The Patchwork Principle
Gustav said:
so the question becomes, do we at sciforums attempt to be a place where objective and rational discourse occurs or a place where populist sentiments run amok, captive to every whim and fancy of the faddish rhetoric that rises and falls?
In 2008, "Palintology" offended some of Sarah Palin's supporters. In 2009, we semi-officially struck "teabagger". We've also rejected abuse of anti-Obama terms such as "Obamassiah" and "The One".
What we're into, along those lines, is a clumsy arrangement of patchwork solutions.
Over the years, we've considered whether or not it's appropriate for an evangelical Christian to attribute the opposition to ultimate evil: Are we of the Devil's brood?
And we've let religous rivalries carry on to the point that atheists and theists are often slinging massive, inappropriate generalizations at one another.
One puzzle facing the staff at present is how to keep track of all the quirks and ad hoc rules we've applied over the years. At some point, we have to acknowledge that we've been going about this wrongly.
The way I see it—and this is
strictly the way I see it, and should not be construed as an official site perspective—is that we've been operating at the most simple valence of rhetoric and offense. For instance, is a term designed to be offensive and derogatory, or is that just the effect it has on some people?
I have an ongoing dispute, for instance, with one of my fellows on staff, about whether or not it is appropriate to identify and explain genuinely perceived bigotry. In this, the simple valence is that it is offensive to be called a racist or sexist or homophobe. A slightly more complex consideration would be to examine whether or not the label is reasonably applied. That is,
A asserts bigotry of
B, and
B is offended, so we should strike
A's assertion and explanation of perceived bigotry. But, to the other, what if
A is reasonably correct? Now, maybe
B doesn't
intend to be a bigot, but that's also a long staple of bigotry, too.
I frequently offend my conservative neighbors, but at some point, in my opinion, a hard, perhaps even shocking question such as, "What is it with conservatives and rape advocacy?" might seem appropriate to me. To wit, Republicans almost elected to the U.S. Senate a Colorado prosecutor who refused to prosecute an open-and-shut rape case (he had a confession) because he felt it was somehow the victim's fault. Congressional Republicans this year attempted to
redefine rape in order to exclude statutory rape. That is, they didn't want to explicitly exclude statutory rape, so instead wrote bill content that would hae that effect. It was a fairly naked attempt. A Massachusetts Republican recently expressed that an immigrant's status rightly should discourage an illegal from reporting a rape, explaining, "If you weren't here, the crime wouldn't happen." And when a group, ideology, or identity consistently lands on the wrong side of an issue, at what point do we start to wonder if it's more than simple coincidence?
But the idea of Republicans as rape advocates is offensive, is it not? At least, to Republicans? What it comes down to is that there is a range of behaviors that qualify as rape, and it turns out a good number of Republicans either would like to, or simply wouldn't mind if, that range of qualifying behaviors was narrowed some. What is the threshold, here? At what point does one say, "I'm sorry if you're offended, but ..."?
I mean, at this point, I'm not even reaching to the couple of east-coast state legislators who each, in their own turn, argued that pregnancy by rape is impossible; one attempted to use his medical credentials to explain to the people that, "The juices just aren't flowin'." Those were over a decade ago; we have plenty of examples from more recent years.
One might look at the American sex wars in political culture and wonder a few things that conservatives find offensive. We can point to Pam Stenzel, a Bush-administration abstinence advocate who is perfectly willing to admit, in a roomful of fellow evangelicals, that she doesn't care whether or not her program works. We can point to Utah, where the question isn't whether the state can force a school to teach sex ed, but whether the schools should be allowed to teach sex ed. And the answer is no. And a teenager in Utah is statistically more likely to contract a sexually transmitted disease, such as chlamydia, than a common illness like the flu. We might look at Ted Haggard, who ended up snorting meth out of his gay hooker's ass, and then, after his public disgrace, fell in with a con-artist charity run by a registered sex offender. Or Dr. George Rekers, a founder of NARTH who ended up in a scandal not so long ago having his "luggage lifted" by a twenty-something gay prostitute he took on a vacation to Europe.
And it's actually worth noting the famous Democratic Party example, former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. He, too, fought a lost cause, prosecuting prostitutes. And yet he ended up banging prostitutes.
To the one, we see in these sexually constricting attitudes a string of policy failures. To another, we see in these sexually constricting attitudes a necessary increase in the thought and energy allotted to considering other people having sex. And to yet a third, we see a creepy trend emerging whereby these puritan sexual warriors are, in fact, caught up in the very sins they obsess themselves with.
So it doesn't really work. Yet people are determined to keep dwelling on other people's sex lives. After how many years do we get to ask about the psychological depravity of social-conservative attitudes toward sex?
But that's probably offensive, isn't it?
And yet, in all of this,
teabaggers make confounding examples. Obviously, the context is pejorative at this point. To the other, they gave themselves the name.
Only a couple years before the rise of the
teabaggers, President Bush, I think it was, caused some controversy by using the phrase "Democrat Party". The phrase is in vernacular circulation, now, and some of our hardline conservatives have even used it here at Sciforums.
Teabaggers have found a place in vernacular circulation, as well. But no matter how obnoxious we think it is coming out of Ed Schultz's mouth, or in the pages of
The Stranger, or at Huffington Post, or
The New Republic, or ... or ... or ... or .... No matter how obnoxious one finds the word, we must remember that an allegedly libertarian political movement gave itself that identity label.
I still find it very strange that in this "libertarian" (i.e., "not conservative") movement, there was not one libertine who could have stood up and said, "You know, the thing about asking people to 'teabag' with us ...."
Part of me wonders about a guy I saw on MSNBC once upon a time, taking part in the debate about who the real teabaggers were, and he was asking people to come teabag with his group. And he reminded me of a particular Southern queen I met at a famous tchotchke store in New Orleans crossed with longtime WWE "manager" Paul Bearer. So it occurs to me that it's possible that some of them
did know. One could even extemporize, based on that single, vague, example, that "real"
teabaggers were happy to spread the term since it would annoy the people who were trying to annex their movement.
But in the end, this is all just chatter; when we attempted to suppress the
teabag conjugates, it was because
teabaggers were offended that we were all having a homoerotic chuckle at their expense. And that's as complicated as the question got, back then.
Now that we have it before us again, I think it would serve well as an example of
how we establish our standards.
