Fine Lines
Click to rock.
Joepistole said:
Well, that's kind of the problem. How do you define "hate speech"? The devil is in the details. Those who support these laws are expressing deeply held beliefs. I don't think that is hate speech. Those feelings are offensive to many, but offensiveness isn't hate speech. It's a fine line, and frankly I'm not sure where that line is crossed. But both sides need to be careful here.
Okay:
(1) The proposition arises that preventing injustice is itself unjust. (
↑)
(2) A counterpoint is offered that liberty does not require injustice. (
↑)
(3) An objection is argued, that preventing injustice is itself unjust. (
↑)
I have to admit it's quite amazing;
years have passed since I last encountered someone actually explicitly arguing what CosmicTraveler just tried. Thus, for the record:
→ Equality is not supremacy.
→ It is not racist to tell the white supremacist to knock it off.
→ It is not sex discrimination to tell the sexual harasser to knock it off.
→ It is not religious discrimination to say Christians can't be the arbiters of other people's rights under the U.S. Constitutiion.
→ Civilized society is not a suicide pact.
Right of conscience does not include empowerment to cause harm to others.
So let's think about sincerely held beliefs.
• Proposition: My equally protected rights as a Christian are violated as long as your equally protected rights as a non-Christian are intact.
↳ We've heard versions of this argument in diverse issues over the years; it is the heart of censorship, a key component of the Gay Fray, and a perpetual lamentation about uppity women. The examples are clear: Book burnings and music censorship in the eighties; gay rights in the nineties and new century, leading up to Kim Davis and continuing into the morality police idea that has self-righteous men following women into restrooms in order to give them permission to urinate or defecate; in the twenty-first century we skipped back to the future and are now having right of conscience arguments over who gets to decide whether a woman is allowed acces to birth control. Question: Is it just and proper that a Christian's sincerely held belief should require you to forfeit your constitutional rights? Are you oppressing Christianity if you do not give over those rights? Are you anti-Christian for insisting that you have the right to free speech, equal protection under the law, and primary authority over your own body? Do you believe you have human rights? Why would you be such an anti-Christian bigot as to say you do? If that last seems amiss, yeah, that's the point; it's supposed to.
There are other versions of this in history, all the way down to the schoolyard. You're of a generation that remembers how some of our fathers actually took us aside to teach us how to fight; is it unfair to estimate that you are familiar with the idea that you deal with a bully by standing up to him? For many of my generation, though, it was a raw deal. Standing up to the bully worked well enough as long as both bully and victim were of the empowered class―that is, if it was a dispute between two white kids because one is short and scrawny, yeah, Mr. Bully, you better be careful that he doesn't haul off and hit you back. If the bullying was racism, religious supremacism, or otherwise a cultural dispute, it was the obligation of the minority to try harder to fit in. And somewhere in between my youth, the rise in school shootings, and the It Gets Better anti-bullying campaign, our society tried to make certain progress but seems to have skipped some steps. It isn't just one generation of school administrators dying out and a new one taking over and doing things their own way; schools have pretty much been cornered. Spectacular massacres are one thing, but the daily grind of potential lawsuits and liability exposure is what we're not talking about. We're trying to perform a transition without discussing what we're doing and why. The reason we're doing it this way is inextricably tied to the sincerely held beliefs of bullies. There is a bunch of stuff people don't want to say about themselves, how they see others, and what is happening in society. Here's an example: In my youth, the prevailing societal discourse still held violence among black communities in a range by which it was at least acceptable to postulate such outcomes indicated fundamental human inferiority; 'twixt then and now we learned a few things about how human beings work, both in and of themselves and within community dynamics. You've witnessed the transformation to discussing economic and social justice; the chaos and damage we focus on in some minority communities is inextricably tied to human behavior under circumstances describing poverty, oppression, and alienation. The discussion always stalls at the sins of the empowerment class; this becomes a rhetorical battle line. And as Justice creeps into the gaps with e'er more nuanced comprehension of people and society, the fundamental argument against such change always comes down to the difference between black and white, or male and female, or Christian and everybody else.
In the late nineties through the
Lawrence decision in 2003, there was a curious class of middle-bloc voters and voices in the Gay Fray. These were neighbors who ostensibly conceded gay rights, but prescribed that society needed to "slow down" because the transformation was "happening too fast" and that "made people uncomfortable". In other words:
Sure, equal rights, but that scares supremacists, so we need you to wait until they're comfortable.
The underlying principle will assert itself again and again; we'll hear it in police and criminal sentencing reform, and other human rights considerations such as we've encountered about women, homosexuals, and the transgendered.
The thing about deeply or sincerely held beliefs is that such principles cannot in function require others to forfeit rights. It's like the bit about birth control:
Don't like oral contraception? Don't use it. Or marriage equality:
Don't like gay marriage? Don't marry a gay partner.
It seems easy enough: I will never be a Christian, but in these United States in particular and generally throughout the human endeavor, it is exactly
not my place to tell anyone else they can't be. Reverse that formulation, and it ought to be enough, except it apparently isn't. And maybe it seems particularly obscure to recall the book burnings and music wars, but those are the same arguments we hear deployed today:
Your rights end where my comfort chooses to wander.
This is the underlying driver, and yet says nothing about, as it happens,
Wellwisher's argument↑, but, really, we could use a couple other names from around here, and there are plenty in the larger public discourse, too. What's interesting is that he's not necessarily wrong:
The entire transgender issue is a social experiment to see if it is possible to suppress intelligence in favor of morons. This test will continue to escalate to see just how far one can lead morons down the rabbit hole. This will also show just how far the morons will go, to force even smart common sense people down the hole.
The thing is that the point is actually just an excuse to call people morons. But if we look at the extraordinary legal doctrine asserted in traditionalist objections to the human rights of the trangendered, our hatemongering neighbor isn't entirely wrong. Then again, that's the problem with scratching the itch to call people morons; I have my own opinions about Kim Davis and Mat Staver, but I would still like to think some of this is just bound up in an identity crisis among Christians as they undergo a transformation from superior under law to merely equal. That is, I would rather most of this moronic craziness be neurotically symptomatic than conscious and calculated supremacist hatred, or simple genuine stupidity. Either way, though, it's still dangerous behavior that really does look like
any excuse to whip it out, or,
any excuse to get a peek, or even,
any excuse to exercise my right of conscience to compel a woman to ask me permission to urinate and defecate.
It's one thing if someone is actually making an argument, but we all know already that this poster pretty much exists as a user ID in order to say outrageous and inflammatory things. The equivocation our neighbor proposes―
"Doesn't that make you about the same because you now want to control what others think and want to not allow them to speak"―ignores basic function, and that doesn't even begin to account for the projected exaggeration of "what others think".
But the functional result is that you're throwing in with one's right to go out of his way to harm others with deliberately belligerent and inflammatory behavior. I don't see any fine-line consideration here, nor "both sides".
The old bigotries are over. This is the new reality. Asking people to wait for justice simply because a bigot is uncomfortable with the prospect is officially
passé.
If their distress is that a sincerely held belief requiring harm unto others no longer finds credibility in the discourse, that is their own damn problem and should not need to be anyone else's.
