[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Toughy

I do not have any idea of any other way to say that hate speech under the guise of religion is wrong. That is not a 'get rid of religion' or 'anti-religion' statement.

Seems to me that the sentence "hate speech under the guise of religion is wrong" is a more accurate way of stating it than the statement I quoted in your prior post where you expressed a desire that Benny Hinn not be able to broadcast his bile. I won't belabor the point, however.

There are reasonable hate speech laws across the world. Canada has them, France, Germany etc. We do not have to let those hate mongers preach on TV or anywhere else. We can stop them and we should. Everyone knows what hate speech sounds like.

I'm not sure that everyone does. I have heard a lot of people make statements that I'm reasonably certain they would go to their graves denying was hate speech. Listen to Afrocentrists talk about homosexuals for a few moments and you will hear some of the most virulently hateful speech. Yet, I doubt that these Afrocentric bigots would say that they are operating out of hate, rather they would say they were operating out of 'love for African peoples'. I'm not saying we should not revisit the question of what constitutes incitement to violence. That is a conversation worth having. But that's a far cry from saying that everyone knows or agrees on what hate speech sounds like.

Blaming queers (or blacks or brown or red or immigrants or ______) for 9/11, lack of jobs, a crappy economy, crime, the recent earthquakes and every other frigging disaster is hate speech and incites violence against queers and/or whomever is the flavor of the day. It should be illegal. Fines and/or jail time should be imposed. Religion should not be a free pass for hate speech. Free speech is not limitless....you can't yell 'fire' in a theater. Universities policies that enforce hate and hate speech towards anyone should not be allowed to do that......whether they be public, private or religious. I repeat one more time, hate speech under the guise of religion should not get a free pass.

No one is saying it should, Toughy. Go back through the thread from first word to last and you will find not a single post that could be read, in even the most generous *possible* interpretation, as saying that religion should get a free pass. Toughy have you *ever* heard me make a statement that is even in the same ballpark as "religion should get a free pass" for *anything*? Me?

Beating or killing someone while you yell 'faggot' or 'dyke' is considered a hate crime. It looks like hate speech to me. Why should hate speech be different when it comes out of a preacher's mouth?

Beating or killing someone, well, it violates their bodily integrity or it takes their life or both. Speech does not violate your bodily integrity (you have NO right to have your ears never be polluted by speech you do not care for) and it doesn't take your life.

It is the difference between:

Zoroastrians practice an outmoded, barbaric bronze age religion with as much claim to truth as a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

and

Zoroastrians practice an outmoded, barbaric bronze age religion that offends society. Let us be done with Zoroastrians once and for all time by offering them the choice of conversion or death. Hey, there's some over there right now. Let's go get them!

We should not allow so-called therapists to get away with reparative therapy. It is utter bullshit.

Yes. You will note that not a *single* major professional organization that has any reason to be taken seriously on the matter states that reparative therapy has any efficacy what-so-ever. The American Psychological Association hasn't. The AMA doesn't. The National Academy of Science condemns it as does the National Science Foundation. The situation with the mental health and social work professional organizations, as well as any part of the evidence-based medicine community, is so arrayed against the Christian mental health community that the latter has had to form their *OWN* organizations and create their OWN journals so that they can say that articles have been published showing that reparative therapy works. But one must note that not a *single* peer-reviewed journal has published an article favorable to reparative therapy in recent memory. RT has as much cache as Intelligent Design within the mainstream, consensus body of science and evidence-based medicine. This being, none at all.

Queerness is not a disease or a mental illness and should not be treated as such. Since the medical profession has a damn hard time policing it's own, perhaps malpractice or criminal charges should be considered. Why is the government paying for reparative therapy through medicaid/medicare? It's not a legitimate therapy and is not based on good science.

I don't know why the government is doing that. The government will *also* pay for all manner of New Age therapies that are no more effective than RT. Several leap to mind but I won't belabor the point.

This country is also about protecting the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

Yes, Toughy, and that is my point PRECISELY! For the first time you are acknowledging--tacitly but nevertheless acknowledgement--that there are trade-offs. There are *costs* and that is what you have studiously ignored up to this point. Yes, democratic republics must be responsive to the will of the majority--up to a point--but at that line then the priority must switch from the will of the majority to the rights of the minority. Now, here is where the tension comes in. We either have to argue that society should change itself because we are in the minority and our rights are being violated (this is, essentially, the reform path) OR we have to build a majority that believes as you do (in which case you now have the opposite problem of protecting the rights of the minority). But there's a cost no matter what you do.

So the question then becomes about what kind of process costs are you willing to countenance.

Understand, I'm not saying that what revolution has costs while reform has no costs. I'm saying that while reform makes costs part of the equation, my reading of history and my own experience in Marxist, Trotskyite and anarchist circles has taught me that revolutionaries never really count the costs. Their vision is SO pure and so self-evidently true and beautiful that there can be no costs worth considering. Except that there are *always* costs, Toughy. There's no escaping it. The saying that there's no such thing as a free lunch applies as much to societies as it does to individuals.

That is probably because I do not believe in assimilation.

See, Toughy, I DO believe in assimilation. I believe in it because I watched it work. I see the difference between the lives my parent's built and the lives that less assimilated blacks built. One of those lives led to a course that when both my parents were dead, they were able to leave my sister and I property. The other led to a rather different outcome. You met me *because* I am assimilated. I have the job I do *because* I am assimilated. I grew up in the neighborhood I did, went to the schools I did from Kindergarten to college *because* my parents assimilated and they taught my sister and I their ways. Whatever good reputation I have here in this community is because of how I communicate and that is a *direct result* of my assimilating. Even when I was in the Army, I was where I was because I was assimilated. You may not believe in assimilation. You may not think it works. You may not think that people should *have* to assimilate but if you think that, I will say to you what I say to libertarians; great idea, wrong species. To live in a society, to live in a community, IS to be subject to community mores and norms. That is part of their function is to train people in ways so that they are able to get along more easily. If we were more like orangutans and less like chimpanzees then the idea of assimilation wouldn't be so intuitively obvious and there would be far less social pressure to do so. If I interact with another of my species once every few months, perhaps, and the rest of the time we all pretty much go our separate ways then it really doesn't matter HOW any one of us behaves because contact is minimal and the need for cooperation is equally minimal.

On the other hand, if you live in close proximity of others of your species AND there is a high degree of need for cooperation then norms and mores become important and society then ups the ante for certain types of non-conformity. That is where we find ourselves, Toughy. So no matter WHAT kind of society one builds, there will ALWAYS be a need to assimilate to it. Even a society that claims that there's no need to assimilate at all will find, inexorably, that anyone who believes that there are, for instance, right ways of behaving and wrong ways of behaving, better or worse ways of doing things, is pushed to the margins of society if only because the presence of someone constantly saying "you say everyone can do as they please, but that's not true because *I* can't" spoils the collective illusion of harmony.


Cheers
Aj