I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say Malignantly Idiotic Things

This article from Inside Higher Education appeared in my Facebook timeline today. Overall it's good news that Syracuse University forthrightly defended their faculty's freedom of expression, which so many other schools have failed to do.  

Briefly, a Black assistant professor of political science, Jenn Jackson, posted some provocative Tweets on the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.  She was attacked, the university was urged to fire her, she received threats; the university not only affirmed her freedom of speech but condemned the attacks and demands that she be removed.

Of course, freedom of speech also permits me to point out that one of her tweets was not only wrong, but malignant and idiotic.

In [a] separate tweet, Jackson described the Sept. 11 attacks as targeting the “heteropatriarchal capitalist systems America relies upon to wrangle other countries into passivity. It was an attack on the systems many white Americans fight to protect.”

The 9/11 hijackers, most of whom were Saudi, were nothing if not heteropatriarchal themselves, as is the system of government and the religion in whose name they killed thousands of people, not all of whom were white.  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Islamist states are perfectly comfortable doing business with capitalists even if they don't consider themselves to be capitalists: the Saudi royals' comfortable relationship with the Bush crime family is well known, if commonly overlooked.  Targeting a "system" is like targeting "terrorism": it's an abstraction, and framing the attacks in this manner obscures the use of murderous violence against human beings.

I think it's also a safe bet that the 9/11 hijackers would not appreciate being "defended" by a woman who dresses like a harlot, letting herself be photographed with her face uncovered.  (The popular attacks on Western feminism are pertinent here.)

This tweet should go down in history with its heteropatrarchical sibling, "Suck.on.this."  Like Thomas Friedman, Jackson has the right to say whatever vicious things she likes, and I support her university's defense of her freedom.  But others have the right, and indeed the obligation, to point out that the terrorism she justified led directly to wars that killed over a million people, displaced millions more, and made the lives of most people in the Middle East immeasurably worse.  Which is exactly what they were intended to do: the intention was to lead the US into retaliation that would ultimately destroy us.  It has certainly harmed us, but it harmed ordinary people in the Middle East much more, while US capitalists and their corrupt Middle Eastern clients enriched themselves in comfort.

Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee (Slight Return)

As numerous people have warned, efforts to ban "hate speech" are going to backfire; indeed, they already have.  Today Glenn Greenwald linked to an article about a Canadian Muslim university student who's being disciplined by her school for "for supposedly 'hateful' FB post about Canadian history."  He added: "Lesson here for the left: implementing hate speech penalties will be used against you. For the right: much censorship is against the left."

According to the article Masuma Khan, a vice-president of the Dalhousie Student Union, responded to a criticism of a DSU decision not to participate in Canadian 150th Anniversary celebrations by posting on Facebook that "white fragility can kiss my ass. Your white tears aren't sacred, this land is." The university investigated, and "Khan said she was given the option to undergo counselling and write a reflective essay after the Halifax-based school conducted an investigation into a complaint about her online comments, but she says she refused."

"It was really offensive, to be honest, for the university to tell me that they're going to teach me how to talk about racism in a more collaborative way, when racism is very harsh … there's no nice way to talk about it," the 22-year-old Muslim woman said.

"We're going to do everything we can to let Dalhousie know that this is not OK and it's not appropriate."

I'm not sure how far to believe Khan's account about the restorative justice measure offered to her; according to the article, it appears to have been a first, informal step before the university held a formal hearing.  And I don't think I do particularly trust her word.

The funny part is, by the criteria of those who want to suppress hate speech (probably including herself), Khan's post was hateful.  If someone had written a post addressing her in those terms, I can imagine the fuss that would have ensued.  Khan's complaint about her punishment sounds exactly like a whiny white guy complaining about Political Correctness running amok, right down to the claim that she was just telling it how it is, that's how she rolls.

​"I'm not apologetic for voicing my opinion and using free speech to tell my support systems on my own social media how I feel," Khan said.
"There's a lot of folks that feel that racism doesn't exist anymore, but I think I'm here to be frank and say, 'Hey, that's not reality.'"

As the article quotes her, she stopped just short of accusing the University of Political Correctness before reverting to Culture of Therapyspeak.

Khan said she doesn't regret the online post, but recognizes that it may have hurt some people. That wasn't her intention, she said; she was simply trying to reflect her own experiences dealing with racism.

Nor did it occur to her, evidently, that she herself is just one more Old World colonialist occupying "sacred" lands.

It's hard to decide where to come down on this story.  Like Greenwald, I think college students should be allowed to express their views without being punished for them.  The trouble is that so many college students (like their elders) believe that they should be allowed to express their views freely, but others, those they disagree with, should not.

Can Khan dish it out but not take it?  Would she insist that a white racist should be allowed to respond to her in the same terms she feels justified in using?  I'd bet she can't, and wouldn't.  But even if she can, and would, I would criticize her for her post.  Like so many of our supposedly Internet-savvy youth, she evidently thinks that what happens on Facebook stays here.  If her post were posted privately where only her "support system" could see it, she would have a case, but the article doesn't say, and I suspect the fact that it resulted in this disciplinary action indicates that it wasn't restricted.

But that's not really the issue.  I've addressed the question of civility around here numerous times, and in particular the significance of people venting on social media.  Replies to Greenwald's tweets took on the issue of what online speech should be regulated and suppressed.  Harassment and threats, for example.  The trouble here is that harassment is somewhat subjective, and stopping it requires that some third party adjudicate whether it took place.  Even threats.  Gamergate led to some discussion of the horrific threats directed to others online, and those are what I'd call clear cases.  But what about less clear cases, like the nice Christian liberals who said on Twitter that they wanted to commit violence (via) against Paul Ryan for his icky views about poor people?  I feel pretty sure that if Rethugs had declared the same desires about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, those same Christian liberals would have been infuriated.  In order to decide what constitutes a threat, or harassment, someone has to make a judgment, and not everyone will be happy with those judgments.  There is no way to delegate that job to computer software; there is no mechanical procedure for evaluating the complaints.  From what I see, Facebook's software produces plenty of false positives, that is, it finds harassment and threats and bad thoughts where human beings do not.  But the Internet is too big for human beings to monitor it.  And do you want Facebook employees -- probably overworked and underpaid to boot -- reading everything you post?

Since Khan's obnoxious post wasn't meant as a contribution to debate, let alone dialogue, I can't judge it or her too harshly.  But her attempts to dismiss, let alone justify it as if it were meant for her opponents' eyes suggest to me that she wouldn't do much better in a public forum.  "There's no nice way to talk about [racism]," she told the CBC.  I don't know about niceness, but in public debate one must restrain -- or better, redirect and channel -- one's anger and focus on what is being discussed.  In an important sense, that is what Khan is at a university to learn, and Dalhousie is not out of line in disciplining her to do it properly.  It's not easy, it's not always pleasant, and even many highly credentialed intellectuals fail to do it adequately.  But just throwing feces at one's opponents isn't rational debate.  I'm not saying Khan should be silenced: she is.

Would You Like a Nice Progressive Punch?

This meme baffles me.  At times I wonder if it was intended as a Zen koan, a saying that deliberately makes no sense in order to frustrate and derail one's logical thinking, and ultimately force one into Enlightenment.  But most of the time I think it's just another glitch in human thought.

I regularly encountered another example of this sort of thing during and after the Sixties, when people would dismiss the hippie slogan that you should do your own thing as long as nobody gets hurt.  Someone would triumphantly riposte: "But what about Altamont?  What about Charles Manson?"  Yeah, what about them?  People got hurt in those and other cases, so they didn't show that it's a bad idea to do what you like as long as no one gets hurt.

I suppose the idea was that someone will always get hurt when human beings aren't policed and regulated and overseen and held in check by Authority.  But even in the most tightly patrolled societies, people get hurt -- often enough, by the Authority.  And who watches the Watchers?  One important lesson of history surely is that people given power over others will often abuse it.  I don't think that "Do your thing as long as nobody gets hurt" implies that there shouldn't be consequences when you do hurt someone, though as we also should know, there are rarely consequences for Authority when it hurts people.  You're just not supposed to notice it.  (What, your unarmed child was shot to death by a policeman?  Oh, look over there -- a Mexican took your job!)

I admit that the Sixties counterculture, at least its rank and file, didn't seem to think much about what consequences should follow from breaking its golden rule.  It's the kind of question that most people don't like to engage, because it involves judgment and gray areas and other messy complexities; the kind of core philosophical question that children ask and adults can't answer, because like most core philosophical questions there is no simple, firm answer.  But in one form or another, that maxim is virtually proverbial.  "Your freedom ends at the end of the next person's nose," for example.

Lately I've been seeing the same kind of diversion being used in the wake of the Charlottesville killing, as people try not to grapple with the limits of free speech.  Apart from the misconception that "hate speech" isn't free speech, people have trouble applying their own limits consistently.  Speech is free as long as it doesn't carry into action that hurts other people -- most people I know agree with that in principle, but their next move is to point to acts of violence.  Violence hurts other people, so it doesn't count as free speech.  Yeahbut the Nazis in Charlottesville pepper sprayed other people!  Yeahso that's violence, not speech -- where's the problem?  There are hard questions that can be raised about freedom of speech, but this isn't one of them as far as I can see.

On the other hand, sucker-punching a Nazi is so good that it's probably protected speech, all peace and love and shit.  So many liberals and progressives squealed with delight when Richard Spencer was punched that I believe their confusion over the boundary between speech and and action (which, I admit is another one of those messy complexities) is willed.  As the philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote, "Not only is the criminal a human being like you, but you, alas, are like the criminal."

As I wrote yesterday, I could be classified a nihilist in certain realms, like the heat death of the universe.  Choosing, deliberating, and applying principles is hard; but to throw them out altogether at the human level is nihilism at the human level, of the most destructive sort.  Yet the people who are now agitating for further restrictions on freedom of speech fancy themselves principled advocates of justice.  It never occurs to them that the government at all levels is much more likely to suppress their speech than the speech of the Right; that's how it has always played out before. (They disagree with what you say, but they will defend to the death the right of the Trump gang to crush them like bugs.)  They'd be more honest to admit that they want a war of all against all, which (typically) they assume they'll win, and people caught in the crossfire will be glorious martyrs.  No, thank you.

It appears that I've never quoted this passage from Jean-Paul Sartre's essay "Anti-Semite and Jew" here before.  It was written in 1944, just after the Nazis withdrew from France. The anti-Semite as Sartre analyzed him stands for all anti-rational people, as you'll see:

Do not think that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of these answers. They know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed. Not that they are afraid of being convinced: their only fear is that they will look ridiculous or that their embarrassment will make a bad impression on a third party whom they want to get on their side. Thus if the anti-Semite is impervious, as everyone has been able to observe, to reason and experience, it is not because his conviction is so strong, but rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen to be impervious [13-14].*

I've encountered such people from the political right -- but also, alas, from the center and the left.  Sartre wasn't being "prescient," of course; he was describing people in the France of his day, who also exist in all countries and eras.

What Sartre described here is also what Patricia Roberts-Miller calls demagoguery.  If it worked as a way to bring about social justice, we wouldn't be in trouble now.

*Anti-Semite and Jew.  New York: Schocken Books, 1948.

A Question of Priorities

I mostly agreed with this piece by FAIR's Janine Jackson up until the last couple of sentences.

... And that’s the thing to remember: Every person you see on air is there because someone chose to put them there, and is taking the place of someone else who might be there.  So when they, say, trot out the “n-word” and say it’s less “a race thing than a comedian thing”; when they ask an Indian-American spelling contest winner if she’s “used to” writing “in Sanskrit” because they’re “joking”; when they lament a commemoration of the now, they care about pop music and going to the beach”—the thing to keep in mind is that Orlando Pulse shooting being used to agitate for gun control because “most gay people aren’t political. Most gay people, you know, they care about pop music and going to the  beach" -- the thing to keep in mind is that freedom of speech is not the same thing as a guaranteed right to a megaphone. It is always appropriate to ask media outlets why they have chosen these people over others to fulfill their obligation to serve the public interest.

I think it's at least arguable that freedom of speech is the same thing as a guaranteed right to a megaphone.  Having the "freedom" to say whatever you like while you're alone in a soundproof room, or to write whatever you like as long as no one but you ever sees it, is not what I'd call freedom of speech or the press.  This has always been a problem with the implementation of freedom of speech, and the proprietors of today's commercial media would, I think, basically agree with Jackson here: Sure, you have the right to say whatever you like, but we're not obligated to give every tinfoil-hat wacko a soapbox and a megaphone for his crazy ideas.  So buy your own megaphone!

It was the part about the media's "obligation to serve the public interest" that bothered me first, though.  I agree that it's appropriate to challenge the media over the criteria by which they choose the people they provide with a megaphone, not because they aren't entitled to put anyone they like in front of the microphones and cameras, but because the corporate media posture as much about their responsibility to the public as Jackson could wish.  Even the most degraded and reactionary of our media claim to be telling the public what it wants and needs to know.  They wave the flag and prattle about their sense of duty to Truth, and their eternal quest for Objectivity.  It would be better to acknowledge that all media are partisan, that the corporate media report the news "through the eyes of the investor class" as another writer at FAIR put it very aptly a few years ago.  Non-commercial media are often no better: I happened to hear BBC commentary the morning after the recent UK election, and it was pretty appallingly partisan: even the pundit from a nominally Labour paper was upset by Labour's victory, saying younger voters voted for Labour because Corbyn had simply promised to give them money, and the woman from a Conservative women's website kept giggling about how Corbyn was like ninety years old, even after she was corrected.

The question is, what is the public interest?  Who knows it, and how do they know it?  Again, the corporate media would protest that they do so serve the public interest to the best of their  ability.  The principle underlying liberal, Enlightenment mandates like freedom of the press is that no one does know where the true public interest lies, so it is important that as many viewpoints as possible be available.  This may be invalid -- a surprising number of liberals and progressives jeer at it -- but if so, we should just repeal the First Amendment.

I think that consumers / users of media also need to take responsibility for their choices.  Everything you see on media is something you've chosen to watch or listen to, and it means that you're not listening to or watching something else.  There are many options available, probably more than ever before.  Even better, there are media criticism resources like FAIR, and unlike the media generally, they show their work: why is this statement dubious, what could this story contain that it doesn't, and so on?  No one can really do your thinking for you, so you have to evaluate the information you take in.  No media source is infallible, and every media source must be used critically.  If you prefer not to do that, it isn't the fault of the media (as a whole) if you end up misinformed.

Human-Caused Climate Change

It's going to take time to sort out everything about today's shooting of several people at a Republican Congressional baseball practice by an apparent Bernie Sanders supporter and volunteer, and I could use that as an excuse not to write about it now.  But one thing seems clear to me.  For the past year and more I've been watching liberals, progressives, and leftists fantasize aloud about and even endorse violence against Republicans and other right-wingers, from the video clip of a football player tackling a Trump lookalike (shared on Facebook by my friend A, who unfriended me soon after I called her out on it) to the widespread kvelling over the punching of Richard Spencer.  Whatever the facts about James T. Hodgkinson turn out to be, I think it's indisputable that liberal Democrats have been energetically fostering what they call a "climate of hate" when it's fomented by the Right.

They'll do their best to evade responsibility for their words, of course, just as the Right did after the shooting of Gabrielle Gifford.  They'll try to claim that Hodgkinson was mentally ill, a lone nut, and that the vitriol liberals and some leftists have been spewing in public for the past year -- and especially since the election of Donald Trump -- had nothing to do with his crime.  Maybe so, maybe not: Hodgkinson died in the hospital after he was shot by police, so he can't speak for himself; but apparently he had a rather vivid social-media presence.

I believe that we are responsible for our actions and our words, and that words mostly are not actions.  We can't be held responsible for everything that happens after we've acted or spoken, because it's not always certain whether something like this crime was a consequence of public rhetoric.  But it's notable that liberals and progressives have insisted often that the Right's rhetoric made such crimes more likely -- that "climate of hate" -- while giving themselves a pass for their own intemperate and often hateful rhetoric.  The denial that is so by many liberals, like the person in the photo that heads this post, is not only illiberal but a declaration of war on the principle of free speech.  I've often told liberals who claimed that "hate speech" isn't constitutionally protected that they should be glad it is, because otherwise they themselves would be in deep shit.

But then the rest of us are in deep shit too, as both mainstream US political factions gleefully drag the country (and the rest of the world) down.  "The creatures outside looked from pig to man," at the ending of Orwell's Animal Farm, "and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

P.S. Yes You're Racist has been active in fostering a climate of hate on Twitter, joining hands with the white supremacists he purports to despise, so this morning's retweet was almost funny:

It is okay to spread toxicity if it gets retweets and favorites on Twitter apparently.  Some of us don't need to "rethink things," though.  A rich white lady got hurt a few years ago, after all -- has YYR already forgotten Gabrielle Giffords and the eighteen other people shot during a constituent meeting in Arizona six years ago?  Six of them died, including a rich white guy and a little girl.  YYR and his ilk are paradigm examples of what so many left writers call "tribalism," the belief that only our side's lives matter.  If it's not okay to spread toxicity, it doesn't matter who gets hurt.

And, of course, some in the liberal media are blaming Putin for Hodgkinson.  Why not?

Unraveling Offense

I think it was in Mary Midgley's book Wisdom, Information and Wonder (Routledge, 1989) that I first encountered the idea that real-world thinking -- rationally, critically -- is not like building on a firm foundation, but more like unraveling a huge tangle of yarn: you pick away here and there, making some progress here and then moving to another area until you can't go any further there.  After you've done that awhile, you may find that something comes loose and you suddenly have a large section that comes free.  After that, however, it's back to picking away at it.

I had an interesting little exchange online that worked this way.  Someone linked favorably to a Facebook post, illustrated with a photo, by a nursing mother who defended the right of women to breastfeed uncovered in public if they're comfortable doing so.  (She also defended the right of women not to do so, to use a cover if they're more comfortable doing it that way.)  One woman commented on the repost:

I'm from a different generation. I cannot condone nursing in public. That's what breast pumps are for. Have a little consideration for those around you who may be offended. Think about what you wouldn't want to see exposed in public. How would you like it if men were allowed to just hang all out in restaurants? Before you say It's not the same thing -- it really is. Common decency dictates that we are respectful of others. This is disrespectful of people like me. I would walk out of a restaurant that allowed this.

I replied:

It's not the same thing. It's fascinating that you believe it is, though. How far do you demand that we take "consideration for those around you who may be offended"? People get offended by just about anything. The book you're reading. The way you wear your hair. The cross you're wearing, or the headscarf. And so on. People need to learn that being offended doesn't give them the right to throw a tantrum and attack the person who offended them; and this applies to everybody, not just Christian rightists.

Maybe I should say instead that people do have the right to throw a tantrum when they're offended -- but others have the right to regard it the way they regard any tantrum, with tolerance but distaste.  This woman has the right to walk out of a restaurant that allowed a mother to breastfeed, of course, but it doesn't put her on the moral high ground.  Someone who stormed out of a restaurant that served a same-sex or interracial couple or a woman in a hijab would have the same right, but fewer and fewer people anymore would agree that the person's sense of outrage was justified.  Go, most people would think or say, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

I also wondered about her conviction that it would be dreadful if men "were allowed to hang all out in restaurants."  For one thing, her wording, which seems at once euphemistic and raunchy.  More important, the penis and testicles are not analogous to women's breasts.  Men are allowed to go bare-chested in many environments, while women are not.  And I am baffled by the widespread belief that the sight of a penis, even a flaccid one, is horrible and traumatic, at least for women.  No doubt many men like the idea that exposing themselves gives them power over women.  It's interesting that a woman would claim that the sight of a woman's breast, or part of it, should be equally traumatic; I can imagine that if she lived in certain Islamist societies, she'd say the same of a woman's naked face.  Even granting that, however, women who breastfeed aren't trying to provoke a reaction, not trying to shock: they are feeding their infants.

At around the same time (this was several months ago -- I'm rummaging around in my drafts folder again), a relevant excerpt from an essay by the political philosopher Michael Walzer was posted at Alas, a Blog.  I have my differences with Walzer, but I thought he had an important insight here.

In multicultural politics it is an advantage to be injured. Every injury, every act of discrimination or disrespect, every heedless, invidious, or malicious word is a kind of political entitlement, if not to reparation then at least to recognition. So one has to cultivate, as it were, a thin skin; it is important to be sensitive, irritable, touchy. But perhaps there is some deeper utility here. Thin skins are useful precisely because the cultural identities over which they are stretched don’t have any very definite or substantive character. People are right to be worried about cultural loss. And because identity is so precarious in modern or postmodern America, because we are so often so uncertain about who we are, we may well fail to register expressions of hostility, prejudice, or disfavor. Thin skin is the best protection: it provides the earliest possible signal of insults delivered and threats on the way. Like other early warning systems, of course, it also transmits false signals–and then a lot of time has to be spent in explanation and reassurance. But this too is part of the process of negotiating a difficult coexistence in a world where difference is nervously possessed and therefore often aggressively displayed.

Despite all the misunderstandings generated by the mix of nervous groups and thin-skinned individuals, there is something right about all this. Social peace should not be purchased at the price of fear, deference, passivity, and self-dislike–the feelings that standardly accompanied minority status in the past. The old left wanted to substitute anger at economic injustice for all these, but it is at least understandable that the actual substitute is the resentment of social insult. We want to be able and we ought to be able to live openly in the world, as we are, with dignity and confidence, without being demeaned or degraded in our everyday encounters. It may even be that dignity and confidence are the preconditions for the fight against injustice.

So it is worth taking offense–I am not sure it is always worth feeling hurt–when demeaning and malicious things are said or done. But a permanent state of suspicion that demanding and malicious things are about to be said or done is self-defeating. And it is probably also self-defeating to imagine that the long-term goal of recognition and respect is best reached directly, by aiming at and insisting on respect itself. (Indeed, the insistence is comic; Rodney Dangerfield has made a career out of it.)….People do not win respect by insisting they are not respected enough. ("Multiculturalism and the Politics of Interest," in David Biale et al., eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 89-90).

Walzer was talking here primarily about black/Jewish relations, but I think his point extends to other groups as well, and he knew it.  I recognized the struggle the gay movement had in the 70s and even afterward to get gay people to be offended by public displays of bigotry, partly because they often agreed that as a despicable minority, we should be grateful only to be insulted rather than killed or expelled.  We had to learn to be offended.  (Feminists faced the same resistance from most women: why was she out walking by herself at night, in that neighborhood?  Shouldn't good jobs be reserved for men, who have families to support?  And so on.)  It took me, at least, a long time to realize that it wasn't enough to be offended, you have to learn to judge what offenses really matter, and what to do about them -- and that is not an objective question.

In general we don't consider our opponents' feelings of offense and "cultural loss" to be valid, because they aren't ours, and because they block our getting the change that we want.  But if being offended is a bad thing from which we ought to be protected at all costs, and many people evidently believe it is, then all offensive displays must be forbidden -- and I think I'm right that this is impossible, partly because almost any behavior you can name will offend someone, and partly because offenses clash, and sometimes we do need to suck it up and learn to live in a world where we aren't always comfortable.  Being offended is often a sign that we need to begin educating ourselves further.

At Indiana University there have been a few cases over the past few decades where students' and others' complaints of offense were overridden.  One involved a New-Deal-era mural by Thomas Hart Benton, from a series in a lecture hall, that depicted (among other subjects) Ku Klux Klanners burning a cross.  African-American students complained that they shouldn't have to see such an image in a classroom: "Students report feeling uncomfortable by the depiction of the Ku Klux Klan. Some find it difficult to attend lectures and others report difficulty focusing on exams."  Myself, I was surprised that the objection didn't come from right-wing white students complaining that the mural stereotyped whites as racists; that we heard nothing from that faction was, I thought, significant, but not reason enough to remove the mural.  And couldn't the hootchie-cootchie dancer to the right of the Klansmen be seen as 1) a problematic image of women and/or 2) distracting to students taking exams?  In the end the murals remained in place.

At around the same time, there were complaints about decorated tiles in the entry to what was then the Physical Education building, which was built in 1917.

Some of the tiles bore swastikas, which in 1917 was a Hindu and Buddhist symbol.  The Nazis didn't adopt the swastika until years later.  Some students, unaware of the historical and religious background, called for the tiles' removal.  This call was also unsuccessful. This case raises interesting questions: when a symbol or image is ambiguous for historical or other reasons, should it be suppressed because someone fastens onto one of its possible meanings and ignores the others?  Also, Jewish students among others have good historical reason to be disturbed by the sight of Christian crosses; should they be kept out of public view?  Should people on a state-supported university campus be forbidden to wear them?

I've been trying to think of analogous images that might offend me as a gay man, to the point that I'd demand their removal and suppression.  I imagine there are some, but I can't think of any offhand, and I'd have to have a concrete example before I could evaluate it.  I might very well point out that a certain image was offensive, even disturbing, but probably only to try to get people to think and talk about it -- which, of course, most people don't want to do.

I think the distinction Walzer draws between "being offended" and "being hurt" is a useful one, and his account of the pitfalls of deliberately cultivating a thin skin largely agrees with my opinions.  I think, however, that many people reject the distinction: you've offended me, therefore you've hurt me, and I demand recognition, reparation, and protection against any further offense.  But sometimes people who are trying to get a discussion going will be accused of wanting suppression first, by people (usually from majority or other privileged groups) who want to suppress the discussion because it offends them.

I don't see any clear solution to this problem.  Each case has to be examined on its own merits or lack of them.  I think, though, that it would be a beginning to recognize the limits of offense.  "I'm offended by that" is where you start; the first response should be, "And ...?"  What to do about your offense, or my offense, isn't immediately obvious.  In many cases it's likely to be nothing.  In others it'll be a firm suggestion to educate yourself further and then consider submitting your complaint again.  In others you and your feelings of offense might be the problem, as in this item, purportedly a letter from an African-American law professor to white students who objected to his wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt on campus.  I'm a bit suspicious of its authenticity, but this is one case where the content is what counts: it answers real complaints and accusations made against BLM, and answers them well.  Its arguments would be as valid in response to the students who complained about the Benton murals and the swastika tiles.

The Land of the Skree and the Home of the Slave

It has been entertaining to watch the controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who refused to stand for the National Anthem.  After seeing the predictable frothing reaction by white racist jingoes, I'm half-inclined to agree with Donald Trump that Political Correctness is killing America: Kaepernick was just speaking his mind, telling it like it is, refusing to let Political Correctness stifle his thought and opinions, and all these whiny Social Justice Warriors got their delicate sensibilities in a bunch.  They want professional sports to be a Safe Space, and they'll accept no trigger warnings -- they want total conformity to the Politically Correct thought police.

This morning I met a friend for lunch at a bar, which of course had a TV tuned to ESPN.  The big question of the segment was Rodney Harrison's celebrity-style apology for claiming that Kaepernick is not black.  I say "celebrity-style" because, as is typical of the genre, Harrison's apology groveled without actually saying something or even acknowledging that, or why he was wrong -- he just hadn't meant to offend or hurt anybody.  A self-identified "Caucasian person" on the panel of commentators, also predictably, lamented that Harrison shouldn't be "humiliated" for making an honest mistake.  The other commentators did better, though.

But I have a question. The cartoon above got a lot of traffic among liberals and progressives a few years back, when Brendan Eich, Alec Baldwin, Duck Dynasty and some other people got in trouble over some antigay and racist remarks and actions. The point was that as long as the government isn't censoring them, it's okay for them to be fired, to lose their contracts with their media overlords, and for millions of people to throw virtual caca at them on the Intertoobz -- because it's only censorship if the government does it. Corporations and other private entities are not bound by the First Amendment. This can be argued, and it was.

So here's my question: why does this cartoon not apply to Colin Kaepernick? Or does it? Should the NFL show Colin Kaepernick the door for being (as he is, in many people's opinion, though not in mine) an asshole, whose bullshit they don't want to have to listen to?  I have no particular opinion myself, I'm just curious to know what other people think.  It seems to me that this case confirms my oft-stated belief that freedom of speech almost always comes down to which asshole and which bullshit is on the block.

Some Adults Are More Adult than Others

I got bogged down in a post I was trying to write about the current fuss over Political Correctness, especially the Political Correctness of young African-Americans which supposedly threatens to bring down the Republic by attacking Freedom of Speech.  Then someone linked to an article that suggested another approach to me.  Rather than add it to what I'd already written -- the subject could and should be a book, rather than an article -- I decided to explore it separately.

First the writer, one Ryan Holiday, invokes and quotes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; it's a stupid book, and I've discussed it before, so I won't cover it here.

Then Holiday quotes a saying of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (ca. 55-135 CE): “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.”  He concludes,

Control and discipline of one’s own reactions make for a successful person and a functioning society. I don’t think you want to live in a world where that isn’t the expectation of each of us. I don’t think you want to see the things that will need to happen when the burden of making sure everyone is happy and not offended is put on the government—or worse, a corrupt and bitter blogosphere.

But that seems to be the road we’re going down. Even though we’ve been warned. 

I was about to say that this is incredibly dishonest, but unfortunately it's all too credible.  Anyway, I decided to track the saying down, because it sounded like the sort of thing that is made up and attributed to some famous thinker; I'd already seen it by itself in a meme that was going around Facebook.  It turned out be genuine, it's Saying 20 from the Enchiridion or Handbook.  Then I noticed that Holiday had taken it out of context.  Here's the whole passage, in another translation.

Remember, that not he who gives ill language or a blow insults, but the principle which represents these things as insulting. When, therefore, anyone provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you. Try, therefore, in the first place, not to be hurried away with the appearance. For if you once gain time and respite, you will more easily command yourself.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to this, but as I noticed even before I tracked it down, in use it tends to exculpate and erase the person who gives "ill language or a blow" -- he or she is also complicit in the provocation, no less than the victim.  That generally is forgotten when someone is telling someone else that the insult is all in his or her head.  As Epictetus says, it's "the principle which represents these things as insulting."  He who gives ill language or a blow is also trapped by "the appearance."  Epictetus was born a slave, and before he became a freedman was owned by a secretary of the Emperor Nero, so he had plenty of occasion to experience insults and abuse, and to learn to master himself for merely prudential reasons.

Leaving out the reference to being struck also makes things too easy for Holiday and others who cite this version of the saying.  Very often it is the better part of valor for anyone who's hit by someone who has power over them to control their emotions.  The assailant in such cases is probably using the blows to assert his or her status and remind the slave who's boss.  That doesn't mean that the slave is mistaken about the message being sent, even if he or she decides not to collude with it; nor does it mean that anyone who objects to being struck has no valid complaint and just needs to man up.  There's also a world of difference between my telling myself to practice control when someone insults me, and the person who insulted me telling me that self-control is good for my soul.  When today's straight white males are whining about the misandry of feminists who joke about subsisting on male tears, shouldn't they also take Epictetus' wisdom to heart?

That being said, let's stick to speech.  If someone calls me "faggot," I don't react by bursting into tears or clubbing him down.  I'm not even insulted, since I am indeed a faggot.  But I also recognize what the epithet means.  That is also part of what Epictetus meant, I think: the "principle which represents these things as insulting" is the system of male supremacy, in which men have power over women and not-men.  The same principle is involved in a man randomly calling a woman a "slut," or a white person calling an adult black male "boy."  The word is used performatively, to assert and assign status.  I don't take the insult personally, but I do want to challenge the "principle."  To do that, I must think about how best to do it, which will probably include joining with other fags and sluts and boys to change our society.  Meanwhile, I may respond by calling the person who called me "faggot" a bigot; he or she should, of course, take the same advice he or she would give to me, by refusing to be complicit in the provocation.  But generally they don't: their feelings are delicate and must not be bruised; I must master myself, but they need not.  I consider this a test of their sincerity.

Many of the insults that people like Ryan Holiday want to minimize and protect aren't delivered face-to-face, one-on-one.  Athletic teams with names or mascots invoking American Indians are an example of this.  I can't help wondering how American white males would react if an historically black university were to name its team the Greyboys or Rednecks or Honkies; I don't think it would go over well, especially if the mascot wore a culturally-insensitive costume. (It's entertaining to imagine what one: a backwoodsman in whiteface and bib overalls?)  At any rate, that an individual isn't being targeted specifically doesn't mean that no insult or derogation is intended.  As Joseph Heller's Yossarian says in Catch-22, just because anti-aircraft fire was trying to kill all the Allied bomber crews didn't mean they weren't trying to kill him too.

Noam Chomsky's metaphor of stepping on ants is relevant here.  He says that Americans (that's just an example, since it applies to all imperial or ruling groups) don't necessarily harbor murderous hostility to the people our police and military kill or torture, we just don't think of them as having feelings we need to respect.  (Unlike our own -- nobody's more obsessed with cultural sensitivity than an American Christian throwing a tantrum because some Muslims on the other side of the world burned a US flag or called his country "Satan.")  Analogously, Chomsky doesn't worry about stepping on ants when he walks down the street.  So the little kids whom a friend once observed Trick-or-Treating, one of whom was dressed in KKK robes, and led the other, in blackface, with a rope around his neck didn't necessarily hate African-Americans; nor did their parents, who surely approved and probably helped make the outfits.  I'm being way too generous here, because southern Indiana is Klan country.  A better way to put it is that it doesn't matter what they felt, or thought they were doing; they were embodying the principle of white supremacy enforced by racist violence.  That this implementation didn't involve overt violence doesn't change the "principle" that gave it meaning.  The ants I step on thoughtlessly are no less dead because I didn't mean to harm them, and the dusky people killed by American bombs around the world are no less dead because it never occurred to most Americans that they were people.  (No one else is allowed to kill those dusky people -- they belong to us.)

There is an issue that needs to be explored here, which is the principle of non-retaliation.  That a person who feels himself insulted by words is justified in striking back is a widespread, longstanding principle of human social life, known as "honor."  (Women are not supposed to protect their honor with violence -- the men who own them are supposed to do it for them, because a slight to one's woman's honor is a slight to one's own honor.)  It's so widespread that it might well be part of "human nature." Yet the contrary -- that one should not retaliate -- is also ancient and found all over the world: not only Jesus but Plato's Socrates and the Buddha, among others, declared it.  Yet, though it has an equal claim to being natural, it's one of those principles that is generally honored only in the breach.  In practice, only the poor and relatively powerless are seriously exhorted to live by it.  When someone is excused from that duty, it's because someone more powerful is willing to grant them something like full human status.  An example would be the sympathy expressed by many about the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  I overheard a gay Christian male I know saying in connection with that attack that while he didn't condone violence, you'd better not insult his mother and expect him not to do anything about it!  I wouldn't blame him for being angry if someone insulted his mother, but I would blame him if he hauled out an automatic weapon and shredded the offender.

Holiday wrote:

Real empowerment and respect is to see our fellow citizens—victims and privileged, religious and agnostic, conservative and liberal—as adults. Human beings are not automatons—ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control. On the contrary, we have the ability to decide not to be offended. We have the ability to discern intent. We have the ability to separate someone else’s actions or provocation or ignorance from our own. This is the great evolution of consciousness—it’s what separates us from the animals.

Here's a perfect example of the patronizing attitude I'm talking about.  By telling black students at Yale not to make a fuss over racially insensitive Halloween costumes and the whole structure of white privilege and supremacy they invoke and support, Holiday tells them they're acting like children, even like animals.  The protesters did not claim that they were "ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control"; on the contrary, by organizing a protest they showed that they were in control of their reactions.

What also separates us is our capacity for empathy. But how empathetic the speech we decide to use is choice for each one of us to make. Some of us are crass, some of us are considerate. Some of us find humor in everything, some of us do not. It’s important too—but those of us that believe it and live our lives by a certain sensitivity cannot bully other people into doing so too. That sort of defeats the purpose.

Revealingly, he doesn't really believe that the black students' protest was a choice for them to make.  They should respect the right of white students to be "crass," but they have no correponding right to be crass themselves.  Even speaking out is "bullying."  It's a fascinating repudiation of freedom of speech by Holiday. White men, unlike minorities, are entitled to panic when their conduct comes under criticism.  Seeing them as adults who can be reasoned with is bullying and shows lack of empathy.  Notice his complacent certainty that he's one of those who "live our lives by a certain sensitivity."  Notice also that he speaks of the crass and the considerate as though these were acts of God -- the crassness that falleth like rain from the heavens -- instead of choices that people make, at least when they're white males.

Notice too that Holiday, like others of his viewpoint, equivocates -- or in plainer language, plays fast and loose with -- just what is happening in this controversy.  Are the insults real, or do they exist solely in the imagination of childlike minorities who lack empathy?  If they are real, are they unintended, or is that just a defensive excuse made by people who live their lives by a certain sensitivity when they're caught exploiting their status?  Now you see the insult, now you don't.  How I'll react to various expressions of antigay bigotry depends on my assessment of these and other factors. But I'm reminded of Dorothy Dinnerstein's remark in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976) that for women to be

ready to collaborate with men ... is to have been given to understand, much more often than not, either [a] that they had no idea what you were talking about, but in any case it seemed irrelevant, or [b] that they could do the important part of it without you, but loved to have you around helping, minding the kids, cleaning up the shit, and looking pleasant.

This response in new left men was part, I think, of the ordinary human moral laziness that made them falter in the face of other challenges too.  But to face the narrow unintelligence of such a response, its complacent ungenerosity, is to give way to ordinary human rage, murderous rage, which one tries to handle, if one is not a murderer, by withdrawing from those who evoke it.

This doesn't solve the problem of offense and people's reaction to it; that is for the other post I'm still bogged down in.  Nor does it mean that every action by minorities is wise.  As I've said before, while overdogs are not entitled to lecture underdogs on what should offend them, those of us who are underdogs in some aspects of our lives can't take for granted that simply being underdogs gives us wisdom and discernment -- if only because we disagree with each other about which battles to take on. At some point we all need to address each other as adults.  But that's not made easier by people like Ryan Holiday.  The last thing he wants is for straight white males to be addressed as adults, because that would imply that the childlike minorities are not children but his equals -- not animals but human beings, with whom he can be expected to empathize.

No matter how empathetic and adult one succeeds in being, those who are used to privilege do not give it up easily, and will happily counsel their status-inferiors to be adult, empathetic, and above all, patient.  To take Epictetus' counsel is not to forget that abuses are happening, but it may give the abused breathing space to think how best to counter the abuses.  No effective action to do something about abuses will be acceptable to the abusers and their apologists.  But that shouldn't intimidate those who seek change.  If anything, it's one sign that the struggle is having an effect.  As the sociologist Philip Slater wrote, all real change produces a backlash; if it doesn't, it isn't real change.

No True Progressive

I received a mass e-mailing this weekend, alerting me that the Center for American Progress has invited Benjamin Netanyahu to speak there, "following heavy pressure from the Israeli Embassy and AIPAC."

Click here to sign our petition to CAP's president telling her that Netanyahu is #NotProgressive and has no business speaking at a self-defined progressive policy institute.

Emails just leaked provide documentation that CAP has been censoring its own staff to prevent criticism of Israel.
  
Netanyahu and Israel's apartheid rule over Palestinians are anything but progressive. 

I don't know -- what is progressive, anyway?  Bernie Sanders is surely a progressive, but he supports Israel in a mainstream way, which means supporting Netanyahu; Sanders joined the unanimous Senate consent supporting the 2014 Israeli blitzkrieg against Gaza.  So do many of the Americans who label themselves progressives.  Barack Obama in the White House, wrote the progressive feminist Katha Pollitt in 2008, "could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." Obama has continued US support for Israeli atrocities, though he balances out by supporting Saudi atrocities in Yemen and the latest Egyptian dictator.

I see two basic ways of settling the question.  One is that if a self-styled progressive organization supports Israel according to the Israeli line, and this position is common among those labeled progressives in the US, then supporting Israel is a progressive position, and progressives lose their claim to the moral high ground.  The other that if a self-styled progressive organization supports Israel according to the Israeli line, it forfeits its claim to style itself "progressive," no matter how many progressives take the same stance.  But who gets to decide what is a progressive position?  There's the rub.

The e-mail message claimed, you'll notice, that CAP "has been censoring its own staff to prevent criticism of Israel."  Intriguingly, it has recently been revealed that Bernie Sanders has been censoring his own staff, firing a staffer who ejected members of a pro-Palestinian group from a Sanders rally.  It appears, then, that Sanders may be moving away from the mainstream on Israel-Palestine; if so, good for him.

What intrigues me, however, is this whole matter of selecting speakers for organizations like CAP, or at universities and other institutions.  Progressives are more likely, it seems to me, to stress the importance of More Speech, and to fret that opposition to the choice of a speaker constitutes some kind of threat to free speech.  I'm not sure what free speech has to do with it.  There's a longstanding tradition of public figures who retire from public life going on the lecture circuit, for which they are paid quite lucratively.  Colin Powell springs to mind: as far back as 1999, Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt wrote in Academic Keywords (Routledge) that when he

spoke at the University of Cincinnati in 1998 he insisted on traveling by private chartered jet, on limousine transportation on the ground, and had it written into his contract that he would neither answer questions nor sign books.  It was basically the equivalent of a videotape performance with an added photo op.

If a celebrity speaker comes to campus, talks to students, perhaps visits a class or two, it might be defensible to hire such a person; but someone who essentially parachutes in and refuses to interact with his audience isn't giving much to the pursuit of knowledge.  Who makes the decision to bring in someone like Powell?  What do they think is gained by doing so?

Even at $150,000 per appearance Powell is small potatoes compared to ex-Presidents like Ronald Reagan, who was paid $2 million for a speaking tour in Japan, or Bill Clinton, who "recently got paid $500,000 in advance for a 45-minute speaking gig at the 90th birthday soiree for Israeli President Shimon Peres"; or former Senators like Hillary Rodham Clinton:

As Amy Chozik of the Times reports, “For about $200,000, Mrs. Clinton will offer pithy reflections and Mitch Albom-style lessons from her time as the nation’s top diplomat. (‘Leadership is a team sport.’ ‘You can’t win if you don’t show up.’ ‘A whisper can be louder than a shout.’)”

Whatever else you can say about them, while such platitudes are protected by the First Amendment, they're awfully expensive free speech.  I wonder how much of an honorarium Netanyahu is going to receive, and what delicately vital insights he will deliver to the Center for American Progress in return.

More important, who makes these decisions?  As the Salon article I just linked shows, often it's the captains of industry and finance.  If they want to redistribute the wealth from the rich to the rich, no one is going to accuse them of Marxism for doing so, and it's their money (subsidized by the taxpayers, of course).  But when it's a university or a supposedly principled political organization like CAP, I can't help but wonder what is going on.  Cui bono? -- apart from the speakers, that is.  It seems reasonably obvious to me that these people are scratching each other's back, with the expectation that the scratching will be reciprocated, as it always has been.

I can't work up much indignation about CAP's invitation to Netanyahu, therefore.  Rather than try to fight it with a petition, I think it would be better to publicize the episode as evidence of the group's moral bankruptcy, without worrying whether they're really progressive or not.  One can waste immense amounts of time quibbling over definitions, and I'm not sure people who are concerned about the state of the world have that kind of time to waste.

According to Wikipedia,

The president and chief executive officer of CAP is Neera Tanden, who worked for the Obama and Clinton administrations and for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. The first president and CEO was John Podesta, who served as chief of staff to then U.S. President Bill Clinton. Podesta remained with the organization as chairman of the board until he joined the Obama White House staff in December 2013. Tom Daschle is the current chairman.

I don't see any progressives there, do you?  Only "centrists," which is to say, right-wing Democrats.  Neera Tanden, the current CEO, is "a stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama White House official." Of course such a group would invite someone like Netanyahu to speak to them.  I'm not sure I believe that any pressure from AIPAC was needed.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

By Cthulhu's tentacles!  I didn't think this shameful spectacle could get any worse, and then of course it did.  It's almost certainly not over yet.

I confess, I didn't pay much attention at first to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as it moved through the Indiana Legislature.  I don't know why; I pay less attention to state politics than to local, national or international politics, and that's not something to be proud of.  But as more and more people began drawing my attention to the bill, and the temperature of the opponents' rhetoric rose, I grudgingly took a look.

First I looked at the text of the bill itself.  I took for granted that "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" was intentionally misleading, a smokescreen like "Defense of Marriage Act" or "Marriage Equality".  People I knew were fuming that it would be a license for discrimination against LGBT people, and I wondered what such a law would look like.  Someone mentioned that there was a Federal RFRA too, passed during the Clinton administration.

As I'd rather suspected, the Indiana bill, like the Federal one, didn't explicitly mention sexual orientation or gay or trans people.  Both versions were weirdly vague, which I thought was worrisome enough.  The gist of the Federal bill, as well as of the Indiana version (I know, I know, but hold your horses -- I'll get to that presently) was that "Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability" and that any burden must be justified as "furtherance of a compelling government interest."  The point of the Federal bill was to protect small, marginal religious sects when their practices ran afoul of majority prejudices and laws.  The best-known example of this was peyote use by the Native American Church, but the RFRA was cited in other contexts too, ranging from conflicts over the renovation of a Roman Catholic church building that had been designated a historical landmark to the infamous 2014 Hobby Lobby case.

In 1997 the US Supreme Court overturned part of the Federal RFRA, "with respect to its applicability to States (but not Federally), stating that Congress had stepped beyond their power of enforcement provided in the Fourteenth Amendment."  Numerous states then passed RFRAs of their own, of which the Indiana version is (so far) the latest.  In some cases, court rulings provided similar protections at the state level.

That the Indiana bill didn't refer explicitly to sexual orientation doesn't tell us anything about its intent, of course; that's why I find its vagueness so worrisome.  What constitutes a "substantial burden" probably is constrained somewhat by case law, what the courts have ruled on the subject in the past.  But that's just what is being debated now: is it a "substantial burden" to require businesses to serve customers whose lives are at some kind of variance with the business owners' religion?  This is likely to be fought in the courts for years to come.

When I pointed this out, asking snarkily how many of the Indiana bill's opponents had actually read it, the reactions (basically "you think you're so smart!") indicated that they hadn't, but OMFG we have to do something right away, because this law will give Bible-thumpers a license to discriminate against LGBT people!

On this point I confess I was slow on the uptake.  It took me a few days of debate before I remembered that Bible-thumpers in Indiana (or anyone else, in fact) already have "a license to discriminate against LGBT people": Indiana's civil rights law doesn't include sexual orientation as a basis on which it is forbidden to discriminate.  Not only that, Indiana localities are not permitted to add anything to the state law's provisions in their own civil rights ordinances.  My liberal city, Bloomington, tried to do so in the 1970s, but that ordinance was overturned.  In the 1990s, West Lafayette and Bloomington tried another approach: they passed ordinances which forbade discrimination based on sexual orientation, but without any provision for enforcement.  The city would attempt to mediate complaints about discrimination, but there could be no penalties.  Those ordinances are still on the books, but they don't constitute any real prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Nor is Indiana unique in this regard.  Some people I knew began calling for boycotts of Indiana if the bill passed.  The first lives in Kentucky.  Kentucky already has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and does not legally forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation.  The state government of Kentucky is currently fighting against the legalization of same-sex civil marriage there.  So shouldn't he boycott himself first?  Then my liberal law-professor friend said, half-jokingly I guess, that she wasn't sure she should visit her family in Indiana, she didn't want to spend money here.  She lives in Texas, which already has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and no legal protection for sexual orientation.  As a law professor who specializes in civil rights law, she surely is aware of this.  (So far she has yet to say anything about the Indiana RFRA that betrays any intelligence at all.)  Before long some random person in Michigan issued the clarion call to boycott Indiana.  While Michigan doesn't have a state RFRA, it does have "RFRA-like protections provided by state court decisions," and permits discrimination based on sexual orientation; it also has a ban on same-sex marriage passed by popular vote ten years ago, but still in force so far. (The Detroit Free Press editorial I just linked to was one of the more sensible things I've read on this issue.)  This map, already out of date but still helpful, shows the thirty-one states that have RFRAs or RFRA-like court decisions.

Same-sex civil marriage is legal in Indiana, by contrast, and it seems that the RFRA was introduced as a sullen riposte to the activist courts that made it so.  (So there, too!)  I wouldn't be at all surprised if Governor Mike Pence, who clearly isn't the sharpest pencil in the box, was unaware that antigay (as well as anti-straight) discrimination was already legal in the state he governs. 

Now, it is true that the Indiana law has some important differences from the federal RFRA, and from other state versions, as discussed here.  They're clearly meant to make it easier for bigots to cite religious freedom to defend discrimination.  Again, however, none of these differences point to sexual orientation.  They are meant to defend all kinds of discrimination, even those that are prohibited by existing civil rights law.  And let me repeat: In Indiana and most other states, there's no need to cite religion as a justification for discriminating against LGBT people, since it is already legal to discriminate against us here.  What I find annoying about most of the Indiana RFRA's critics is that, first, they ignore this elementary fact.  Numerous people quoted Stephen King's line "Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act is gay discrimination, pure and simple. You can frost a dog turd, but it's still a dog turd."  Leaving aside King's evident confusion about terminology (it's antigay discrimination, not "gay discrimination"), the Indiana RFRA is not specifically about gay people.

My second concern is that in the hysteria over this law as a license to discriminate against gay people, its critics are overlooking other forms of discrimination that are at least as relevant in a Republican, heavily conservative-evangelical state.  If a good Christian shopkeeper wants to refuse to serve a woman in a hijab or other Muslim head covering because America's a Christian country so go back where you came from, for example, this bill would provide a cover for that refusal -- at least until the courts overturn it.  Most (all that I've seen, in fact) of the fuss over the Indiana RFRA focuses on antigay discrimination, while ignoring its other implications.  This may be partly because so many LGBT Americans, being Americans, are quite comfortable with anti-Muslim discrimination, racism, sexism, and other areas where faith and the law may clash.  The campaigns for "marriage equality" and against the US military ban on homosexuals involved a lot of reactionary flag-waving and Bible-thumping to assure their fellow citizens that LGBTs can be good Republicans and Moral Majoritarians too.

Which brings me to another flaw in the criticism.  Given the vagueness of Religious Freedom Restoration laws at all levels, their writers' intent is not all that important, but it can still be noticed and discussed.  Given the people who inspired and worked on the Indiana bill and who were present when Pence signed it into law, I don't doubt that enabling antigay discrimination was their intention.  (Though they'd probably be quite happy if it could be used against Muslims, Jews, Wiccans, atheists, and others.)  But the intentions of a law's framers don't determine much.

Take the the Equal Access Act of 1984 (via), passed during the Reagan administration to force public schools to allow students to use their facilities for prayer and Bible-study groups.  In those heady days, when the Christian Right saw Reagan as their Vindicator who would make the whole world bend the knee to Christ as they conceived of him, it's not surprising that the bill's sponsors and supporters dismissed concerns that it could be used by secularists and homosexuals and others they disliked.  But the EEA turned out to be the "single most important tool available"* to the Gay-Straight Alliances that spread across the US in the 1990s.

Returning to the RFRAs: the Federal version was intended to protect minority religious groups, notably Native Americans.  It failed to do so.  First the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional as it applied to actions by the states, while sustaining it at the Federal level.  Then it turned out that Native Americans who used peyote in religious rituals were still running afoul of law enforcement, so the law had to be amended in very specific language: "the use, possession, or transportation of peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremony purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian religion is lawful, and shall not be prohibited by the United States or any state. No Indian shall be penalized or discriminated against on the basis of such use, possession or transportation."

The authors of the Indiana RFRA learned from the failures of other state RFRAs. Its provision that government entities need not be involved to make a case for infringement of religious freedom, for example, was evidently inspired by a court's rejection of such a case involving a private business in New Mexico.  The Indiana bill attempts to plug that hole.  Whether the courts will accept this plug will have to be seen.  Again, the critics of the Indiana law ignored such issues until their noses were rubbed in them, and then they still preferred to focus on its nonexistent "license to discriminate against gays" aspect.

Some unexpected and unwelcome invocations of religious freedom have been turning up even before the Indiana RFRA was passed.  Some were meant seriously, others humorously, but they were no less educational for all that.  One example that got a lot of press was the "nearly nine-foot-tall bronzed statue of a Baphomet, a goat-headed idol seated on a throne before two children, which [the Satanic Temple] plans to erect in the Oklahoma Capitol."  I hope that creative interventions like this will proliferate, letting the Christian Right and the American public know just what a Pandora's box the RFRAs will open.  While the intention of the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration act was certainly bad, the intentions of many of its critics are also suspect as far as I can tell.

Next: the backlash.
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*Melinda Miceli, Standing Out, Standing Together: The Social and Political Aspects of Gay-Straight Alliances (Routledge, 2005), page 39.

Toleration for Me, But Not for Thee!

The point I was driving at in yesterday's post was not only that anyone who tries to silence someone else on the grounds that the latter is an "asshole" who utters "bullshit" has discredited him or herself as a rational person, but that allowing such complaints to affect public discussions (whether in "private" or "public" environments) will severely limit, if not destroy, free speech in our society.  You don't like what I say?  Complain to my employer or to my web host that I'm an asshole!  If enough people complain, I'll be fired and my blog deleted.  Social conservatives won't be the only ones who will be silenced; anyone who offends enough people will also be removed from the public eye, because private employers and companies aren't required to protect freedom of expression except their own, not that of their employees -- and a newscaster or a columnist or a variety show host is an employee, who's employed at the will and pleasure of his or her employer.

This evidently doesn't worry the people who try to silence others, either because they believe they have the power to protect themselves or because they don't realize that their blogs, their tumblrs, their Twitter feeds, their Facebook accounts, are private rather than "public" media -- until they run up against the limits of corporate tolerance.  Corporate tolerance is limited by public pressure, and you never know when your boss or web host will decide you're more trouble than you're worth.  (Not that it's very different in the increasingly corporate world of government: just ask Shirley Sherrod, for one.)  And it's not even necessary to construct an argument: according to that xkcd cartoon and the liberals who spread it around the Internet, it's enough that someone thinks you're an asshole and your opinions are bullshit.  Your (and my) freedom of expression consists of freedom from government action against you, limited though that is by legal restrictions but also because there are fewer and fewer venues not under corporate ownership and control nowadays.  Public sites like parks are increasingly privatized, so you have no guarantee of freedom of assembly or expression there.  The police will silence you, not because the government doesn't like you, but because the owner of the site doesn't like you; besides, you're only an asshole.

Now, granted that there is a rational case to be made against Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla; in yesterday's post I linked to some people who attempted to make one.  Because Eich participated by donation in the Proposition 8 campaign against same-sex marriage in California, he arguably took a step beyond speech into action against the rights of other citizens -- though as I argued, such action is and should be protected by law to some extent, an extent which can be debated but isn't clearly marked out anywhere.  And as CEO he does have a representative function where his political opinions and actions might be the concern of Mozilla.

It occurs to me, though, that the same "employees have no rights" line was used by the critics of Phil Robertson, Paula Deen, and others, though their offense was limited to speech.  Stupid, bigoted speech, true, but speech nonetheless, and it's one of the pillars of free speech doctrine that speech is not (necessarily) action.  It also occurs to me that the idea that every performer in corporate media represents the corporate owner, who is therefore responsible for their every word and thought, is very similar to the claim advanced by religious opponents of same-sex marriage, who claim that taking money to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple amounts to endorsement and acceptance, even celebration of their marriage.  Some writers pointed out quite simply that no, baking a cake for a wedding doesn't constitute endorsement of the coupling.  In the same way, my buying used books from the shop of a right-wing acquaintance of mine doesn't constitute endorsement of or agreement with his often fascist opinions -- just as his occasional part-time employment of me doesn't constitute agreement with or endorsement of my America-hating, Communist opinions.  I pick on him constantly, but I still do business with him.  I might consider changing that policy if he crossed some line or other, but I can't think at the moment of what the line would be.

A writer at Slate asked, rhetorically but seriously, why, if conservatives are so upset by the plight of Brendan Eich, they don't also concern themselves with ordinary Americans.  It's a good article.  But it works both ways.  The liberals who howled for Eich's removal, justifying it because he works for a private company, must also explain why they think lower-profile employees shouldn't be subject to the discretion of their private employers.  If customers complain about a salesperson's visible tattoos or piercings, for example, shouldn't that be grounds for firing her?  After all, it's not like the government is picking on her.  Or if a business loses customers (or is afraid it will lose customers) who don't want to deal with a black clerk, or a female doctor, it's not the business's fault; shouldn't employers be allowed to comply with (their fantasies about) public opinion?

As the Slate writer points out, in most of the US a private employer can discriminate in employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender "identity."  Instead of acknowledging that private employees have no freedom in such areas, many people are working to limit the rights of private employers by passing a law forbidding such discrimination.  The excuse is largely that sexual orientation or gender identity is not a "choice" but something innate and therefore should be protected against discrimination, an excuse which is doubtful for various reasons; but the key point is that private employers do not have total license to cave in to public complaints about what the public considers unacceptable employees, and their freedom to do so is not written in stone but can change.  Where to draw the line is not clear either; it is a matter of judgment, and as such needs to be debated as rationally as possible.  That's not going to be easy, but it's necessary.  And it's odd to see many liberals and progressives suddenly so solicitous about the power businesses have over their employees.