Hadley Arkes: Judge Walker and the language of the law

Hadley Arkes writing at The Catholic Thing: “[B]ehind all of this was a trend long in the making, a radical recasting of the language and logic of a ‘moral’ judgment. In the relentless march of ‘relativism,’ good and bad, right and wrong, were translated to mean merely the things we ‘like’ or ‘dislike,’ a matter of personal taste. Justice Hugo Black would famously deride appeals to natural law and moral reasoning by reducing them to subjective beliefs . . . With Judge Walker the conversion of terms took this form: ‘the state cannot have an interest in disadvantaging an unpopular minority group simply because the group is unpopular.’ Walker simply rules out the notion that there may have been reasons for turning away from the homosexual life. Homosexuals were simply ‘disliked,’ an aversion without reason. ‘Moral judgments’ come down in the end to irrational beliefs; and they could supply then no justification for the law. In this way, the wave of relativism inverts language and dissolves any moral ground for the law.”