Monday, November 29, 2010
Opposition to SSM as hate speech
Apple has pulled the Manhattan Declaration app from its App Store, apparently in response to customer complaints that the declaration amounts to hate speech. Is this part of a broader trend? See, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center's recent report, "18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda," in which the National Organization for Marriage is included as one of "a hard core of smaller groups, most of them religiously motivated, [which] have continued to pump out demonizing propaganda aimed at homosexuals and other sexual minorities." To be clear, I do consider some of the rhetoric employed in opposition to SSM to amount to hate speech (under virtually any imaginable definition of "hate speech"), but I fear that we're approaching the point where opposition to SSM itself is considered hate speech, regardless of the rhetoric employed.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/11/opposition-to-ssm-as-hate-speech.html
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Mr. Vischer,
Try this thought experiment, if you will. Imagine that around the 1960's instead of identity culture being enshrined in the academy, the long noble tradition of critical historical investigation reaching back to the Renaissance had been maintained. Do you think that the conceptual apparatus of creations like the Manhattan Declaration would have even survived scholarly scrutiny before they had a chance to make it into the public realm?? This is presuming the realistic trajectory of most matters like this: They start in embryo (no pun intended) in scholarly treatises, gather some support, and then are distilled into a political banner. In this sense I see the development of notions like "public reasonableness" as an epiphenomenon of the identity culture, by way of reaction to it. Where did such notions exist before?? It would be like insisting that those who lived in the past under a culture of courtliness, would have hypostasized "courtliness" as their goal instead of learning to be "courtly". In the same way, being "reasonable" was always the goal of intellectuals in the past, not embracing a facile reification like "public reasonableness".
If we take such reifications out of the equation then the objections to DOMA are more of a scientific than political nature. If the question had been posed with historical perspicacity as "In what ways are marriages between opposite sexes important for a society??" then the results would be different.There are some pretty obvious answers. Instead "marriage" has been posited as an objectified datum of "public reasonableness" which you have to assent to a particular identity to agree with. You just cannot enforce a particular identity on others in a society and not expect others to balk. They will find it hateful. Whether it is technically meant as hate speech, I'll agree is a less clear matter. Thus, in the view of some, the whole way this matter has been handled in public and the academy is just a flamboyant part of our much diminished intellectual realm, even if it has seized on prolix intellectual life-boats to try to float its ultimately quite insecure identity. By contrast let's add that a man and a woman living a happy marriage with happy kids is anything but insecure.