What's happening?

There’s a piece in the Harrisburg Patriot-News today by Anthony Infanti, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. He writes in support of a pending state anti-discrimination bill that would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

He focuses on what he says are the economic benefits the legislation will bring by making the state more welcoming to LGBT people. Professor Infanti doesn’t much develop the logic of anti-discrimination, which makes sense, since that logic is increasingly taken as given across our culture, and in our social, religious, and political institutions. Why spend time defending something that a lot of people will take at face value, at least in the public square?

Anti-discrimination, though, isn’t a habit of mind that occurs to everyone naturally. Until recently in human history it didn’t occur to anyone at all, practically. Affairs were conducted on a basis that was less than fully egalitarian, and it seemed natural for people to live in a setting in which different individuals with different identities would be placed on different footings. While not all of our past attitudes are to be invoked as things worth restoring—impossible, anyways, since attitudes that differed from time to time often contradict each other—at some level we should be surprised to find that justice and basic decency now require us to replace our inherited public understandings with a single self-contained principle of equality that is to override all other considerations. That seems to be what is happening, though, even though some continue to object and complain.