrid smell, the feel of a flabby body or of a belly ripped open.

For Kolnai, the exemplary disgust object was the decomposing corpse, which illustrated to him that disgust originated not in the fact of decay but the process of it. Think of the difference between a corpse and a skeleton. Although both present evidence that death has occurred, a corpse is disgusting where a skeleton is, at worst, highly spooky. (Hamlet wouldnt pick up a jesters rotting head and talk to it.) Kolnai argued that the difference had to do with the dynamic nature of a decomposing corpse: the fact that it changed color and form, produced a shifting array of odors and in other ways suggested the presence of life within death.

Angyal argued that disgust wasnt strictly sensory. We might experience colors and sounds and tastes and odors as unpleasant, but they could never be disgusting on their own. As an illustration, he related a story about walking through a field and passing a shack from which a pungent smell, which he took for that of a decaying animal, pierced his nostrils. His first reaction was intense disgust. In the next moment, he discovered that he had made a mistake, and the smell was actually glue. The feeling of disgust immediately disappeared, and the odor now seemed quite agreeable, he wrote, probably because of some rather pleasant associations with carpentry. Of course, glue back then probably did come from dead animals, but the affront had been neutralized by nothing more than Angyals shifting mental associations.

Disgust, Angyal contended, wasnt merely smelling a bad smell; it was a visceral fear of being soiled by the smell. The closer the contact, the stronger the reaction.

Students, read the entire article, or at least the first two sections of it (until I first met), then tell us:

What is your reaction to the article? Did you feel disgust while reading any parts of it? Did any of the theories about disgust resonate with you?

In your experience, what makes something disgusting? Is it the taste, texture, smell or sight of it, as Kolnai argued? Is it the mental associations with it or the fear of being contaminated as, Angyal suggested? Or is it something else?

Describe in detail something that really disgusts you. Use vivid and descriptive language to bring your revulsion to life. Then, explain why you think this thing is so repulsive to you. (Please keep in mind that your comment should remain appropriate for our site. We wont approve comments that include obscenity, vulgarity or profanity.)

Later on in the article, the author suggests that disgust can also apply to a persons politics, beliefs or activities, such as what a person with conservative politics might feel for someone with liberal politics (and vice versa), or what someone might feel about things like racism, brutality or hypocrisy. Do you agree? Do you ever feel disgust, and use that word, to describe such ideas? Is it the same feeling you might feel for moldy food or garbage? Or is the sensation and meaning different to you?

The author describes the feeling of disgust as the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls. What role do you see disgust playing in our society? How has it influenced your own life, if at all?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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What Disgusts You? - The New York Times