Well, that's kind of the problem. How do you define "hate speech"? The devil is in the details. Those who support these laws are expressing deeply held beliefs. I don't think that is hate speech. Those feelings are offensive to many, but offensiveness isn't hate speech. It's a fine line, and frankly I'm not sure where that line is crossed. But both sides need to be careful here. As I said in the OP, this is a silly, stupid, and discriminatory law. This is a law in search of a problem - a problem that doesn't exist. It's a disgusting piece of regulation fomented by Republicans who claim to be against regulation. If Republicans are true to form, legislation like this will pop up now in other Republican controlled states. That will only be mitigated by the economic consequences of this law. The bad news is Republicans have shown they are willing to endure much economic pain in order to advance their ideology (e.g. Medicare expansion, Obama's economic stimulus, etc.).
It is hate speech when one's deeply held beliefs are negatively expressed in a bid to curtail the rights and freedoms of a group of people based on sex, creed, race, nationality, colour or orientation.
I think the question isn't whether it's hate speech, the question is whether it's discrimination based on peoples' innate characteristics, and my answer is, yes, yes it is. I see this as no different from having black vs. white bathrooms. It invites discrimination and potentially a violent encounter in the restroom when someone dressed as a woman with visible breasts and wearing lipstick is forced to enter the men's restroom just because she was born with a penis, and vice versa.
Fine Lines Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Click to rock. Okay: (1) The proposition arises that preventing injustice is itself unjust. (↑) (2) A counterpoint is offered that liberty does not require injustice. (↑) (3) An objection is argued, that preventing injustice is itself unjust. (↑) I have to admit it's quite amazing; years have passed since I last encountered someone actually explicitly arguing what CosmicTraveler just tried. Thus, for the record: → Equality is not supremacy. → It is not racist to tell the white supremacist to knock it off. → It is not sex discrimination to tell the sexual harasser to knock it off. → It is not religious discrimination to say Christians can't be the arbiters of other people's rights under the U.S. Constitutiion. → Civilized society is not a suicide pact. Right of conscience does not include empowerment to cause harm to others. So let's think about sincerely held beliefs. • Proposition: My equally protected rights as a Christian are violated as long as your equally protected rights as a non-Christian are intact. ↳ We've heard versions of this argument in diverse issues over the years; it is the heart of censorship, a key component of the Gay Fray, and a perpetual lamentation about uppity women. The examples are clear: Book burnings and music censorship in the eighties; gay rights in the nineties and new century, leading up to Kim Davis and continuing into the morality police idea that has self-righteous men following women into restrooms in order to give them permission to urinate or defecate; in the twenty-first century we skipped back to the future and are now having right of conscience arguments over who gets to decide whether a woman is allowed acces to birth control. Question: Is it just and proper that a Christian's sincerely held belief should require you to forfeit your constitutional rights? Are you oppressing Christianity if you do not give over those rights? Are you anti-Christian for insisting that you have the right to free speech, equal protection under the law, and primary authority over your own body? Do you believe you have human rights? Why would you be such an anti-Christian bigot as to say you do? If that last seems amiss, yeah, that's the point; it's supposed to. There are other versions of this in history, all the way down to the schoolyard. You're of a generation that remembers how some of our fathers actually took us aside to teach us how to fight; is it unfair to estimate that you are familiar with the idea that you deal with a bully by standing up to him? For many of my generation, though, it was a raw deal. Standing up to the bully worked well enough as long as both bully and victim were of the empowered class―that is, if it was a dispute between two white kids because one is short and scrawny, yeah, Mr. Bully, you better be careful that he doesn't haul off and hit you back. If the bullying was racism, religious supremacism, or otherwise a cultural dispute, it was the obligation of the minority to try harder to fit in. And somewhere in between my youth, the rise in school shootings, and the It Gets Better anti-bullying campaign, our society tried to make certain progress but seems to have skipped some steps. It isn't just one generation of school administrators dying out and a new one taking over and doing things their own way; schools have pretty much been cornered. Spectacular massacres are one thing, but the daily grind of potential lawsuits and liability exposure is what we're not talking about. We're trying to perform a transition without discussing what we're doing and why. The reason we're doing it this way is inextricably tied to the sincerely held beliefs of bullies. There is a bunch of stuff people don't want to say about themselves, how they see others, and what is happening in society. Here's an example: In my youth, the prevailing societal discourse still held violence among black communities in a range by which it was at least acceptable to postulate such outcomes indicated fundamental human inferiority; 'twixt then and now we learned a few things about how human beings work, both in and of themselves and within community dynamics. You've witnessed the transformation to discussing economic and social justice; the chaos and damage we focus on in some minority communities is inextricably tied to human behavior under circumstances describing poverty, oppression, and alienation. The discussion always stalls at the sins of the empowerment class; this becomes a rhetorical battle line. And as Justice creeps into the gaps with e'er more nuanced comprehension of people and society, the fundamental argument against such change always comes down to the difference between black and white, or male and female, or Christian and everybody else. In the late nineties through the Lawrence decision in 2003, there was a curious class of middle-bloc voters and voices in the Gay Fray. These were neighbors who ostensibly conceded gay rights, but prescribed that society needed to "slow down" because the transformation was "happening too fast" and that "made people uncomfortable". In other words: Sure, equal rights, but that scares supremacists, so we need you to wait until they're comfortable. The underlying principle will assert itself again and again; we'll hear it in police and criminal sentencing reform, and other human rights considerations such as we've encountered about women, homosexuals, and the transgendered. The thing about deeply or sincerely held beliefs is that such principles cannot in function require others to forfeit rights. It's like the bit about birth control: Don't like oral contraception? Don't use it. Or marriage equality: Don't like gay marriage? Don't marry a gay partner. It seems easy enough: I will never be a Christian, but in these United States in particular and generally throughout the human endeavor, it is exactly not my place to tell anyone else they can't be. Reverse that formulation, and it ought to be enough, except it apparently isn't. And maybe it seems particularly obscure to recall the book burnings and music wars, but those are the same arguments we hear deployed today: Your rights end where my comfort chooses to wander. This is the underlying driver, and yet says nothing about, as it happens, Wellwisher's argument↑, but, really, we could use a couple other names from around here, and there are plenty in the larger public discourse, too. What's interesting is that he's not necessarily wrong: The entire transgender issue is a social experiment to see if it is possible to suppress intelligence in favor of morons. This test will continue to escalate to see just how far one can lead morons down the rabbit hole. This will also show just how far the morons will go, to force even smart common sense people down the hole. The thing is that the point is actually just an excuse to call people morons. But if we look at the extraordinary legal doctrine asserted in traditionalist objections to the human rights of the trangendered, our hatemongering neighbor isn't entirely wrong. Then again, that's the problem with scratching the itch to call people morons; I have my own opinions about Kim Davis and Mat Staver, but I would still like to think some of this is just bound up in an identity crisis among Christians as they undergo a transformation from superior under law to merely equal. That is, I would rather most of this moronic craziness be neurotically symptomatic than conscious and calculated supremacist hatred, or simple genuine stupidity. Either way, though, it's still dangerous behavior that really does look like any excuse to whip it out, or, any excuse to get a peek, or even, any excuse to exercise my right of conscience to compel a woman to ask me permission to urinate and defecate. It's one thing if someone is actually making an argument, but we all know already that this poster pretty much exists as a user ID in order to say outrageous and inflammatory things. The equivocation our neighbor proposes―"Doesn't that make you about the same because you now want to control what others think and want to not allow them to speak"―ignores basic function, and that doesn't even begin to account for the projected exaggeration of "what others think". But the functional result is that you're throwing in with one's right to go out of his way to harm others with deliberately belligerent and inflammatory behavior. I don't see any fine-line consideration here, nor "both sides". The old bigotries are over. This is the new reality. Asking people to wait for justice simply because a bigot is uncomfortable with the prospect is officially passé. If their distress is that a sincerely held belief requiring harm unto others no longer finds credibility in the discourse, that is their own damn problem and should not need to be anyone else's.
Damn well said, Tiassa. Your point about deeply held beliefs not being license to suppress others' rights is, I think, the center of the argument. It's a personal problem, and people with deeply held beliefs that appear to require them to suppress the rights of others need to get that worked out or they are behaving antisocially. Oh, and nice rock.
Say for the sake of argument a person sincerely believes they are a cross gender person. Or say someone sincerely believes they have wings and can fly. Say someone else sincerely believes this is not real. Why does the feelings the first and second person get to trump the feelings of the third, if all have personal feelings? Why is the feelings of one type, more important than the other? The normal way to decide is allow all to have feelings and then have the people vote; the majority of feelings decides. The current scam is about allowing a small group to control the majority, by discounting the feelings of the majority, by deeming the feelings of the small group to be worth more. If you do the math the rights of a cross gender counts 1000 times as much as anyone else. People, like myself, who resist, do so, not because of hate, but to get a fair shake. If I don't agree, I am a hater so my feeling count as zero. I am getting ripped off! If the majority does not feel comfortable using the same restroom with someone who feels they are not what their generics say they are, their voice should not be discounted. The entire transgender issue is a social experiment to see if it is possible to suppress intelligence in favor of morons. This test will continue to escalate to see just how far one can lead morons down the rabbit hole. This will also show just how far the morons will go, to force even smart common sense people down the hole. In this case, part of the dumbing down process has to do with deprogramming math skills. One is not allowed to add the feelings of people who do not vote democrat or who stay in touch with reality. If you don't go down the hole, your feelings don't count.
This analogy fails because the person who thinks they can fly is not prevented from doing so by societal laws or social mores; they can shake their fist at physics or the universe if they like, but this will make no difference to whether they can fly or not. I don't see where anybody gets to vote on whether they can fly. And if they really could fly, more power to 'em in my view. Furthermore I'd oppose any law saying they weren't allowed to fly if they could. You've forgotten a basic tenet of the constitution, which is that the majority doesn't get to have tyranny over the minority by making laws that exclude them from society. This is clearest from the free exercise and establishment clauses in the Second Amendment regarding religion. You can have a religion if you want; you can't stop others from having any other religion or no religion if they want. Most especially you can't make a law about it, either prohibiting (free exercise) or mandating (establishment) the exercise of any particular religion. It's not a "scam;" it's to protect the minority from tyranny of the majority and to be inclusive of people with different beliefs than the majority. And it has been found that you also cannot make laws about peoples' race, or their or their forebears' national origin, or their creed, or their status as handicapped, or any other intrinsic belief or characteristic. This also protects your religion, and pretending you don't need it because you happen to be in the majority right now is shortsighted, as well as tyrannous, insensitive, and quite likely ingenuous (though I cannot state the last as a certainty since I cannot know your mind). You're not allowed to vote that Muslims can't use your restrooms either. Get over it. Then you're getting ripped off just as much by not being able to keep Muslims out of your restrooms either. Sorry, that's one of the things you have to give up if you want to be a US citizen. If you don't like it leave and go found your own country with a bunch of laws about what religion people can be. For that matter you can see if you can find one that likes your religion; good luck with that, most of the places you'd want to live realized a long time ago that wasn't very bright and led to religious wars. If it imposes tyranny of the majority on the minority, that makes it your personal problem, and sorry but we're not going to make laws in order to help you cope with reality. Get over it. You don't get to vote to impose tyranny on some class because you don't like their opinion, at least not in the US. Feel free to leave and go live somewhere they allow that.
Well put. I've usually used the argument that, when a police officer needs to use violence to subdue a criminal, they are not committing an assault. (It's not the best argument, because in reality sometimes it does go above and beyond upholding the law). But the point stands: restoring justice is not in-and-of-itself committing an injustice. Yes, we are certainly morally in-the-right in shutting up hate speech.
No. It is not a 'right' to not be uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable certainly does not trump someone's else's basic human rights. And the majority's opinion does not trump the basic human rights of even a single person. Such fallacious logic was banished over a half century ago. Which is why blacks are allowed to sit on the bus anywhere they want.
That sounds a lot like the argument used to suppress blacks and other minorities for more than a century after the Civil War.
Any Excuse Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Well, come on, it is the American Family Association, after all. A director for the American Family Association says it has been sending men into women's restrooms at Target stores in response to the company's new transgender-friendly policy. A director for the American Family Association (AFA) says it's sending men into the women's restrooms at Target stores to test its barriers after the retail giant announced that its facilities will be transgender friendly. Sandy Rios, the director of government affairs for the AFA, revealed her group's agenda in a radio interview Monday. Speaking on "Breitbart News Daily," Rios said the group's concerned that women and children could be victimized by men who enter female restrooms while falsely claiming to be transgender. "The chief concern, even more than just, I think, trauma, certainly for little girls of having men dressed like women coming in their bathrooms, the chief concern of the American Family Association is the predators who will take advantage,” she said. (Golgowski↱) I actually had this discussion with a conservative of my local acquaintance; he suggested an uptick in these bathroom incidents, expressed his fear for the little girls and defenseless women, and then became utterly confused when I pointed out that these are all allegedly "Christian" and "conservative" men defending "family values" by these acts. That is to say: We want you to believe there's a problem. We will go out and create that problem. Then we will tell you we were always right. I didn't bother asking my Seventh-Day Adventist neighbor if it would be simpler to just bar Christians from using public restrooms. Honestly, how many people run around these days pretending to be Chr― .... Oh. Bottom line, the AFA are the predators today. Just like the moralist in Fayetteville↱ and the morality patrols↱ demanding women prove they have the right to urinate. Predatory perverts. These people are dangerous. ____________________ Notes: Golgowski, Nina. "'Family' Group Says It's Now Sending Men Into Target's Women's Restrooms". The Huffington Post. 2 May 2016. HuffingtonPost.com. 2 May 2016. http://huff.to/1VHp4up
Lone Star Virtue Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Via Dallas Observer↱: Case in point: the man who, um, heroically barged into a women's restroom at Baylor Medical Center in Frisco on Thursday to make sure that Jessica Rush, who manages a local health-food takeout place, was peeing in the proper place. She was, for the record, and her situation isn't particularly complicated. Rush was born and identifies as female and has no plans to change that. "I look very much like a girl," she says. "I'm not trying to transition, nothing like that." But Rush wears her hair in a bleached blond fauxhawk and dresses androgynously. On Thursday, she was wearing a T-shirt from her alma mater, Texas Tech, with basketball shorts. As the man at Baylor explained after walking into the restroom behind her, it's all very confusing. Apparently, the restroom harsser claimed he was just looking out for his mother, who might need to use the restroom later. The unfortunate but all too predictable incident occurred only days after a candidate for Denton County Sheriff publicly apologized↱ for a Facebook post invoking violence against transgender↱. Yeah. Texas. What, is it time for me to make the occasional joke about secessionist mutterings in Texas↱, that this time around we really ought to let them go? Sorry, America, Texas just isn't that into you, anymore. They've got better things to do, like trying to force women to establish their right to urinate. ____________________ Notes: McPhate, Christian. "Denton County GOP Sheriff Candidate Tracy Murphree Calls for Violence Against Transgender People Needing to Pee". Dallas Observer. 22 April 2016. DallasObserver.com. 2 May 2016. http://bit.ly/1pXnnLf —————. "Denton County Sheriff Candidate Apologizes for Saying He'd Beat a Transgender Woman". Dallas Observer. 26 April 2016. DallasObserver.com. 2 May 2016. http://bit.ly/1pXnnLf Nicholson, Eric. "Self-Appointed Bathroom Cop Catches Dallas Woman Using Women's Restroom". Dallas Observer. 29 April 2016. DallasObserver.com. 2 May 2016. http://bit.ly/1TrOXs3
cosmictraveler: No. I'd just rather not listen to bigots. Once it has been established that somebody has just got an irrational prejudice rather than a reasoned opinion, and that they aren't amenable to listening to any other point of view, there's really not much point in engaging with them any further. I haven't suppressed wellwisher's bigoted view in any way. It is right there in the thread for you to read. You're free to make your own judgment about him. I don't know where you're getting this stuff from. I merely asked wellwisher to keep his bigotry to himself, as a matter of courtesy to the rest of us. I don't want to control what he thinks, and even if I did how could I possibly go about achieving that? I said nothing about not allowing him to speak. He is, however, butting up against our rules regarding hate speech. Not quite there yet, but we'll see. Actions speak louder than words. The fact is: nobody is censoring wellwisher here, regardless of what you imagine I might or might not rather have happen.
I don't think so. In some cultures the idea of a difference of sex and gender was known for a pretty long time. E.g. in some tribes the role of "king" has male gender. It didn't stop those tribes to have biological females as kings - they were supposed to dress as man, and be addressed as man while on representative duties. They still could be married to a (biological) man and take the female role in family. They knew a spearation of biology, and role in the family and occupation. Some roles came with a fixed gender, and the person to take the role had to adapt to that. And I know enough manly women to be sure it worked, vise versa there are enough womenly man as well. Demanding that biological sex and the social role or behaviour of a person must be in sync jumps too short. Reality is more complex. These days it became even more complicated, since surgery allows to adapt biology to some extend. So it became even more fluid, not only the behaviour or role of a person can be independant from their biological sex, they are even able to change their sex by an operation. I think it's time to accept all this. Our world is complex. Trying to force it into a simple scheme with only two categories is inadequate in this case and doesn't do justice to reality - it just causes pain and problems for the people who do not fit in the categories. At times I think that unisex restrooms are the only way to solve the problem, because all the other regulations cause more problems than they solve. Good behaviour is something that laws cannot solve, this is an education issue and a matter of socialisation. We'll get used to unisex restrooms, and there will be some etiquette established how to behave, and things will be fine from that point.
By telling others to not post their opinions isn't the way to handle them Tell them exactly why they are wrong, to you, and give them things that would make them see your side of the problem.
Mod Hat ― Necessary clarification As some abstract principle, you might have a point; we would prefer people learn what is wrong with their argument than slink away embittered. To the other, something about the definition of insanity goes here. Wellwisher is not new to our community, has shown no desire to learn from his mistakes, and goes out of his way to be offensive unto others without offering anything of substance to support his overworn excuses for argumentation. Naturally, when it comes right down to it, there's always some joker who wants to ignore reality and the historical record in order to posture fake self-righteous humility. "Give them things that would make them see your side of the problem"? That presumes they're paying attention. And propositions such as yours are functionally problematic when they so ignore reality as to require people presuppose the opposite of what is observed. As it is, Wellwisher has repeatedly been reminded of his bigotry and why it is unacceptable; to presume some manner of argument or coddling will actually bring him around is, observationally speaking, an extraordinary assertion. So now he's going to lose any of that, and simply face moderator action for future transgressions. We're actually well overdue, having extended years worth of opportunities to correct his behavior. He has a history; we don't need to pretend a blank slate, and, furthermore, it would seem exactly counterproductive to do so.
Chicago Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! While conservatives celebrate regression, hatred, and sexual harassment in places like North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, other Americans are simply trying to move on with American life: Chicago Public Schools released the rules Tuesday, saying they'll ensure that transgender students and those "questioning their gender identity" won't be denied access to the same education opportunities as their peers, including overnight field trips. The guidelines say additional accommodations will be assessed on an individual basis. (Associated Press↱) The nation's third largest public school district just said no to supremacism and hatred. And, you know, the problem with taunting the supremacists by saying, "Sorry, predatory perverts, not today!" is that civilized society is not, in fact, sorry about its commitment to justice and equality. ____________________ Notes: Associated Press. "Chicago: Students can access bathrooms by 'gender identity'". 3 May 2016. Hosted.AP.org. 3 May 2016. http://apne.ws/23mAi6P
I'd like to tell him exactly why he is wrong, but it's hard to know how to respond to a claim like: "The entire transgender issue is a social experiment to see if it is possible to suppress intelligence in favor of morons." - wellwisher I mean, what is he actually saying here? To me, it sounds like he is just taking the opportunity to call anybody who supports the idea of gender-appropriate restrooms a moron. And his justification for that is ... what? Nothing as far as I can tell, except that the idea of members of a minority having the same rights as the rest of us makes him uncomfortable.
What I am saying can be better explained with an example. Say someone believes they have wings and can fly. This person has believed this since they were a child. There are many cases of small children who pretend to fly around the house. They were not born with wings but they will still pretend to fly. Maybe their mothers might go along. She sees no harm to going along with his imaginary play, because it makes her child feel good and he seems happy. If this play fantasy of flying continues into young adulthood, fewer people will just go long, accept maybe the mother who had been unknowingly encouraging this game. Scientific and social common sense would not just create a new law of science that accepts the claim of the flying man, especially if all the physical evidence says there are no wings on his back, even if he believes. Say the family loves their son and brother and are able to generate enough local peer pressure to make everyone to go along with the claim the adult can fly, simply because that person believes they have wings. This who retain common sense, who point out there are no wings, will need to be called hateful. The truth will not spare his feelings. They place feelings ahead of common sense, in an attempt to pressure these doubters to conform, so they will reinforce the subjective delusion. People will be willing to let their intelligence to take a nose dive, to avoid the stigma of the peer pressure and not hurt feelings. Maybe the term moron is insulting, but sometimes people need a slap in the face to help them wake up. The scientific community needs to stand firm until a time where the scientific evidence is overwhelming for wings. It is not healthy to encourage insanity even if it makes people feel good. Feelings should not come first if it conflicts with common sense. Say a new surgery procedure appears, where they can attach wings onto people. It is really expensive so the mother and her older son push for insurance to cover it. They don't push for treatment for his delusion, since that is hateful; hurt his feelings. After this expensive operation, now the person has indeed have wings. Does this change anything in terms of a scientist? Are modern scientists unable to distinguish between natural and artificial? Why doesn't science just accept the concept of God? There are more people who believe in God than there are transgender people. Neither God or Transgender can be definitively proven based solely on physical evidence. Why does liberal culture stop short of allowing anything subjective to trump the common sense of science? Is there a goal in mind? Forcing the majority to conform to the subjectivity of a subjective minority does not make sense unless the goal is a world of morons, who can be lead to believe anything. What is the advantage of having a world of morons to be who can be pressured away from their common sense? I don't mind if people have subjective beliefs. Imagination is a wonderful thing. If someone believes they wings, let them have fun. But where I draw the line is being forced by culture to go along, with common sense called hating; truth can hurt fantasy. What good is a science education if it can be trumped by collective insanity? Feelings are important but common sense is even more important.
