ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a framework for locating the intuitions' work within contemporary doctrine, culture, and politics. It advances an extended typology of the intuitions themselves, drawing from case law, scholarly literature, and public discourse. As once-accepted empirical justifications for discriminating against lesbians and gay men have fallen away, the major stumbling block to equality lies in a set of intuitions, impulses, and so-called common sense views regarding sexual orientation and gender. Like the authority cases just discussed, the category encompasses cases that, in the course of defining or interpreting a statutory term, avoid direct engagement with justifications for sexual orientation distinctions in law. Building on Mary Douglas insights, others have shown how emotions of disgust motivate adverse feelings toward sexuality, toward sexual relations between same-sex couples. Reinforcing is another intuition that if the preference for heterosexuality is abandoned, nonmonogamy will be seen increasingly as a viable option. Sexual orientation insecurity is closely related to disgust regarding homosexuality.
