Empathy isn’t itself an emotion. It’s a cognitive process that lets you see the view point of another . Turning it off, predictably, makes you dumber.

Every time a GOP congressman suddenly decides that gay people deserve rights just because their son came out as gay , it’s displaying this problem. Gay people in general don’t suddenly deserve rights because of your son. A rational person can see that they either always did, or still don’t. The cognitive process that could have prevented this person from being irrational before is called empathy.