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.
36 comments
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.”
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.