Picture this. Students in schools paid for with tax dollars are ordered to stand as a sign of respect for the federal government. If they sit or kneel, they face punishment. Sometimes, teachers respond to a student who refuses to stand by haranguing her until the student reacts angrily, at which point she is arrested. This might sound like something out of China, North Korea or Russia, but it describes some American public schools and universities. For some students in America’s public education system, standing for the Pledge of Allegiance or National Anthem is not an option. As the Hill explains, “two states, Florida and Texas, have seen their pledge statutes tested in court, since they require permission from a parent or guardian for a student to decline to take part in the pledge.” Interestingly, they do not require permission to stand for the pledge.
In 2017–18, Texas was embroiled in a lawsuit, after Houston public school student India Landry remained seated during the pledge and was briefly expelled. The Texas state government jumped in to defend the law. According to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, “requiring the pledge to be recited at the start of every school day has the laudable result of fostering respect for our flag and a patriotic love of our country.” Free speech is apparently not a priority for the Texas Attorney General. The support of the state government for this kind of censorship shows that this is a systemic problem, not simply a matter of a few bad individual teachers or principals. Things in Florida look little better. About a decade ago, the US Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Florida’s law on the grounds that “We conclude that the state’s interest in recognizing and protecting the rights of parents on some educational issues is sufficient to justify the restriction of some students’ freedom of speech.” Florida’s interest in “protecting the rights of parents” only applies to speech the state government dislikes, since there is no similar requirement to get parental permission before standing for the pledge. It is not the proper role of government to assist (or stand in for) parents in arbitrarily censoring children’s free expression.
Earlier this year, a black sixth grader in a Lakeland, Florida public school refused to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance due to his frustration with the treatment of non-white Americans. According to her own affidavit, the child’s teacher berated him, suggesting he “go back” to where he came from if he disliked the way things were in America. When he refused to knuckle under in response to this racist, authoritarian behavior, she reported him, and the administrative dean and a police officer entered the classroom to confront the student. Understandably angry at the violation of his free speech rights, the student yelled at the officials, refused to leave the room, and was arrested and charged. The local police claimed that, “This arrest was based on the student’s choice to disrupt the classroom, make threats and resist the officer’s efforts to leave the classroom.” This misses the point. If the teacher had not felt entitled to bully her student for not following her vision of patriotism or if school officials had told her she was out of line, the class would not have been disrupted, and things would never have escalated. Both the teacher and the cop ought to find jobs that do not involve working for the government or having authority over children.
In all too many cases, public educational institutions are equally intolerant when students do not stand for the national anthem. In Louisiana, Bossier Parish’s superintendent of schools, Scott Smith, warned student athletes in 2017 that kneeling or sitting during the anthem would have disciplinary consequences. According to Smith, “It is a choice for students to participate in extracurricular activities, not a right, and we at Bossier schools feel strongly that our teams and organizations should stand in unity to honor our nation’s military and veterans.” In Shreveport, principal Waylon Bates of Parkway High School warned that athletes who failed to stand for the national anthem could be removed from their teams. After a Native-American football player from California’s San Pasqual High School kneeled during the national anthem at a game, he was subjected to racial slurs, and a cheerleader for his team was sprayed with a water bottle. The San Pasqual Valley Unified School District responded by upholding this heckler’s veto and requiring coaches and students to stand with their hats and helmets off during the National Anthem. Thankfully, a federal court overruled the policy. In Collier County, Florida, in 2016 public schools attempted to extend the parental permission rule to students who kneel during the anthem.
The pledge and the anthem are homilies to the state. Both refer to the official flag. The pledge refers to “the republic”—our system of government—and to the “liberty and justice” that government supposedly recognizes. The anthem refers to America as “the land of the free”—ironically, since slavery enjoyed government support at the time it was written. Francis Scott Key, its author, was a state prosecutor who targeted abolitionists and slaves and attempted to censor radical antislavery literature.
The danger to free speech posed by the policies detailed above is clear. Government schools are forcing students to take part in a political ritual. Those who believe that such policies are necessary to prevent students from being disruptive ought to ponder precisely how sitting or kneeling quietly is disruptive. It is the people incapable of reacting in a calm, reasonable manner who are being disruptive. The claim that forcing people to stand is not a free speech violation, because they are not actually forced to recite any words is unpersuasive. If only spoken and written words are protected under freedom of speech and expression, the government would have the right to ban people from wearing religious symbols, making religious or patriotic art, displaying the American flag or reciting the pledge and anthem themselves.
These policies seem to violate the Supreme Court’s 1943 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette ruling that students cannot be forced to recite the pledge or salute the flag. However, there are two reasons why these policies have been able to stand. First, the court never specifically addresses whether students can be forced to stand. It is possible that the court felt that this was implicit in the judgment. It is also possible that they considered it beyond the scope of the case at hand. Second, the Barnette case dealt with Jehovah’s Witnesses, who felt that they had been forced to violate their religious teachings. By requiring parental permission for students not to stand for the pledge or anthem, school officials may feel that they have gotten around Barnette. However, compelling children to participate in patriotic and/or pro-government rituals is a clear violation of the spirit of Barnette. Even the current conservative Supreme Court might rule against this kind of forced patriotism if a case such as India Landry’s ever makes it onto their docket. In the meantime, however, these policies are in place. And, despite the laudable resistance offered by some students and parents and by groups such as the ACLU, they are neglected by much of the public in favor of cases involving censorship of conservative or religious expression. Religious and conservative Americans should have their free speech rights upheld. But ignoring censorship that does not fit a particular narrative betrays a lack of concern for the principle of free speech.
In 2017, the University of Helsinki noted the continuity between the hyper-patriotic indoctrination of children by the Soviet Union and the current emphasis on “civic education, grounded in strong patriotism” under Putin. In Russia, encouraging children to think for themselves is less important than promoting loyalty to the state. Russia was essentially a totalitarian state under both the tsars and the communists and remains one to the present day. For now, the US has far greater freedom of speech. But we must consider the parallels between some of our attempts to enforce blind patriotism through coercion and those of much more repressive countries.
74 comments
We can agree to disagree, but I see a fundamental disdain in your opinion of French that I do not see in French’s opinion on gays.
I don’t advocate that French be denied civil marriage based on his support for restricting civil marriage rights of LGBT people. That’s the difference between his views and mine.
“I realize you don’t believe marriage should be a government institution, but what I am asking is whether you believe that in a world where it is a government institution, the “civil marriage for heterosexual couples, civil unions for gay couples” system is fair/libertarian.”
I think the arrangement you describe is a mistake. The government can recognize unions for the extension of benefits but should not be in the business of deciding what is and is not a marriage. I think I am clear here. If you’re asking what I think is worse, the government recognizing heterosexual unions as marriages but not homosexual unions, or the government recognizing both heterosexual and homosexual unions as marriages, I’d say the bigger mistake is probably recognizing one as a marriage and not the other. This doesn’t mean it’s not a mistake, just that’s it’s the lesser mistake of those two specific options. The optimal solution is to get out of the legislation of values, except for the most fundamental values, entirely. On Obergefell, my position is that I want the courts to rule in favor of the law as written, and not act as a super legislature. Other than that, I don’t know enough about the law, or the case, to say if the decision was correct. This is outside of my scope of knowledge, so I try not to take a position when I am ignorant of the basic necessary information.
On the statement that French signed, this is exactly the thought process I am referring to when I say that generally speaking, Christians are more tolerant than progressive activist types. The statement is almost entirely positive and in the vain of “love the sinner, hate the sin”. Articles 6 and 8 are particularly exemplary of this fact:
Article 6:
WE AFFIRM that those born with a physical disorder of sex development are created in the image of God and have dignity and worth equal to all other image-bearers. They are acknowledged by our Lord Jesus in his words about “eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb.” With all others they are welcome as faithful followers of Jesus Christ and should embrace their biological sex insofar as it may be known.
WE DENY that ambiguities related to a person’s biological sex render one incapable of living a fruitful life in joyful obedience to Christ.
Article 8:
WE AFFIRM that people who experience sexual attraction for the same sex may live a rich and fruitful life pleasing to God through faith in Jesus Christ, as they, like all Christians, walk in purity of life.
WE DENY that sexual attraction for the same sex is part of the natural goodness of God’s original creation, or that it puts a person outside the hope of the gospel
On the only article that is contentious French writes:
“In other places, their career opportunities are limited and their civil liberties are at risk. As a result, a number of Christians have retreated to a fallback position: They claim that they’ll comply with Christian orthodoxy in their own lives, but they won’t “judge” anyone who chooses to live differently. In perhaps its most contentious article, the Nashville Statement deals directly with this mentality, declaring:
WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.
WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.
Again, this is basic Christianity. Moreover, it’s a moral statement. It declares no position on matters of constitutional law, civil rights, or civil liberties. It does not in any way urge any individual or the government to mistreat any LGBTQ person. To the contrary, it repeatedly declares God’s love and God’s saving grace.
The backlash was of course immediate, with multiple liberal Evangelicals deriding the statement as cruel or mean. In their theology, God’s word is subject to an overriding cultural and political test. One can reject even His clearest commands if those commands are “mean” or “intolerant.” And what’s “mean” or “intolerant” is — oddly enough — defined almost entirely by secular social revolutionaries.”
I’m not an expert on the bible, but as far as I’m aware the proposition that homosexuality is a sin is explicit and not up for debate based on the word of the text. In French’s words it’s, “basic Christianity”. And even though he recognizes homosexuality as a sin, it does not mean he holds any ill-will, malice, or hatred for those that commit such sinful acts. I’m an atheist (among many other sinful things), which I assume is an even bigger sin in the bible, and I have no reason to believe someone like Shapiro or French hate me. In fact, by their own words, I know they see me as equal in almost every respect, except perhaps in what they believe are the eyes of god. The latter doesn’t matter to me a bit, it’s the former that is important. As Shapiro said, “I think homosexual activity is a sin…You don’t have to care. Get over it”. Here’s a response from a gay atheist who understands and respects Shapiro’s position. https://mobile.twitter.com/vasprintf/status/804021189844860929
I have family that is Evangelical, and I know they love me the same regardless of my Atheism or if I were gay. I see love, respect, tolerance, and understanding in their words, in addition to a rigorous adherence to a set of values that they are not willing to compromise based on the whims of the political/social atmosphere (which, in its own right, is respectable). This is not true of all Christians though, see the West Boro Baptist church for an example. They are a genuinely hateful and intolerant group, and the activist types, like the ones recently protesting outside the Toronto chic-fil-a, treat the French evangelical types, as moral monsters essentially equivalent to the West Boro types. Ironically, the activists seem to have many more similarities to the West Boro types than they do the French types. I know almost for certain they would hate me and protest me if I were invited to give a talk on campus, and I don’t even think homosexuality is a sin.
Can you show me the thought leaders on the left that are preaching similar tolerance towards “basic Christians” along the lines of “love the sinner, hate the sin”? I’m not talking about someone who reneges on their core values to appease conservative Christians who cry intolerance like the LGBT activists want Christians to renege on their core values to appease them. I would like the see the left leaning intellectual types who firmly hold that the conservative Christians are wrong about their belief’s but fundamentally respect them and understand they are not coming from a position of hate. Outside the IDW, I don’t think there are any. I think when Biden backtracked on calling Pence a “decent person” he summed up the left’s position on “basic Christianity”. You cannot believe in the word of the bible as written and be a “decent person”. This includes my family and as well as millions of other genuinely good people.
Now I would like a straight answer from you, do you think the David French types, who believe in “basic Christianity” are fundamentally good people or are fundamentally bad people? Do you think they have equal “dignity and worth” to you and are generally decent people? My answer is very much a yes to the French types, and a no to the West Boro types.
I disagree with most what you said, but I will answer two points: I don’t consider opposition to homosexuality and gay marriage a “basic Christianity” belief, as many Christians disagree with each other strongly on it. That said, I don’t know if people like French are fundamentally bad people. I find many of their statements and actions reprehensible, but people are extremely complex, and you often can’t really delineate people into neat “good” or “bad” categories. As for leftist “thought leaders,” I could give you lots of examples of many of them being tolerant toward conservative Christians. But your standard is so high in that area, especially compared to what you think constitutes “tolerance” toward LGBT people that you probably won’t agree with any of examples. So there isn’t much point. It is probably best to agree to disagree.
As regards equal dignity and worth, I think everyone has equal inherent dignity and worth. Some people waste their potential, though.
Speaking from the perspective of one who conducted the same protest in 1974, I applaud the state for inculcating the foundation of loyalty to one’s fellow citizens, and I also applaud the student for conducting his protest. I sincerely hope that the protester learned the very important lesson of remaining outwardly calm in the face of authority’s provocations, which is essential to the maintenance of focusing attention on the precise activity defining a protest of that nature.
Without the rule to pledge, the protest becomes meaningless as rejection of arbitrary authority.
Curbing the excesses of the state and the polity requires constant frictions, else devolution into authoritarianism ensues.
While I applaud you for protesting in 1974, I would say that one of the best ways to prevent devolution into authoritarianism is to not impose authoritarian rules and laws such as forcing children to stand for the Pledge. One of the best ways of curbing the power of the State is to not give the State the power do things such as forcing children to stand for the Pledge. For analogy, while it was immensely admirable that people such as MLK bravely resisted Jim Crow, it would have been far better if there had been no system of Jim Crow to begin with. So I do not applaud the State for trying to quash dissent. If the student in the Florida case actually threatened anyone, then I disagree with them making a threat, though they were obviously provoked, did not instigate the confrontation, and are not the party primarily to blame for things escalating. But as far as remaining calm, nobody has an ethical obligation to remain calm or cheerful when they are being bullied by someone else. The people most in need of lessons here are the authority figures who abused their power.
Thank you for your reply. The reason for my protest was enforced speech, because the imposition was an injunction to utter the pledge. What was subsequently proposed to me was a compromise wherein I, and the other participant who, unbeknownst to me, was sitting in the back row mirroring my own refusal to stand, were asked to stand for the pledge, but would not be required to utter. We both thought the compromise fair and reasonable, as it allowed the other students to express themselves without disruption, and thereafter complied. I still think it was reasonable, in that it allowed all present to honor their individual consciences.
Forty-six years later, I have come to understand that allegiance to our Republic is allegiance to our fellow citizens, and I support the indoctrination of children in the practice of fundamental loyalty. It seems that our schools have adopted a practice of indoctrinating empathy without inculcating loyalty, which deprives students of any practical methodology other than empty signalling. Schools indoctrinate, and the only question is, in what?
The only sense in which I can see your “Jim Crow” example being analogous is within an anti-nationalist framework, otherwise I don’t see an equivalence.
If you interpreted my hope that the protester learned the important lesson of remaining outwardly calm, as a moral imperative, allow me to clarify that I in no way consider it a matter of morality. It’s a matter of pragmatism. The first rule of effective activism is to refuse escalation in engagement with provocateurs. Assuming any modicum of accuracy in the media quotations of the unrecorded dialog between teacher and protester, the teacher stated that the protester was free to go to a country where they felt welcome, as would the teacher if she felt that this, her adopted country, no longer valued her presence. That is a substantially different message than “go back where you came from.” Remaining calm places the onus for escalation entirely on the side of authority, and bears no relationship whatsoever to remaining cheerful.
I am very familiar with the tired old saw of “if you don’t like it, you can leave,” a canard that insists that any acknowledgement of room for improvement is tantamount to treason, and I find it as intellectually and morally bankrupt as the contemporary “no platforming” and “cancel culture” movements, but I remain unconvinced that this is what the teacher said or meant.
If the reports of the student saying that “the flag is racist” are in any way accurate, that student has my sympathy for having been taught to abjure common sense. Little of the historically contextual bigoted minutiae surrounding the negotiations at the beginning of this country can be judged by the standards of today, except insofar as they created a framework that eventually became an environment within which you and I are able to have this conversation. Had we remained part of the British Empire, I would be encouraged to remain silent under threat of incarceration for “hate speech.”
In my time, it was the My Lai massacre and the assassination of Allende, among other sins. Today it is other issues that are often as misguided as that of thinking of the Viet Cong as liberators and Allende some kind of saint. The truth is messier than that, and the everyday mendacity of human nature makes it necessary to understand that certain frictions are integral to the process of maintaining freedom from tyranny.
Corrupt authoritarianism is common, understandable and deplorable. Calm and steadfast opposition to it is essential. Submission to authority, when consensual, is often necessary to common undertaking and reasoned resistance to it is also essential in obviation of corruption. I hope that the protester learns that our Republic is his birthright, as well as it is that of all other citizens. I can reasonably assure him that it is his loyalty and participation that will continue the good work of obtaining liberty and justice for all, rather than his objection to signalling that loyalty to any more than his own narrow self-interest. Throwing a tantrum, in support of an imagined universal antipathy toward his complexion, does not constitute rational polemic. There are racists in America, but that doesn’t make the Republic racist.
The compromise in that situation should have been to allow the students who wanted to stand and/or recite the Pledge to stand and/or recite it and allow those who didn’t want to stand or speak to refrain from doing so. What happened at your school was a case of government officials violating your rights to symbolic speech in order to promote reverence for the State. There is nothing disruptive about quietly sitting or kneeling. The only people being disruptive were and are the people who harangue students for quietly sitting or kneeling. If your consciences compelled you to not recite the Pledge but allowed you to stand, then your consciences were not violated. If your consciences compelled you to not stand and to not recite the Pledge, then your consciences were very much violated. In any case, each individual child and adult ought to be able to determine whether their conscience allows them to stand and then to stand, sit, kneel, or leave the room as their conscience dictates.
Loyalty to the Republic means loyalty to the government, not just loyalty to fellow citizens. In fact, when the government violates individual citizens’ rights, as it always has and continues to do now, loyalty to the republic can mean disloyalty to fellow citizens. Even with schools’ attempts to build empathy, which you seem to oppose, I am not aware of schools generally requiring students to stand during a pledge about empathy. If that is happening or happens later, I will oppose requiring students to stand, on free speech grounds. I prefer political indoctrination in public school to be kept to a minimum if it exists at all, and I certainly do not support any kind of compelled standing during oaths/pledges/homilies, etc. But based on your view, there would be no free speech violations if public schools required students to stand during a pledge in support of feminism, LGBT rights, and racial equality. To be clear, I would not support forced standing in that case either. But your own logic, there would be no free speech violation, and nobody’s freedom of conscience would be violated.
My point with the Jim Crow analogy is simple. You indicated your belief that government overreaches and violations of people’s rights are a good way of promoting dissent and keeping the government from becoming tyrannical. I pointed out that the logical extension of this is that Jim Crow was good, because it brought us the Civil Rights Movement. And I gave my position that it would be most conducive to civil liberties not to give the government oppressive powers in the first place.
From a pragmatic standpoint, you may well be correct that remaining calm is the best strategy. But that does not vindicate your defense of the teacher. The teacher said that if the child did not like the way he was being treated in this country, he should leave instead of fighting for better treatment. Her exact words were, by her own account, “go back”–presumably to whatever country he or his ancestors (I’m not at all sure he was even from another country) came from. I really don’t see any difference between what she said and “go back where you came from.” Additionally, “go back” is a very racist, xenophobic thing to say, and it is not good advice. If everyone who disliked their country of residence due to how they were treated left, there would be significantly less progress on freedom, because we would be deprived of a lot of great reformers. Furthermore, people should not have to leave a country because they are being treated badly. They have a right to expect fair treatment in their country of residence and/or origin. Finally, if, in fact, the student was born here, like many other black people who have been subjected to similar admonitions were, then the teacher was being even more racist by acting as though he was a foreigner due to his skin color. The funny thing here is that the way that this child was treated very much parallels all the criticisms people make of “no platforming” and “cancel culture,” except that he was treated this way by the government as opposed to private institutions. (“Cancel culture” usually seems to refer to private institutions and consumers, “no platforming” can refer to public institutions but also to private ones.)
First of all, whether or not the flag is racist is not relevant to the free speech issue at hand. Part of being an America is, supposedly, being able to decide for yourself how you feel about the country, the government, the Constitution, and the flag. Nevertheless, acting as though the student’s view is completely invalid also requires us to abjure common sense. While I don’t consider the American flag racist like the Confederate Flag, I don’t consider it anti-racist either. Essentially, the flag is race-neutral. Slavery had federal protection under that flag. The government represented by our flag promoted slavery for over 70 years, sanctioned Jim Crow laws for another hundred, and has promoted a slew of other civil liberties violations. I do not consider a constitutional clause, which federally protected slavery and sent multitudes of runaway slaves back to bondage, to be “minutiae.” I do not know whether or not the cause of freedom was better served by having America win or lose the Revolutionary War, because I don’t know what Great Britain would even look like now if America hadn’t become independent. I do know that Britain outlawed slavery a great deal earlier than America–albeit in a very morally repellant way–has been more successful than the U.S. over the last twenty years in recognizing the civil liberties of LGBT people, does not have the death penalty, and never banned interracial marriage on the mainland. I also know the British government has done a lot of awful things, as has the U.S. government. Both countries could do much better on free speech But whether or not we like the flag, the founding, the government, etc. does not change the fact that a country which claims believe in freedom cannot compel patriotism, whether through compulsory recitation or compulsory standing, from anyone.
The submission to authority that was expected from the student was in no way consensual. Authorities attempted to force him to stand in reverence to the State, because him sitting or kneeling quietly wasn’t innocuous enough for them. There is a long history of people who are being treated unjustly, as well as their allies, protesting injustice by making their national loyalty contingent on fair treatment. For example, in my undergrad thesis, I brought up the fact that some radical civil rights activists in the late 1940s, like A. Philip Randolph, urged black conscripts to refuse to fight in a segregated military for a racist country. As I stated in my thesis, “It is hard to deny that this concern, brought on by activists like Randolph, helped push Truman toward integrating the military. In essence, by refusing to be unswervingly loyal to a country that denigrated them, blacks were able to leverage patriotism in exchange for increased civil rights.” I also do not think this student was acting just in his self interest. I think that he was also standing up against what he correctly views as the unfair treatment of other nonwhite Americans by the government and society. But whether you think he was self-interested and whether you think his protest was effective or not have no bearing on whether or not he deserves free speech. I have literally defended the right of white supremacists to march in support of a white ethno-State. I find everything that they stand for reprehensible and dangerous, but I also believe in the principle of free speech, whether I agree with how people use it or not. If I can defend the legal free speech rights of a bunch of vile Neo-Nazis to hold hate rallies, you can defend the legal right of kids to not stand for an oath they don’t believe in without being harassed by authority figures.
At times, I have wondered if we were discussing the same incident, that of Ana Alavarez and the son of Dhakira Talbot, because there was no link to the incident provided in the article, and the quotational brevity did not indicate any context accommodating the interchange between pupil and teacher beyond an ad reductio pejoration. Considering the fundamental premises upon which we disagree, however, the precise exchange between student and teacher seems peripheral to the argument, which appears to be that the rights of minor children must be accorded full parity with adults.
That premise informed the locus of my protest, which was that my rights under the thirteenth amendment were violated by my status as a dependent minor ward of the court, and my involuntary incarceration in juvenile detention centers, despite my having broken no law applicable to anyone having reached their majority, represented the outcome of trial in absentia, without any right to a jury of my peers, for the crime of having no parents that were willing to assume responsibility for my welfare at a time when I was already fit for, and trained in, occupations that allowed me to earn sufficient income to support my own emancipation. Furthermore, the simple fact of compulsory education meant that the state, at the point of a gun, did restrict my rights of association (not named, but derived from first amendment principles) in an unlawful manner.
Obviously, my attitude has been modified by personal reflection assisted by the passage of time. Your premises are stipulated clearly enough by use of modifiers such as “correctly,” and you certainly defend your position with great acuity, as evidenced by terms such as “reverence,” rather than the less affecting “respect.”
However much my adult outlook may lead me to sympathize with the grievances of an adolescent, watching myself and many others impose unnecessary suffering on ourselves by failing to impose self discipline in the face of societal and commercial adversity has convinced me to acknowledge that minor children do not enjoy untrammeled rights under the constitution; nor will they ever be, as long as we have any sort of compulsory education instantiated anywhere within the rule of law. What is a violation when imposed on an adult may be no more than is expected of a minor.
A Cuban emigre entered into an interrogatory dialogue with a recalcitrant student, explaining her reasoning, and was subsequently quoted out of context in one instance, and damned by a promulgator of hardly disinterested hearsay by the student’s mother, but this is not relevant to the underlying principle (as we seem to agree,) making me wonder what purpose, aside from rhetorical, is served by mention of any portion of the verbal interchange in the above article.
However much it may seem that I consider indoctrination in empathy bad, as opposed to suboptimal when unaccompanied by a concurrent and similar inculcation of principles of loyalty, any separation from the contextual meaning of my statement is ill-considered.
Given the disparity of premise, I do not accept that inculcation of loyalty, within the ranks of juveniles, to one’s fellow citizens is in any way comparable to the heinous instantiation of racial separatism within American law, and I consider the repeal of such separatist laws to be further evidence that American ideals provide a remarkably efficacious self-corrective paradigm. In keeping with my own belief in America as being one of the most catholic countries ever extant within recorded history, I support freedom of thought and freedom from forced speech, having defended those principles in word and in deed.
The child’s first amendment privileges were ultimately upheld, possibly in spite of his refusal to assert them specifically when it could arguably be considered more attractive to take advantage of a substitute teacher’s ignorance of school policy and escalate the disruption beyond any necessity. Having attended inner-city schools, I am no stranger to a temptation toward “playing” substitute teachers. Until minor children are accorded every single right under law that is guaranteed to adult citizens, I will continue to consider the constitutional rights of citizens to be privileges when applied to children, with the exception of rights and freedoms specifically accorded to minors, such as the right to be free from physical violence and molestation.
You quite rightly point out that loyalty to the state may present a moral dichotomy within those for whom it represents a preeminent position within their hierarchy of loyalties, and I would add that such cognitive dissonance has led to violently oppressive outcomes. This is a matter of morality, which strengthens my belief that loyalty and empathy must develop concurrently.
We will simply disagree, you and I, and I thank you for taking the time to clarify your positions.
“the promulgation” [sic]
I am referring to the Alvarez-Talbot incident. And yes, we can agree to disagree. You and I have a far different view on Alvarez’s behavior, who is primarily to blame in the incident, and what level of free speech public schools students should have.
It seems to me that if we can take examples from elementary schools and make the protests of minor children into something that should inform adults, then we are putting ourselves and our laws in the strange position of invalidating every cultural tradition in the history of law – which reasonably treats children differently than adults. I’m reading this story and it has the feeling of someone telling of a miraculous revelation from an elderly woman on her deathbed – some great portent of universal significance.
There’s a reason that children should be seen and not heard – which is rather how the law sees them. It’s because they don’t fully understand what’s going on. So most of the time it is appropriate for them to simply do what they are told and get over themselves, especially in school. Elementary school is not a sandbox for expressionism, it is about basic education and the basic socialization of children. Nobody expect that children are subject to the full weight of patriotic duty. They’re not Hitler Youth being indoctrinated to serve the Fatherland.
It seems to me that if this story ended with the child being charged as an adult and found guilty of disturbing the peace, then the premise of the child’s majority and standing to disrupt a classroom based upon their right to free speech and free expression might have all the weight the argument seeks to establish. And what is an arrest without charge other than a de-escalation (something teachers used to have the authority to do in their own classrooms). But alas this molehill is nothing more with a cute racial headfake thrown in for style.
It seems to me that if we take your position, then we are saying that children have no free speech rights. While children have limits on their autonomy, they ought not to be completely stripped of all civil liberties. Certainly, there are cases in which a child has their civil liberties restricted, but there needs to be a compelling interest in protecting children’s safety and well being. The “compelling interest” in the case of the Pledge of Allegiance is “the child is quietly, unobtrusively expressing a political view the school doesn’t like.” Furthermore, in cases when children have their right to express political views restricted, the restriction must come primarily from the parents, not the government. Public schools are an arm of the State. When public schools arbitrarily censor students, it amounts to government censorship. There is nothing about basic education and socialization that requires students to participate in a patriotic ritual that they don’t believe in. A person can be perfectly educated and perfectly capable of interacting civilly with others without standing for an oath of allegiance to the government. And while being a child may increase the odds that you “don’t fully understand what’s going on,” it doesn’t automatically mean that you have less understanding than an adult. Some kids are more knowledgable and engaged about politics than some adults. In the Florida case, I would have less faith in the teacher to make good policy decisions than the student. The teacher seems less mature, for one thing.
Furthermore, based on your logic, government schools have a right to force students to stand for pledges of allegiances to LGBT rights, Planned Parenthood, or the Democratic Party. Would you agree that this would not be a free speech violation either? Of course, by your logic, we also need to get rid of the legal precedent that allows kids to pray (as opposed to teachers initiating prayer) in public schools. Are you fine with that too?
Finally, there are a few things you said about the case that I must correct here. The child was not being disruptive until he was bullied. Originally, he was quietly not standing. The first person who acted disruptively was the teacher who ground class to a halt and detracted from everyone’s education to try to bully him. Secondly, you say he was arrested “without charge.” But he did initially face misdemeanor charges, though they may have been dropped after the school and police realized the backlash they could face. Finally, nothing the teacher, administration, or police did here was “a de-escalation.” They actively escalated the situation by demanding that the student violate his conscience, suggesting he leave the country, etc. De-escalation would have been the teacher ignoring the student not standing or the police/administration telling her to leave him alone.
I wasn’t going to make the Hitler analogy, but since you brought it up, there are definite parallels between the Nazis’ attempts to force indoctrination on youth and the attempts of some of our public schools to force patriotism on children. In both cases, the government usurps a parental role and violates the freedom of thought for some of society’s most vulnerable members. In both cases, dissent gets punished, and people are encouraged not to think for themselves. Obviously, the U.S. is worlds above Nazi Germany in terms of civil liberties, but in a way that’s part of the point: when we see practices and policies in America that violate people’s civil liberties, we need to be vigilant in correcting course so that we don’t start losing more and more freedoms and actually end up like Germany did in that era.
There’s a final irony here: children who kneel or sit quietly during the Anthem ARE being “seen and not heard,” as you think children should be. They are just aren’t being “seen and not heard” in the way you want.
A rather old article on the socialist view of free speech. It is significant that the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Britain’s oldest socialist party formed in 1904, is one of the very organisations that will openly debate with any and every strand of political opinion including even fascists, on the grounds that suppressing free speech implies an obnoxious and contemptuous attitude towards workers and their capacity to grasp, or see through, an argument. That in turn implies a belief in the principle of vanguardism or political leadership which the SPGB vigorously oppose as fundamentally undemocratic in spirit and practice https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1986/1980s/no-983-july-1986/socialists-and-free-speech/
Overall, I think this was a pretty good article. I do have one minor quibble: you refer to laws forcing students to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance and National Anthem as “censorship”. However, it seems to me that these laws are closer to compelled speech than censorship, which arguably makes them even worse.
I think free speech is over. That’s so 1960s. All you do now is call political opposition hate speech and it’s over. Or, social media take-downs. No due process. No, the new thing is freedom of religion. If a muslim is offended by images of Mohammed, the images go. Also, people are not exactly thrilled about being shot or beheaded. The baker in Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. Colorado Human Rights Commission won on freedom of religion.
What we are beginning to understand is that progressivism is a religion.
Surely, you aren’t blaming the left for what you see as the death of free speech, are you? Because censorship by social conservatives long predates censorship by leftists.
Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else’s academic freedom. (This is “political correctness.”) The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control.
— Ted Kazinsky, “The Unabomber Manifesto”
First of all, as brutal as the Soviet Union was, the treatment of ethnic minorities was not less brutal under the tsar. Tsar Nicholas, the last man to rule Russia before the Revolution, believed in pogroms against Jewish people, for example. And the Communist government that ended up running the Soviet Union was fiscally left-wing but socially right-wing. Homosexuality was re-banned after being briefly legalized, the death penalty was routinely used, etc. People who were left-wing socially and fiscally–Democratic Socialists, Anarchists, anti-authoritarian Marxists, etc.–faced censorship also. Additionally, the point here is not that the left is perfect on free speech–it very much is not. The point is that it’s unreasonable to put the primary blame on the left for censorship when censorship by social conservatives has been going on for far longer and helped cause left-wing censorship. Finally, are you really quoting a manifesto from a terrorist who murdered innocent people to make your point here?
I can use your own logic against you. If the pledge was about allegiance to the federal government and not the values the country was built upon, then the lyrics would go “I pledge allegiance to the federal government”, and not “to the flag”. The founding fathers wanted the federal government as small as possible as they viewed government as essentially an arm of tyranny. They wanted to maximize the freedom of the states and ultimately the individual (obviously they did not live up to the these values for all, but that is besides the point). The pledge is not to a body of government but to something that transcends government.
Regardless, I always breathe a small sigh of relief when I see people on the left showing admiration for libertarian principals such as free speech. But I am curious if you apply your position neutrally. Would you stand for a students right to wear a MAGA hat or a “Build the wall” T-shirt?
I am far more curious how you square your commitment to free speech with your position that religious bakers should be forced to bake wedding cakes for same sex couples, as you detailed to me in our last exchange. I personally value free speech, and liberty more generally, because I find these ideals to be moral imperatives. People should be free to express their creed and society should respect their personal autonomy so long as they do not violate the principal of non-aggression. If you agree that personal expression and autonomy ought to be valued, and I presume you do, why do you not respect Jack Phillips’ personal autonomy?
In point of fact, the Constitution gave the federal government a great deal of power, including to actively promote slavery. Nevertheless, the Pledge doesn’t need to say “to the federal government,” because it already says “to the republic,” which is a type of government and refers to the U.S. government in this context. You can’t divorce the federal government from “the republic” or from its own flag. This is a key reason why the Pledge doesn’t tend to be popular with many Anarchists.
I do think students should be allowed to wear a MAGA hat or a “build the wall” t-shirt. It’s still freedom of expression. On multiple occasions, I’ve been debating right-wingers and given some examples of my defending conservatives’ free speech rights against censorship, then asked my opponents for examples of when they’ve defended leftists’ free speech rights, only for them to be unable to name a single one. I’m sure you can name some, but the aforementioned people I’ve asked can’t do it.
Freedom of speech does not apply to the right of businesses to refuse services to people that are offered to other customers. If someone were asked to put an explicitly political message on a cake, that would be a free speech violation. I do not consider it a free speech violation to be expected to render the same service to a same-sex couple–baking a wedding cake–as a baker would to an opposite-sex couple. A wedding cake for a gay couple is not an innately political statement. I would have far more respect for conservatives who claim to make a distinction between a business refusing service to gay people entirely and a business refusing wedding-related services to gay couples if it weren’t for the fact that most conservatives have opposed ANY anti-discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation. Given your stated commitment to liberty, I am unclear as to why you seem to consider civil unions an acceptable alternative to gay marriage. You’ve stated that this is different from “separate but equal” laws in the Jim Crow South by virtue of opposition to gay marriage being religiously motivated. But many advocates of segregation and opponents of interracial marriage have and continue to claim religious motivations. A recent case in Mississippi actually illustrates this. Furthermore, I am curious as to what you think about the fact that it is legal under federal law to fire an employee for being gay but not for being Christian and what you think the policy should be for a Muslim baker who refuses to bake cakes for Christian couples or interfaith couples. Finally, I had a couple of other points to make in regard to our exchange over my first blog. You appeared to argue that conservative Christians who opposed gay marriage but supported civil unions were more tolerant than leftists who want to apply anti-discrimination laws to bakeries. Couldn’t it be argued that leftists are actually more tolerant than conservative Christians when it comes to the gay marriage debate, since leftists support full marriage rights for Christian and opposite-sex couples, as opposed to just civil unions? I am, after all, aware of few if any leftists who think Christian couples or heterosexual couples shouldn’t be allowed to get married. Also, you said that Maxine Waters’ comments about heckling members of Trump Administration officials weren’t condemned by Democrats. They were, in fact, condemned by Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and just to name the people I can think of off the top of my head. I think Cory Booker’s response pretty clearly disavowed the comments also, but I could see some conservatives feeling that he hedged, so I am going to be curious and leave him out.
https://freebeacon.com/politics/pelosi-unacceptable-maxine-waters-comments-calling-harassment-trump-officials/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/chuck-schumer-maxine-waters-harassment-trump-officials/index.html
“Freedom of speech does not apply to the right of businesses to refuse services to people that are offered to other customers.”
Why not? If you force someone to serve another faith isn’t that compelling blasphemy? Anyway, it all comes down to power. If you can’t defend your “rights” they are meaningless words on a piece of paper.
No, it isn’t compelling blasphemy. Serving members of a different religion than you is not the same as endorsing their religious views. Allowing people to cite religion to refuse service to customers of different faiths would effectively privilege religious beliefs over secular ones by allowing people to use religion as an excuse to do things that non-religious people aren’t legally allowed to do. If you disagree, then your quarrel isn’t with modern LGBT rights activists, it’s with the Civil Rights Act itself. For over 50 years, it has been illegal in the U.S. for businesses to refuse to serve people of a different religion. LGBT rights activists are treated as unreasonable for asking that LGBT people be extended the same legal protections that Christians have enjoyed for generations.
“If you disagree, then your quarrel isn’t with modern LGBT rights activists, it’s with the Civil Rights Act itself.”
That’s correct. Human Rights creates a victim hierarchy and status virtual spiral that is unnatural and harmful to a healthy society. Something called “rights” is a social construct that requires endless coercion by the state where no one is satisfied. Life is unfair and cruel. Always has been, always will be. Various groups will always fight for power and dominance over their enemies, falsely perceived or real.
Instead of this bizarre “rights” belief system we should revert to privilege, obligation, honor, custom and divine order. Far more natural.
So in your view, some people should arbitrarily be favored by the State based on your personal prejudices. I assume that you won’t have an issue if you end up on the bottom of the hierarchy once momentum shifts against you? Also I see you aren’t even pretending to support small government.
I think people should live with their own kind. Local communities can pass their own laws. Take the Christian conservative who was thrown rather rudely out of a coffee shop in Colorado.
“This morning, I was asked to leave Cultiva Coffee and never come back because of my conservative principles,” Marilyn Synek, a communications specialist at the Nebraska Family Alliance, wrote on Facebook. Synek had a weekly tradition of eating breakfast at Cultiva. Yet on Wednesday, a barista attacked her for her political views, kicking her out of the shop.
https://www.facebook.com/marilynsynek/posts/2648205791966847
She should find another coffee shop. The problem is in a human rights culture parasites are rewarded.
So you’d prefer that local communities be able to use government power to privilege some members over others or just be able to legalize discrimination by private businesses?
Your concepts are distorting my concepts. Discrimination is normal. Everybody discriminates. Like-minded people will congregate without government doing anything at all. Some are going to do better than others. Some people are better looking, more talented, and add rather than subtract. Certainly, if people want to live in historic districts, eat organic food, work out, raise children to revere excellence, they should be left alone to do it. Virtue is its own reward after all.
Others, who are ugly, resentful, eat badly, abuse their bodies, are anti-social, breed without responsibility and demand others take care of them will do so too. However, the state should leave them alone and practice benign neglect. But the state may encourage anyone who wants to help them, say, Bill Gates or churches or NGOs. The state will of course prevent those lacking in virtue from dragging down the virtuous. Obviously, this is a tragic view of human beings while yours is in Pursuit of the Millennium (see Norman Cohn’s book).
You said we should revert to “privilege” and “divine order.” Traditionally, those concepts have been maintained through coercion by the State. Until I pressed you, you made no attempt to disavow that kind of coercion. So you’re saying a local city government should not have the right to pass laws giving some residents more rights than others?
If everybody believed in the same customs, gods and heroes you wouldn’t need the state to enforce order. You’d have sinners, slackers, racists, sexists and what have you shading into the virtuous. Obviously, each government would enforce its concept of divine and therefore civic order. How could it not? Human Rights worshippers would have their customs and laws. Christians theirs. Pagans theirs. Trads over here. Atheist freethinkers over there. There’d be all sorts along a spectrum. It could happen naturally if people were allowed freedom of religion (which really means freedom of association) and exclude anyone who isn’t a believer or even a sex or race. Why not? In other words, in terms of what you call “rights” one size does not fit all.
You say that “each government would enforce its concept of divine and therefore civic order.” That directly contradicts, “If everybody believed in the same customs, gods and heroes you wouldn’t need the state to enforce order.” And the only way to have everyone believe the same things would be for the government to forcibly remove dissidents. You advocate a series of miniature Leviathan States, with government officials wielding totalitarian power at the local level.
I don’t see how. People migrate to whichever city/state attracts them. For example, people are fleeing NY because of high taxes and moving to low tax states. At the same time urban hipster bohemians are moving to NYC and even Washington DC. Mostly because they do not want children and can afford it. Likewise, family friendly smaller cities seem to attract that demographic. Within liberal urban areas such as DC the races segregate with blacks now down to less than 50% of the population compared to over 70% in 1970. Baltimore, a few miles away, has a reverse trend and will probably end up like Detroit. Demographic groups self-segregate. Imagine if this continues for a century or two.
The only totalitarianism going on is when black politicians and their liberal allies forcibly implant blacks into white communities. In Washington, DC, they are moving unwed women with children into white neighborhoods and meeting with extreme resistance where property owners stand to lose a lot. Poorer liberal whites tend to be renters and don’t care so much, although they do act like Eloi being attacked by Morlocks.
But even if some people migrate to a city because it’s completely segregated or homogenous, the only way to keep it like that is to forcibly segregate or expel certain groups. One of the big reasons our cities are so de facto segregated now is largely because the government actively segregated neighborhoods and schools for so many years. And in societies that don’t have government-mandated segregation, there is virtually always some level of people marrying or living next to people of different races. Even in the most de facto segregated cities and towns today, some people marry people of a different race or have neighbors of a different race. Only government coercion makes complete segregation or homogeneity possible.
” One of the big reasons our cities are so de facto segregated now is largely because the government actively segregated neighborhoods and schools for so many years.”
If you’re talking about redlining that wasn’t government, that was banks who know very well blacks don’t pay their bills and therefore have poor credit. Concerning schools, they’re running out of white kids for forced bussing, which only drives whites further away.
I’ve been in and around DC for 50 years (and still own property as a landlord). I’ve never seen race relations as bad as they are now. There is some racial mixing in other places, probably influenced by the adulation of Obama, I suppose, most which is done by lower class white women in my opinion. From my own empirical observation in ultra liberal DC it’s amazing how college-educated whites culturally segregate themselves from blacks. Some of the many ways they do this is with micro-brew bars, restaurants with European names and menus, yoga studios, farmer’s markets and organic foods, dog parks, etc. All these intimidate blacks, even college-educated ones. Liberal whites will never give them up. In fact, they are becoming more culturally segregated, not less. If you know of some other counter example, I love to hear it.
Usually what happens is brainwashed young college-educated white kids move to DC with optimism intact. Eventually, even professional progressives and NGOs, after a year or two, learn their lesson sometimes the hard way. This has been going on for several generations and I have to ask myself if blacks and whites can’t mix in DC where oh where are they going to do it?
Redlining was engaged in by the FHA, a government institution, and was targeted at those who lived in primarily black neighborhoods. You are confusing this with banks factoring in people’s credit scores when giving or withholding loans. As NPR points out, “[Richard] Rothstein’s new book, The Color of Law, examines the local, state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation. He notes that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as ‘redlining.’ At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.” Public housing projects were kept segregated by the government. Diverse neighborhoods were deliberately destroyed with the goal of replacing them with segregated ones. Until the Supreme Court ruled it illegal in Buchanan v. Warley, cities like Baltimore, Louisville, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Richmond legally required that neighborhoods be segregated. The fact that you haven’t heard of any of this doesn’t mean it isn’t historical fact. As for public school segregation, many parts of the country, including Washington, D.C., historically required by law that public schools be segregated. In many places, such as Georgia and Kentucky, even private universities were required to be segregated. Again, the fact that you don’t know this does not make it untrue.
Oops, I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re talking about. Even a propaganda arm of the Democrat party couldn’t entirely spin it away. Although they made a valiant effort. Hate facts, I guess.
“A Freddie Mac study concluding that far more black people have bad credit than white people, even when both have the same incomes, has come under attack in Congress, and some experts have questioned whether it oversimplifies a complex issue.
“The study’s [Freddie Mac] authors defended their conclusions but said they probably should have chosen language other than “bad credit” or “good credit” because they were trying to say whether people had trouble paying their bills.
“The [Freddie Mac] researchers, relying on data from credit reports, designated people as having “bad credit” if they had two bills overdue more than 30 days in the past two years, one bill more than 90 days late, a lien, a judgment or a bankruptcy. Their data showed that a higher percentage of African Americans with incomes of $65,000 to $75,000 had “bad credit” than whites with incomes below $25,000.”
(Washington Post 10/05/99 by D’Vera Cohn)[former link **http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-10/05/089l-100599-idx.html]
Well, again, you’re lumping together two different things. You are conflating businesses denying loans based on credit scores with the history of the government using coercion to keep neighborhoods racially segregated, regardless of how good or bad someone’s credit score is. The former does not negate or disprove the latter. If you think I don’t know what I’m talking about, I would suggest you read the article I cited, the book cited in the article, one of the many journal articles on the topic, or the Buchanan v. Warley Supreme Court decision that is a matter of public record. The fact that banks consider people’s credit scores in deciding whether to give loans does not mean that the government did not actively enforce residential segregation.
So, are you saying if it weren’t for government meddling blacks and whites would all be living together? Sending their kids to the same schools? Doesn’t look like ultra liberal DC to me.
No, I’m saying there would be significantly lower levels of segregation than there are now. And “ultra liberal DC” had government-imposed school segregation until the 1950s. Also, do you now admit you were wrong about the government not enforcing segregation for a long time?
Compelling others to do work they do not want to do is called slavery.
Which means that nobody should be forced to be a baker or forced to bake wedding cakes. But if you do chose to become a baker and bake wedding cakes, you need to serve customers equally regardless of sex, gender, or sexual orientation. The baker has the option of choosing a different line of work or deciding to stop selling wedding cakes. By the logic laid out in your comment, if a business owner receives money for a promised service, forcing them to either perform the service or return the money is a form of slavery. After all, they don’t want to do the work!
“But if you do chose to become a baker and bake wedding cakes, you need to serve customers equally regardless of sex, gender, or sexual orientation.”
Why? Seriously, Why? For every baker who discriminates among potential customers on grounds other than their ability to pay there is an opportunity for another baker who does not so discriminate to go into business. The notion that if economically irrelevant discrimination is allowed then there will be people who go hungry is utterly unfounded on any actual evidence. It wasn’t private people exercising their right of freedom of association which created the Jim Crow regime, it was governments legislating discrimination whether private persons willed it or no. If you leave people alone freely to associate then the gregarious and socially adept will associate across all these deprecated grounds of distinction to their great economic and experiential advantage while the insular will keep to their own to their greater happiness.
That’s a great answer. The big problem is that certain groups will never be able to develop the cultural distinction of other groups. There is never going to be a black Masterpiece Cakeshop. Never. And queers and feminists know this and will use the NAACPs massive influence to exploit white status marking. But I do appreciate your comment. Of course, I’m not the author of the article and he should answer. I’m just a hetero white man. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
You have no proof that black people can’t be good bakers. There have been black people baking cakes for a very, very long time. This is a ridiculous claim that I would be very interesting in seeing you try to prove.
Well, show me a black baker. I’ve never seen one.
I was actually refused service once by a local black shoe repair. I assume because of my looks. I didn’t whine because I believe businesses should be allowed to choose who they want to serve. I have to drive an hour to the closest city (Annapolis). It’s okay, I’ll survive.
I won’t show you a black baker. I’ll show you dozens: https://melaninislife.com/blogs/lifestyle/black-owned-bakery
Refusing service to someone for being white is immoral and rightfully illegal. However, the dramatic irony in this case is that if the shoe repair proprietor did in fact discriminate against you, they did so in retaliation for the history of persecution and the ongoing racist behavior that you defend and support. Nevertheless, if the proprietor actually does refuse service to people for being white, I feel badly for anyone besides you who was discriminated against and would have no issue with them pressing charges. I also think it’s funny that you try to frame a narrative where you didn’t “whine,” unlike “those people,” yet right now, you are in fact complaining about being refused service.
“However, the dramatic irony in this case is that if the shoe repair proprietor did in fact discriminate against you, they did so in retaliation for the history of persecution and the ongoing racist behavior that you defend and support.”
So much for freedom of speech or even thought. You are here demonstrating the ugly technique used by liberals to slander and judge without due process. And to then encourage the precise opposite of what you piously preach. It’s not even hypocrisy. It’s just chicanery – the use of trickery to achieve a political, financial, or legal purpose. It really is impressive to watch how open-minded enlightened saintly types such as yourself can turn on a dime into vicious, entitled inquisitors slavering to burn the witches. Quite a show Charles.
There are multiple reasons why, but I will give a few here. Firstly, consumers and employers shouldn’t have to limit their ability to purchase products they can afford or give up jobs they are qualified for based on the bigotry of business people. You may be able to find another baker without too much trouble, but if you lose your job for being gay, it may be very to find another one in an equally convenient location, with equally good pay, and benefits, that you are equally interested in and qualified for. Secondly, even private companies receive public protection. If a business catches on fire, the Fire Department that is paid for partly with gay people’s tax money and staffed partly by gay firefighters comes to the rescue. The same goes for the police force that gets called in if protesters show up and won’t leave. Thirdly, as you said, there is a long history of bigots using the State to actively oppress minority groups. For them to now fall back on libertarian arguments against anti-discrimination laws represents a case of retroactively changing the rules of the game now that momentum is shifting against them.
I did not know some democrats denounced Maxine Waters remarks, that is refreshing to hear.
With regards to my position on Anti-discrimination laws, I am in favor of laws that ban any level of government from discriminating on the basis of immutable or quasi immutable characteristics. I am against those laws as they apply to private citizens or businesses. A private business should be able to discriminate against anyone for any reason, this includes against gays, blacks, christians, whites, men, women, etc. I’m not saying it’s good to discriminate, its obviously a great moral injustice to do so on these bases, just that personal freedom means the freedom to be a shitty person, just like free speech means the freedom to say truly awful things. I don’t respect Nazis (the few that there actually are), but I do respect their rights. You might ask why not have anti-discrimination laws, as they pertain to private institutions, if they make the world a better place, or something along those lines, and I would bring up the Master Piece Cakeshop case as the perfect example of why I am against them. Using a state backed threat of violence to coerce someone into violating their conscious is one of the most evil things I can imagine. Liberty is one of the highest, if not the highest, value. It’s arguably a higher value than life itself, after all many are willing to die, and have died, in pursuit of liberty. This reasoning is exactly why I am pro-choice as well, even if I grant that the fetus inside the womb is a human with equal value to you or I (for the record, I do not grant this argument).
I think that’s is a good explanation of why I’ve chosen the position I have. I’d like to know why you’ve chosen yours. Would you force a black baker to bake a confederate cake? I suspect you will say that the pro-confederate’s belief is not a protected class, therefore no. I think this is a bad argument for a number of reasons, but we could easily change the example to a gay baker being forced to brake a pro-bible or more specifically, a pro-Leviticus cake. In either case, I wouldn’t dream of forcing either baker of baking that cake, regardless of whether or not there are words specifically on the cake. (As a side note, I should add the baker did offer the same sex couple a cake off the shelf, this is an important fact, just not important to the particular arguments I am making here)
As for protected classes, these are an ad-hoc, unprincipled and arbitrary way of forcing beliefs/values onto people. Why should sex be a protected class, but not sexual orientation, gender identity, or species identity (otherkins)? Why is religion a protected class, but not political beliefs when the factors that shape political and religious beliefs are more or less identical? Why is it okay to fire someone for being short or left handed, but not for being gay? If your argument is that there is no history of discrimination against short or left handed people, then I ask from a moral standpoint, why does that matter? If you generalize the reasoning that argues discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is wrong, then that generalized reasoning also applies to other immutable or quasi immutable characteristics. If you hold that all people are of equal, infinite value, then the number of people discriminated against shouldn’t matter either. If it’s worth protecting a group of people from discrimination, its worth protecting a single person from discrimination, regardless of whether anyone in the past has been discriminated on the basis of the particular characteristic in question.
With regards to separate but equal marriages vs civil unions, it comes down to the definition of marriage. Marriage, in both our culture and many other cultures, has almost always been defined under 2 conditions. Condition 1, two people are being joined in a union, almost always religious in nature, and condition 2, one participant in the union is a man and the other is a woman. I don’t think it is up to the government to change that definition. I do not believe the government has a right to extend benefits to some unions and not others, which is why I believe a civil union should be granted every legal benefit as a marriage. The conflict between these two things should be solved by the culture, and not the government. I think the comparison between unions vs marriages to segregated schools is a false comparison.
Finally on tolerance, I did not argue that the right was more tolerant than the left towards the gay community. I think that is a silly argument to make. My argument was that they were neither tolerant nor intolerant towards gays and generally speaking, are less tolerant than the right. I believe I quoted Scott Alexander’s essay “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup”. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
In this he writes about the story The Secret of Father Brown. I suggest reading the essay in its entirety, but at the very least read chapter 1 as it pertains directly to this point and is too long to copy. Essentially, the left is not tolerant towards gays because to the left there is nothing to tolerate, much like I don’t tolerate left handed people. This point is not necessarily a dig on the left as this is a good thing, just an important observation. Its important because like most people, the left are intolerant of their outgroup, although they have a dangerous facade of tolerance.
There are several reasons why I believe anti-discrimination laws are justified. Firstly, there is a demonstrable harm that comes from people being arbitrarily denied goods and services based on immutable traits. If someone loses their job, for example, for being gay, that can have a direct, serious impact on their quality of life, based on a direct action that was taken against them without their consent. Therefore, based on the Harm Principle, there is a compelling State interest in passing anti-discrimination laws. Secondly, even private companies receive certain support and protection from the government. For example, if protesters refuse to leave the premises of a discriminatory business, police paid for partly with taxes from the people being discriminated against are called in. If the building where business is conducted catches on fire, the fire department paid for partly with taxes from the targets of discrimination shows up. Effectively, discriminatory businesses derive the benefits of public protection while excluding certain members of the public from being able to pay for goods and services from said businesses. Thirdly, there is a long history of bigots using the State to actively oppress minority groups. For them to now fall back on libertarian arguments against anti-discrimination laws represents a case of retroactively changing the rules of the game now that momentum is shifting against them. The anti-gay, pro-Confederate cake analogy is a straw man. There is a difference between requiring someone to bake a cake with explicit political or religious methods on it and forcing them to bake the same cake for a gay couple that they would make for a heterosexual couple. A wedding cake does not magically become a political statement because it was made for a gay couple. Your argument would only carry any weight if we were discussing someone being forced to bake a cake with, say, the words “Gay Pride” on it, which we are not. The analogue for a baker having to make an ordinary wedding cake for a gay couple would be a gay baker having to bake an ordinary wedding cake for a heterosexual couple. I’m not aware of any gay baker who has a problem doing that. If any do, I’m fine with them facing charges under anti-discrimination laws. As for short and left-handed people, no, I don’t think arbitrary discrimination in employment based on immutable traits should be permitted. Businesses need to have concrete reasons for denying somebody service or employment. In any case, the people most guilty of double standards here are the large number of conservative Christians who want to entirely exclude LGBT people from anti-discrimination laws but have no issue with anti-discrimination laws that protect Christians.
The “definition of marriage” argument is absurd. In many cultures, polygamous marriages have been tolerated. In various points, societies such as most U.S. states., France, Nazi Germany, Apartheid, and many Middle Eastern nations have made their definition of marriage dependent on the spouses being of the same race, ethnicity, or religion. Many societies have made marriage non-dependent on the consent of the wife. Furthermore, there have been individual cases of same-sex marriages in a minority of societies going back centuries. The definition of marriage has varied greatly across location and time period. At any rate, the appeal to tradition is a poor one. The fact that something is a tradition does not make it good, as the traditions of slavery, rape, etc. in many societies demonstrates. If the government has no authority to change the legal–not religious–definition of marriage–then the government also has no authority to enforce a particular faith group’s definition of marriage by excluding certain couples arbitrarily. You have made no serious attempt to explain why the Jim Crow analogy doesn’t hold up. As I have repeatedly shown, pro-segregation attitudes have often been defended via religion. It is probably not a coincidence that the most pro-gay marriage region of the country–the Northeast–was also historically the region where opposition to segregation and support for interracial marriage was the strongest, while the South has been the most supportive of racial segregation and banning interracial and gay marriage. The pro-small government position would be to either have civil unions for everyone and get rid of civil marriage entirely or to allow civil marriage for both gay and heterosexual couples. Or to simply eliminate all couples’ benefits altogether, a position few conservatives are likely to embrace. I am frankly taken aback that you think the government has a compelling interest to ban a gay couple from getting married but no compelling interest to ban a business from firing them for getting married.
I am afraid you have misunderstood my argument. You previously said that the Right was more tolerant than the Left of people outside their group, because many conservatives are fine with civil unions, while the Left support anti-discrimination laws that apply to bakers. And as I pointed out, the Left is actually MORE tolerant of heterosexuals and Christians than the Right is of gay people. After all, the vast majority of leftists have no issue with heterosexuals and Christians being allowed to get married. The left has made no serious attempt to ban marriage for people it disagrees with. Since you keep bringing up Scott Alexander, I trust you are aware that he has poked fun at opposition to same-sex marriage, right? A final point is that conservative support for civil unions only became common once it became apparent that gay marriage was going to get legalized, and civil unions became seen as a way of stalling or preventing it. In the early 2000s, before support for gay marriage became mainstream, most conservatives opposed civil unions.
I think maybe I did not articulate my position on marriage well enough. I do not think the government should “ban” gay marriage. I think what is and is not a marriage is not up to the government to decide. The government should not be in the business of regulating unions between consenting adults. What counts as a marriage is something that should be determined in a social context not a legislative one. I think it’s reasonable for the federal government to extend benefits to united couples, but I do not think its reasonable to exclude those benefits based on if the union is heterosexual, homosexual, or something else. If certain churches wanted to perform a religious union for same sex couples, that would be their prerogative and the ensuing cultural conflict ought to be handled by the churches and the rest of society. I just don’t think its the place of the government to get involved because this is a contentious debate on values and the government should only instantiate the most basic and fundamental values, like those set forth in the founding documents.
The comparison to separate but equal is a false equivalence for at least two reasons. One, in my view of how the world should work the government should not be determining who gets married as I described above. In separate but equal schools, since the schools are an arm of the government, they are determining who goes to which schools and what resources are extended to those schools. Two, the conflict in marriage vs unions is based almost entirely on the definition of marriage. There is no conflict over definitions in the old debate on segregated schools. If you say there was a conflict over whether or not blacks were counted as humans, I think this conflict is a vacuous as a conflict over the shape of the earth (flat vs round).
On anti-discrimination laws, you’ve put forth three arguments which I’ve summarized below based on my understanding.
1. Harm is done when people are denied services based on immutable traits and the government has an interest in regulating this harm via the harm principal.
2. Businesses derive benefits via taxpayer dollars for protection, therefore they should not be allowed to discriminate against tax payers.
3. Bigots have used the power of the state in the past to oppress minorities, therefore an appeal to libertarian principals is merely a reaction to changing times and not based on a true belief in those principals.
My problem with these arguments are as follows.
Argument 1: I agree harm is done to individuals when a business denies services or opportunities to the individual. However, forcing someone to violate their conscious is a harm much greater in magnitude. I think it’s one of the worst things that can be done to a person, it can arguably be worse than killing the person. I take the violation of someone’s conscious extremely seriously. It is an absolutely demonstrable thing to do. There is no doubt in my mind that Jack Phillip’s conscious would be violated by forcing him to bake a cake for a ceremony that is explicitly prohibited in his religion. Second, if you hold that harm is done to the individual by discriminating against them on religious grounds (like firing a Muslim worker because of his religion), then that same principal applies to other sets of ideas/values as well, such as political beliefs. If you don’t agree that the principal applies to other sets of beliefs, then you are privileging religion (and certain religions at that) which I find unacceptable. Should a business be able to fire someone who is an ardent second amendment or pro-choice supporter? Should they be able to fire someone who interprets their religion to hold that whites are superior to blacks or Jews? Harm is done to someone whether they are discriminated against based on the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, or their racist beliefs. I would not force a black business owner to retain the employment of someone who attends KKK meetings as this would almost certainly violate their conscious, even if it does cause harm to the KKK member. In addition to the right to not have their conscious violated, the black business owner has the freedom of association. If he does not want to be associated with a KKK member, he should not have to be. Same goes with a religious employer and a gay employee. Finally, I do not believe in positive rights, I believe in negative rights. A person has a right to seek employment, but no right to any particular employer. I don’t think any business should be forced to provide services or opportunities to anyone if both parties do not consent to the arrangement. Yes, this will lead to injustices, but the alternate option is a far bigger injustice.
Argument 2: I think this is an easy one. There are non protected “classes” of people who are also tax payers. If you believe discrimination laws should protect Islamic religious beliefs then you must extend those protections to other sets of beliefs, otherwise you believe the government should privilege certain ideologies over others. Political values and beliefs run nearly parallel to religious beliefs. They are very much a function of the time and place you grew up. More than that, Jonathan Haidt has done a bunch of research showing personality traits, which I understand to be a function of both nature and nurture, and political beliefs are highly correlated. I interpret this to mean that political values are even more immutable than religious values, which means the argument in favor of protecting political values is stronger than religious values. What ever reasoning you use to extend protections to classes must be universal and neutral, and I do not see protection for religion but not other ideologies as universal and neutral.
Argument 3: I find this to be completely irrelevant. I am interested in what the rules that govern society, in both a social and legislative context, ought to be. If the libertarian principals are the correct principals by which we should order society, then it is irrelevant that some of the supporters of those principals have ulterior motives. I find this particular line of reasoning prevalent on the left (I usually see it manifest as a punching up vs down argument). It doesn’t matter what people have done in the past when discussing what principals we should use to order society in the present. Racism against whites is equally as abhorrent as racism against blacks and should warrant equal social condemnation, despite the fact that historically racism was usually directed towards blacks at the hands of whites.
Please answer if you would force a black baker to bake a cake for a celebration of white supremacy. If your argument against forcing the baker to cater this party is based on what in particular is on the cake, then that same objection should also apply to the religious baker. If a confederate flag on the cake is your grounds for not forcing the baker to bake that cake, then would you apply that same reasoning to a rainbow on the same sex wedding cake? What if there was nothing on the KKK cake, but it was merely a normal cake for a racist event? What if it was a gay baker being forced to bake a cake for an old testament celebration? Surely its reasonable to expect the old testament cake could violate the conscious of the gay baker, even if there is nothing explicitly religious on the cake, right? Both classes are protected, so whose rights do you protect?
On intolerance, ultimately which side is more tolerant, generally speaking, is irrelevant. That being said I think the evidence showing the left is more intolerant than the right is almost overwhelming. You think the left is more tolerant of Christians? Did you see the absolute hate directed towards chik-fil-a during their Toronto opening, or towards Jack-phillips when he offered and standard cake but refused a custom cake, or towards Jordan Peterson when he spoke out against mandated pronoun usage, or towards James Damore when he said men and women are different and this can explain disparities in outcomes, or when the Oberlin baker tackled a black shoplifter and was accused of demonstrable racism? There are so many examples I can give that it’s hard to even know where to begin. The right tends to disagree on things like gay marriage, but the right wing intellectuals very rarely call those in the gay community evil for their actions. David French may be against gay marriage, but this is not because of animus towards homosexuals. The same is not true on the left. The charge against one side for being evil, in the mainstream, almost always flows from the left to the right. Again, I could point to an almost uncountable number of instances (that are happening today, not 30 or 50 years ago) but I doubt any amount of examples will change your mind here given most of the examples I could use have almost certainly already crossed your path. The intolerance towards Christians, for instance, is not towards their rights to get married, but to the very existence of their beliefs. When Ben Shapiro said he wouldn’t attend Dave Rubins wedding, it was not because he hates Rubin or views Rubin as a morally inferior being. The general feeling on the left towards Shapiro due to this was a feeling of hatred and moral inferiority. I don’t see any mainstream figures on the right saying white kids can’t be friends with black kids, but we have seen this on the left. Again, I think the evidence against the left being more intolerant is overwhelming.
Your explanation regarding your position on gay marriage actually raises more questions than it answers. Whether or not civil marriage should continue to be available at all versus whether marriage should be privatized is a valid debate. But it really isn’t germane to the question of whether or not gay marriage should be legal. The fact is, the government does recognize civil marriage, so the question is whether or not it is fair or libertarian for the government to recognize it for heterosexual couples and not for gay couples. So I ask you: Is it fair or libertarian for the government to recognize civil marriage for heterosexual couples and not gay couples? If we are going to have civil marriage, should it be available for gay couples? Yes or no? The funny thing is that if the Christian Right had advocated privatizing marriage in the 1970s, many gay rights activists would have agreed with them. But instead, they focused on trying to keep civil marriage and excluding gay couples from it. Now, gay marriage is legalized, and Christian conservatives must lay in the bed they’ve made unless they can somehow convince enough people to support privatizing marriage.
Your argument about why the Jim Crow, separate but equal analogy is wrong is very different from your original argument. In the comments section of my first article, you said, “Marriage and what it signifies is at the heart of Christian religious beliefs. Wanting to preserve the sacredness of an institution because of religious beliefs is not the same as wanting to preserve segregated spaces because of a deep seated hatred against minorities.” In other words, you argued that the analogy didn’t hold, because opposition to gay marriage is based on religion, while support for segregation was/is based on hatred. I demonstrated that supporters of segregation have often used religious arguments. Your stated reasoning for why you think my analogy is wrong has now shifted drastically. But I’ll bite. There are a few problems with your arguments here. Firstly, the debate over gay marriage does not hinge almost entirely on what the definition of marriage is. Much of the opposition to gay marriage involves arguments about homosexuality being immoral, damaging to society, bad for kids to be exposed to, etc., as well as arguments such as the idea that gay couples are less fit to raise children. Even the debate over the definition of marriage often involves implicit and explicit arguments like the ones I mentioned. After all, definitions of words, including marriage, get changed rather frequently, so those who oppose changing the definition of marriage from the “man and woman” paradigm must necessarily explain WHY they think changing the definition is bad. Furthermore, the controversy over interracial marriage did involve debates over the legal definition of marriage, since the legal definition of marriage was a union between two people of the same race in much of the U.S. Interestingly, opponents of interracial marriage and desegregation often argued that interracial marriage bans and other “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws were not discriminatory because they supposedly applied to people of all races equally. Opponents of gay marriage often argue that gay marriage bans are not discriminatory, because both heterosexual and gay people can marry someone of the same sex. The more things change…
Your argument about public education doesn’t work either. Many libertarians don’t support public schools. By your logic, they should not support the Brown v. Board decision (which some right-wing “libertarians” in the Lew Rockwell-Von Mises Institute don’t.) Additionally, by your reasoning, since marriage should be privatized, the Supreme Court was wrong to legalize interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia.
There are at least a few problems with the freedom of conscience argument. For one thing, a baker who doesn’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding has other ways of avoiding having to violate their conscience. They could find another job like conservatives and libertarians often tell people to do if they get fired for being gay. They could keep baking but stop baking wedding cakes at all. They could stop making custom cakes and only sell pre-made cakes off the shelf. This isn’t like a draft where people are being conscripted to work as bakers and specifically make custom wedding cakes. For another, your argument also necessitates support for gay marriage. If it is a violation of freedom of conscience for a baker to have to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, it is necessarily also a violation of gay people’s freedom of conscience to force them to accept second-class citizenship by restricting civil marriage to heterosexual couples. And if it is arguably worse than death for a baker to have to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple–your claim, not mine–then it is also arguably worse than death for gay people to be denied civil marriage when it is available to heterosexuals. Also, the positive liberty versus negative liberty argument runs into multiple problems, one of which is related to the point I just made. Firstly, I submit that it is a violation of someone’s negative liberty for businesses to try to limit their access to the market based on their race, sexual orientation, etc.. Secondly, it is a clear violation of someone’s negative liberty to deny them marriage rights that are available to others on the basis of sexual orientation.
I tend to think that firing people based on political views should be legal. I am open to being persuaded otherwise, but I think there is a key difference between religious and political views that is relevant here. Religion can absolutely play a role in public policy. But in and of itself, it is primarily a private matter that doesn’t directly affect anyone else most of the time. While religion can definitely influence political views, there’s no one-to-one correlation there. For instance, some Catholics are very conservative on feminism, abortion, and LGBT rights. Others are very liberal. Political views on the other hand tend to have a more direct impact on people’s lives via public policy. For example, one of the reason Brendan Eich ended up under pressure to resign from Mozilla for donating money to ban gay marriage was that Hampton Catlin, who developed apps for Firefox, had a same-sex partner from the U.K. who couldn’t move to California after gay marriage was banned there thanks to the ballot initiative Eich helped fund. In fact, the impact on Catlin’s and his partner’s quality of life caused by the ballot initiative Eich gave money to was probably greater than the impact that losing his job had on Eich’s quality of life. The mere fact of being Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Baptist, etc. just doesn’t have that kind of direct impact on other people’s lives. Now while I’m open to the idea that firing people for political views should be illegal for the same reason firing people for religious views is (though Eich wasn’t outright fired), it is perfectly consistent to oppose banning firing people based on political views while also favoring anti-discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation, gender, race, etc. Qualities like sexual orientation, gender, and race are mostly immutable. They are traits that people are generally born with. Political and religious views have some correlation to personality traits but not a one-to-one correlation, and even some personality traits are a mix of nature and nurture. Political and religious views are heavily influenced by environment and circumstance and are much more malleable than traits like race, gender, and sexual orientation. People change religious and political views rather often, whereas it is generally not possible for, say, a gay person to change their sexual orientation. But in fact, all of this further underscores the hypocrisy of many Christian conservatives who don’t see anything unfair about the fact that they are protected by the same federal anti-discrimination laws that they oppose extending to gay people.
You say that, “I am interested in what the rules that govern society, in both a social and legislative context, ought to be. If the libertarian principals are the correct principals by which we should order society, then it is irrelevant that some of the supporters of those principals have ulterior motives.” I am generally in agreement with this. With that in mind, I am glad to hear that you disagree with David French’s view that real or imagined persecution of conservative Christians justifies opposing gay marriage. After all, by your own reasoning here, that persecution is irrelevant even if it is actually taking place. Still, in this case, I don’t think we can reasonably ask marginalized groups such as LGBT people to accept claims from politicians that they are unable to protect them from business discrimination due to that being outside the purview of government when the government has actively used its power to oppress these groups for generations. It is just a little too convenient for our politicians to spend centuries using big government to violate minority groups’ rights, then turn around and say libertarianism prevents them from doing anything about business discrimination–especially when these politicians’ supposed libertarianism doesn’t extend to a lot of other areas and seems to have conveniently emerged right as momentum shifted against State-imposed discrimination.
I thought I already made it clear that I didn’t think a black baker should have to make a pro-white supremacy cake, but let me try to answer your questions as specifically as I possibly can. The issue of “what is on the cake” does not apply to having to bake a cake for a gay wedding. A baker who refuses to bake any wedding cake for a gay couple is refusing to bake what is functionally the exact same cake for a gay couple that they would make for a heterosexual couple–regardless of what is on the cake. As I said, the analogy only holds from a legal standpoint if we are talking about a cake with explicitly pro-gay rights or pro-homosexuality messages on it. The issue of a rainbow on a gay wedding cake is a simple one. If a baker refuses to make a wedding cake with a rainbow for heterosexual couples, they should have the legal right to refuse it for gay couples. If they are willing to make a rainbow cake for heterosexual weddings, they must do the same for gay weddings. By racist event, I assume you mean something like a KKK rally. I don’t think baker should have to make a cake for a political event if they disagree with the relevant political views, since that comes across as an endorsement of said views. A wedding is almost always an apolitical event, and it is a stretch to argue that baking a cake for one means you agree with the couple’s relationship. I would be happy to answer the Old Testament celebration question if I knew what an OId Testament celebration was. Is it a celebration dedicated to reviving Old Testament law? Is it a traditional Jewish wedding? I need more specifics.
You seem to think that support by most LGBT rights activists for Christians’ and heterosexuals’ rights to get married cannot even be factored in at all when assessing which side is more tolerant. That seems to be an attempt to eliminate including any criteria that don’t support your point. If most LGBT rights advocates on the left are as hateful as you claim and despise the very existence of Christians, then it is indeed surprising that they are making virtually no attempt to strip Christians of their marriage rights despite what conservative Christians have done and continue to try to do to gay people in that area. Nevertheless, I will bite again here. Firstly, individual cases of intolerance or hatred toward Christians, real or imagined, do not nullify cases of intolerance or hatred toward gay people or demonstrate that the conservative Christian side is the more tolerant one. Secondly, most of the people you mentioned were not condemned by the left for being Christian. They were condemned for actions or statements that were viewed by the left as bigoted. The majority of the leftists condemning them do not have an issue with Christians who support LGBT rights, women’s rights, and racial equality. By your logic, anyone who condemns the Muslim Brotherhood is intolerant of all Muslims. Chick-fil-A is a particularly interesting case, because the company has still refused to include LGBT workers in its companywide anti-discrimination policy. In any event, for a few other examples of conservative intolerance besides opposition to gay marriage, I would bring up opposition to gay adoption, opposition to LGBT people in the military, obsession over restricting transgender bathroom rights, advocacy of racial profiling, defending the right of states to ban homosexuality, calling for women to resign from office after having kids (Rich Lowry of National Review did that), defending predatory behavior by people like Donald Trump and Roy Moore, blaming sexual assault on female soldiers serving with men, and many other examples. The majority of these views are mainstream on the Right now, not just a few decades ago, and they go back to long before the rise of the SJW left. Ben Shapiro has advocated many of them, including saying that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down sodomy laws. On the matter of anti-discrimination laws, the majority of the left doesn’t see a problem with anti-discrimination laws that protect heterosexuals and Christians in addition gay people and religious minorities. Name-calling and anti-gay jokes are not uncommon on the Right, as Steven Crowder’s use of antigay slurs and the support he received from conservatives illustrate. Hate crime statistics don’t support your claim either. Based on my look at the FBI’s 2017 statistics, there were about 200 reported victims of anti-Christian hate crimes and 37 reported victims of anti-hetrosexual hate crimes that year. There were about 1300 reported victims of anti-LGBT hate crimes that year.
Even if we focus entirely on free speech, it doesn’t look good for the conservative Christian side. As Alabama Attorney General, Jeff Sessions worked to prevent an LGBT conference from meeting on a public campus. (https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/politics/kfile-jeff-sessions-lgbt-conference/index.html) Now, you might say this was 23 years ago, but Sessions has never apologized for this to the best of my knowledge. It didn’t stop him from being appointed U.S. Attorney General just two years, and he ultimately lost the job not for this anti-gay, anti-free speech stance but for not deferring to Trump as much as the president wanted. As recently as the 2010s, conservatives in states like Tennessee were attempting to prevent public school teachers from mentioning anything gay-related, despite the difficulties this would pose in Social Studies, English, and likely Science class. But the most damning example is Russia’s anti-“gay propaganda” law. The law put massive free speech restrictions on gay people and their allies, to the point of effectively making it illegal to be openly gay in Russia. Many Christian conservatives, some of whom are extremely prominent on the Right and powerful in the GOP, defended the law. Franklin Graham stated, “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues … obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda … Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue – protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda – Russia’s standard is higher than our own?” I would ask you to prove that David French and Ben Shapiro lack any anti-gay animus and don’t consider gay people morally inferior. Their views on gay marriage and Shapiro’s opposition to attending a gay wedding certainly indicate otherwise. At any rate, you made the assertion, so you must prove it. Again, given how intolerant you think leftist LGBT rights advocates are, it is fascinating that most of them seem to have no problem attending a Christian wedding, and virtually none have a problem attending a heterosexual one. We certainly disagree on whether opposing gay marriage is bigoted. But even putting that aside, French believes that the alleged mistreatment of conservative Christians by some gay people means that no gay people should have civil marriage rights but does not believe that the mistreatment of gay people by many conservative Christians means that conservative Christians should not have religious freedom. This is despite the fact that the mistreatment of gay people by conservative Christians has gone on much longer, been much more extreme and institutionalized, and caused the alleged intolerance by some gay people that French uses as a reason to oppose gay marriage. That is a gross double standard that speaks to anti-gay animus. Shapiro, as I said, has argued for the right of states to ban homosexuality. It’s also crucial to look at the roots of this conflict. Social conservatives spent centuries oppressing gay people in this country (and even longer in other countries), and many of the policies used to oppress gay people are still either popular among conservatives or still in place legally. The types of behavior from gay people and their allies that conservatives complain about are a fairly recent phenomenon that came about as a result of this oppression. When someone engages in rhetoric or behavior that is legitimately intolerant or hateful of Christians or heterosexuals, I have no problem condemning that. But to paraphrase something you said in response to my last article that I think is much more accurate here, LGBT rights advocates who do act intolerantly or hatefully are “merely playing by the right’s rules.”
Let’s look now at racial stereotyping and segregation, since you mentioned that. National Review has run articles defending racial profiling by law enforcement, some of them written by people who are still employed by the magazine. Pat Buchanan, a famous movement conservative still writing for mainstream conservative outlets, thinks Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided. When Bob Jones University was in the news for an interracial dating ban in 2000, prominent conservatives such as Buchanan, Lindsey Graham, Jonah Goldberg, and Ann Coulter defended or refused to condemn the college. You may say this was 19 years ago, but Graham is still a Senator. Goldberg was an editor at National Review in 2019 and still writes for the Los Angeles Times. Coulter is very prominent on the Right. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, Democrats were 11 percentage points more likely than Republicans to approve of interracial marriage, black people were 12 points more likely than whites to approve, and liberals were 17 points more likely than conservatives to approve.
I want to keep this reply brief as I want to keep the length of this conversation more manageable. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t address all of your points here.
You ask: “Is it fair or libertarian for the government to recognize civil marriage for heterosexual couples and not gay couples?” My answer depends entirely on what is defined as a marriage. I think it is both immoral and un-American to extend rights to certain unions and not others based on immutable or quasi immutable characteristics. I also think it is not up to the state to determine what is, and is not, a marriage as this is a question of values that ought to be decided in a social context. I think I am crystal clear here and logically consistent. The government ought to recognize unions between individuals for the extension of benefits but leave the value propositions to the people.
On separate but equal, I did miss an argument, which is my fault. You did however misconstrue that argument. You think that my original position was that we should enforce separate but equal marriages because the argument comes from religion. I’ve repeatedly stated that I think privileging one set of ideologies over another at a legislative level is a mistake. My original point was that separate but equal schools were motivated by racial animus and separate but equal marriage is not motivated by anti-gay animus, at least for most religious conservatives (which I am not). You say the argument against gay marriage stems not from definitions or religious values, but explicitly from the position that gay acts are immoral and bad for society. This is certainly true for some, but the mainstream conservative intellectuals like French and Shapiro do not advance such positions (you make a number of claims about these people which I would really like to see a source for). They take the libertarian approach which is that the government ought not legislate morality. The two other arguments I put forward in my last reply still hold.
You write:
“And if it is arguably worse than death for a baker to have to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple–your claim, not mine–then it is also arguably worse than death for gay people to be denied civil marriage when it is available to heterosexuals.”
I find this dishonest. My argument was not that it was worse than death for a Christian baker to bake a gay cake, but that forcing someone to violate their conscious is arguably worse than death. Doing so is a very serious moral infraction whether you are willing to recognize this or not.
There are too many points to your arguments that I disagree on to address them individually while still keeping this relatively brief. I think the best way to illustrate why your arguments are not valid is to simply employ your own words.
You write: “The issue of “what is on the cake” does not apply to having to bake a cake for a gay wedding. A baker who refuses to bake any wedding cake for a gay couple is refusing to bake what is functionally the exact same cake for a gay couple that they would make for a heterosexual couple–regardless of what is on the cake.”
But you also write: “I don’t think baker should have to make a cake for a political event if they disagree with the relevant political views, since that comes across as an endorsement of said views. A wedding is almost always an apolitical event, and it is a stretch to argue that baking a cake for one means you agree with the couple’s relationship.”
You acknowledge that forcing a black baker to bake a cake for a KKK rally amounts to an endorsement of their views, but for whatever reason, you do not acknowledge that forcing a Christian baker to bake a gay wedding cake also counts as an endorsement of gay marriage. There is a value being put forth in a celebration of gay marriage that is counter to the values that the baker holds (keep in mind, he offered an off the shelf cake, just not a custom cake). Not only does he hold those values, but he organizes his entire life around those values. Those values mean everything to him and are at the core of his being, and you so flippantly hand-wave this point away. I don’t share his values, but I respect his right to hold them. You on the other hand do not.
LGBT activists (generally speaking) may not oppose heterosexual rights to marry, but that is a far cry from calling them tolerant. They, like you, simply dismiss their right to have their values (using the power of the state) and demean their character for holding those values as well. I am not trying to mud sling but the very intolerance on the left I was talking about is quite evident in your post. I don’t know Jack Phillips, but he is almost certainly a good man from what little I do know. He doesn’t hate gays, he doesn’t wish them ill fortune, he doesn’t hold that they are inferior to him, and he doesn’t call or imply they are evil. I cannot say the same about you given what I’ve read. You most certainly do hold that Jack Phillips is a lesser moral being for his religious beliefs despite the fact that he is not the moral monster you make him out to be (to be clear, one can be motivated by religion and still be a moral monster, like the West Boro Baptist Church, but that is not the case with Phillips). And whether or not the left or right is more tolerant, while applicable to other arguments, is not applicable to the argument of what is and is not tolerance, what is and is not moral, and what is and is not the appropriate way to organize society. The right may very well be more intolerant than the left (not an argument I buy), but this is not an excuse for intolerance on the left (and it makes them hypocritical, given their supposed commitment to the value of tolerance).
I think you would do well to reflect on what actions or beliefs would warrant denigrating one’s character. I think smearing a good person as a bad person (which the right certainly has done historically and are not innocent of today) is an especially shitty thing to do. I think you would agree demonizing an otherwise moral class of people as immoral is, itself, immoral. I am saying this principal applies at the individual level as well.
Many of the points you put forward seem self-contradictory. In addition to what I highlighted above, the first two arguments you put forward in defense of anti-discrimination laws also apply to White Supremacists, which means you think White Supremacists should be protected from discrimination or you have to amend your arguments.
There is much more to say, but I think that is the crux of it.
What claims do you want a source for? I can provide a source for every single fact I have laid out here. But before this goes any further, I would like a straight answer: is it your position that it is unjust for the government to recognize heterosexual couples’ relationships as marriage while granting gay couples the same financial benefits but not calling those benefits “marriage?” I realize you don’t believe marriage should be a government institution, but what I am asking is whether you believe that in a world where it is a government institution, the “civil marriage for heterosexual couples, civil unions for gay couples” system is fair/libertarian. Please answer unequivocally. To put this a different way, do you agree with Obergefell v. Hodges? If there had been a bill in Pennsylvania to legalize gay marriage back when it was illegal there, would you have voted for it?
Here is a statement labelling homosexuality immoral, which French signed: https://cbmw.org/nashville-statement/ Here’s French’s column referencing his signing: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/nashville-mayor-barry-attacks-basic-christian-belief/
Here’s a statement from Shapiro on his view that homosexuality is immoral: https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/804020724927119360?lang=en
Here’s his opposition to the SCOTUS decision striking down sodomy laws: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2014/10/06/Same-Sex-Marriage-SCOTUS/
Now bear in mind that Shapiro’s statement he opposes Lawrence v. Texas on states’ rights grounds is the same argument a lot of opponents of Brown v. Board have used.
Here’s Shapiro saying gay couples can’t raise kids as well as heterosexual couples: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Ben-Shapiro-takes-stage-at-UC-Berkeley-under-12200541.php
Believing that if the government recognizes civil marriage, then gay couples should have to settle for civil unions, as Shapiro and French believe, is the very definition of legislating morality.
When you said that the separate but equal analogy didn’t hold up, you specifically brought up religion. If a policy belief can be motivated by religion and still be bigoted, then whether or not it is religiously motivated is not relevant to assessing whether or not it is bigoted. In any case, this attempt to delineate between hateful support for segregation and “tolerant” opposition to gay marriage is belied by the fact that many segregationists strongly denied any racial hatred, spoke of their love for black people, and framed their support for segregation in terms of Christian faith, preserving the “natural order,” keeping the peace between the races, etc. Many segregationists were not openly talking about hating black people. And one need not hate someone to be bigoted against them. Bigotry can also mean simply opposing equal rights or treatment for members of a certain group.
You said that forcing someone to bake a wedding cake for gay people forces them to violates their conscience and that having to violate your conscience is arguably worse than death. You made that argument, now you must defend or withdraw it. You must also grapple with the way in which our pre-2015 gay marriage and adoption laws, as well as the current laws giving tax money to anti-gay adoption agencies, have also forced gay people to violate their consciences.
Baking a cake for a same-sex wedding does not amount to an endorsement of gay marriage, because a wedding is a primarily personal, as opposed to a political event. As I said, weddings are generally apolitical. A heterosexual wedding is almost never treated as a political event, and almost nobody talks about whether baking a wedding cake for a heterosexual couple amounts to an endorsement of heterosexuality or a value judgment about whether or not the relationship is a healthy, ethical one. It is perfectly possible for a baker to produce a wedding cake for a gay couple, in the interest of serving all customers, without agreeing with homosexuality, just as a baker can make a cake for an interfaith couple despite opposing interfaith marriage. For another analogy, if someone makes a wedding cake for a Catholic couple, we do not generally interpret this as an endorsement of Catholicism. But since we are talking about the right of people to make their own decisions based on their own values, you still need to address whether you agree with Obergefell v. Hodges. And you should also address whether you think heterosexual couples should get preferential treatment in adoption.
If LGBT rights advocates are intolerant, because they “simply dismiss their [conservatives’] right to have their values (using the power of the state) and demean their character for holding those values as well,” then by this same standard, most social conservatives are intolerant also. As I mentioned, most favor using the power of the State in a host of ways to prevent gay people from living their lives according to their values. You really haven’t made much of an attempt to refute the numerous, specific examples I gave, which are very damning. But you seem to concede that in the area of restricting marriage rights, LGBT advocates are, in fact, more tolerant. In addition, claiming that someone’s orientation and relationships are immoral, the way social conservatives are wont to do with gay people, is demeaning someone’s character. I never once implied that most social conservatives are evil, but since you believe in reading between the lines to interpret comments that way, one could easily argue that many conservative statements about the immorality/destructiveness of gay marriage, gay adoption, gay soldiers, homosexuality, etc. carry implications about gay people being evil. A key part of your argument since you engaged with my last post has been that social conservatives tend to be more tolerant than LGBT rights advocates. You also downplayed the way that socially conservative intolerance has fueled what you would consider intolerance by LGBT rights advocates. And you have argued that supporting civil marriage for heterosexuals and civil unions for gay people is tolerant. So I am afraid the question of which side is more tolerant is very relevant to this debate. And I have also laid out why I do not think opposing gay marriage is at all tolerant.
I already explained why I disagree with the white supremacist analogy, both in my previous reply and this one. In any event, the first reason I provided for supporting anti-discrimination laws definitionally does not apply to white supremacists, since being a white supremacist is not an immutable trait. You could make a bit of a stronger case with my second argument, but in the case of a business refusing to serve white supremacists, the people getting refused service can start getting served by choosing to stop being white supremacists. A gay person can virtually never stop being gay. Your “freedom of conscience” arguments against anti-discrimination laws, however, do logically require you to support decisions like Obergefell v. Hodges.
Honestly, I think that I have said about as much as needs to be said in this debate, and we are not ever going to come to an agreement. I don’t feel the need to continue a long-form debate on this, except that I will prove sources for any facts I’ve mentioned upon request, and I would like to know what your view on the Obergefell decision is and how you would have voted in the Pennsylvania scenario I mentioned.
“If someone loses their job…”
But it’s not “their job”. It’s their employer’s job. The Job is the creation of, conception of and the desiderata of the Employer. In the absence of the Employer’s desire that something be done for the Employer, there is no Job. The Job description, which may include what person or kind of person will do the Job is properly the purview of the Employer. The misconception that the Employee “owns” “their” job is at the heart of the collectivist error. The Employer is under no obligation to employ anyone. The Employer is under no obligation apart from the Employer’s own objectives to fund whatever production it is that the Employee is volunteering to be employed to accomplish. Nor should anyone be under any obligation to submit to being employed by anyone, vis: cake bakers or garbage collectors.
As for gay “marriage”, at some point it behooves any intellectually honest person to admit that they have abandoned the denotation of the word “marriage” in order to appropriate its phonemes for their connotations.
There would be no job if there were no employees to fill it. Ergo, the job belongs to both the employee and the employer. Employers may terminate people with just cause, but I do not believe that they have the right to arbitrarily do so for discriminatory reasons. If the job is solely the employer’s, and they have a right to dismiss people for discriminatory reasons, then businesses must forgo any public protection, including protection by police or fire departments.
Also, I take it you have never used the words “my job” to refer to your employment?
Also, definitions of words change over and over again. If you want to ban marriage for a certain group, the burden of proof is on you to show that a ban is necessary.
What a crisis. Superintendent Chalmers needs to get a handle on these schools. Next thing you know Lunch Lady Doris will be taking away the kids’ gluten-free option.
Remember this sarcastic remark when a kid gets sent to the principal’s office for wearing a MAGA hat–which, by the way, I also consider free speech, even though I despise the MAGA slogan.
“Students in schools paid for with tax dollars are ordered to stand as a sign of respect for the federal government.”
Nobody is ordered to stand as a sign of respect for the federal government. They stand for the flag and the values the flag represents such as democracy and liberty. Ironically, forced respect for the federal government is antithetical to those values.
I’m only two sentences in so far, but this particular point seemed to be worth addressing.
Obviously students shouldn’t be forced to stand for the pledge, regardless of whether the pledge pays homage to the federal government or universal values. Part of what makes America great is the freedom to hate America, even if that hate is based on incredibly naive ideas.
It would have been better if you’d waited to finish the article, since I do explain why I consider the Pledge to be a homily to the State. I won’t rehash everything I say in the article, but if it were just about democracy and liberty, the words would simply involve pledging allegiance to those values, not pledging allegiance to a flag that supposedly embodies those values. The flag students are pledging to is the flag of the federal government. It is not an ideological nongovernment flag the way that, say, a gay Pride flag is. The implication of the pledge is that our government upholds democracy and liberty–hence the “to the Republic for which it stands” part. Many people who don’t stand don’t feel the government actually upholds democracy and liberty.
Everyone is in favor of their own free speech (including, for instance, Vladimir Putin). The test of your commitment to free speech as a general principle is whether you are willing to tolerate the speech of others, especially those with whom you most disagree. If you are using your speech to try to silence speech, you are not in favor of free speech. You are only in favor of yourself.
It’s highly disingenuous for leftists who don’t believe in the First Amendment nor the concept of free speech (nor the Second, for that matter) to come crying that their free speech rights are being violated. “Fuck free speech!” they chanted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM A professor from Yale said that “free speech has been weaponized by the Right” in order to attack higher education and that “we” need to protect the institution. An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the “American tradition” of free speech is no longer viable.
After the First and the Second fall, so will the Fourth and Fifth, and then darkness will come.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
— Ronald Reagan
I agree that it is vital to support free speech for views you disagree with. However, the Right is every bit as hypocritical, if not more so, on free speech than the left is. Social conservatives have promoted censorship long before leftists started doing so. Reagan is a great example of this. For example, he strongly advocated censoring “obscene” material as a governor and president. I would urge you to read my first piece for Areo, “Meet the New Conservatives, Same As the Old Conservatives.”
Interesting article, but I always find left vs. right tu quoque arguments off-putting. Whether “conservatives” or “liberals” are more likely to be inconsistent in their respect for free speech seems to me not only difficult to resolve, but a matter of self-righteous tribal finger-pointing. So, on that specific issue, I’m not sympathetic either to Harland’s objection to “leftists” or to your “conservatives do it too” response.
I make an argument about the Pledge that is very similar to yours, by the way, in my 2009 book “Public Education: America’s Civil Religion.”
Agreed. Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech. The Left does not make itself less an enemy of Free Speech by pointing to occasions on which the Right has acted as an enemy of Free Speech. Nor is the Left justified in being an enemy of Free Speech by the Right having been, being or becoming an enemy of Free Speech.
Kneeling is the best option! You demonstrate to everyone that you were a slave, now you are a slave and you want to be a slave forever. This is the pinnacle of the art of grievance
If you’re interested in moving beyond the past, do you support getting a new National Anthem that wasn’t written by a slaveholder during slavery?
Not!
I do not rewrite history. And I don’t rewrite my life either!
That’s you, the member of Party of those, “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”. A man who never deviates from the Party line. He deviates with this line.
Then it seems to me that you want to have your cake and eat it too. You want to continue to use an Anthem from the days of slavery, written by a slaveholder, which argues that America was free during the days of slavery. That’s your prerogative, but you then accuse black people of living in the past when some of them don’t want to stand for this Anthem. If you want people to “move on and live in the moment,” you should support adopting an Anthem that better reflects the 21st century. If you want to remember history, then you can’t get mad when a black person remembers that history (and is paying attention to some of the more disturbing things going on now) and doesn’t want to stand for an Anthem that glorifies it to some extent.