“Listen, I only wanted to raise this issue to discuss what seemed (through the lens of the media) to be the lopsided censuring of conservative voices in the colleges these days. It seems to me that those on the left feel the need to stack the cards against conservative views and “privilege” liberal views in order to level the playing field.”
Here is a fundament problem I have with the claims of ‘censorship’, it is one thing in a universe of ideas to have different beliefs, to disagree about things, and another in how you express those beliefs, and that is something I think is being left out of this discussion.
For example, let’s take someone who in their beliefs believes that same sex marriage is a sin, that homosexuality is a sin forbidden by God, etc, which as much as I disagree with it, I can understand where it is coming from. But where does belief go over the line? The problem often has been in how those views are expressed and what they do with them. Often what this translates to isn’t belief, it is how and where they are expressed, and often that expression has been quite honestly, vile. because people with those beliefs often think it is their duty to take that belief and hit people over the head with it, sometimes literally. @Zakesima, I don’t know how you raised your son, but are you saying that free expression of ideas somehow means getting in others faces and berating them, harassing them and the like? Do you think that an evangelical Christian has the right to go around wearing a T shirt with the infamous line out of Hebrew Scripture calling (supposedly) for gays to be put to death? Should they be allowed to go up to a young woman who is presumably sexually active and tell her she is a s*** who will be going to hell for having sex before marriage?
I used an example of this in a prior post, from my own time in college, where the young republicans had these posters up that had wording (referring to anti nuclear arms protestors" that showed a Russian military parade with the line 'Thank you, Comrades"…is that talking about an idea, or is that using the oldest trick in the book, claiming someone who may love this country just as much is a traitor or a communist sympathizer? In the past 35 years, in part thanks to the right wing gasbags like Rush Limbaugh and the like, the word “Liberal” has become a catch all for all that is wrong, where instead of debating ideas we have the line “there you go with your Liberal propoganda once again”, it isn’t talking about ideas, discussing them, it is using a sledgehammer, is that the right to your own beliefs? Someone who says to me “I believe same sex marriage is a sin, I have a hard time with it” I can respect, someone who says “gay people don’t deserve to be married, they are promiscuous, they are child molestors, they can’t love anyone” is not discussion their belief, they are spewing hate filled speech designed to denigrate gays. Likewise, if someone tells me “I think same sex marriage is a sin, so it shouldn’t be legal”, they are crossing a line because they are saying their belief outweights others, who don’t believe that, that is advocating using the law to put down those you think are sinners. Often what comes off as PC is the right to use inflammatory dialog against those they disagree with (and no. it isn’t limited to conservatives, there are a lot of radicals of all kinds, Richard Dawkins and his crowd, race baiters and old guard feminists I would shut down just as fast if they were on campus, even if advocating a position I might agree with, I don’t countenance that kind of rhetoric from any side).
There have been cases where conservative speech has been suppressed, and I don’t agree with it. While I found him to be a vile idiot, when Dr. Shockley (one of the co-inventors of the transistor) was supposed to speak at Yale and it ended up being cancelled (as much as I reviled his ideas, I would do it with my own writing and words). If someone is pushing something unpopular, the answer is to let them speak but also make clear you (whoever) doesn’t agree with them.However, there also are rules again about how this is expressed, if the speaker in question advocated things like putting gays in concentration camps or stoning people to death for adultery, there is a line there, there is a difference between expressing a position and using a bully pulpit to attack other people, and that is something a lot of people don’t understand, that in civil discourse their needs to be boundaries and rules so it doesn’t turn into a beat down.
Put it this way, @zakesima, how would you feel if let’s say a radical atheist went around with a T shirt on campus saying “religious people are all stupid” or “Christ is a fraud”, would you consider that free speech, if someone got in your son’s face and called him a moron because let’s say he believed the earth was 6000 years old (hypothetically), would you think that was free speech or harassment? Those speech codes go both ways, the school would not be very happy with the kid who did that, I can promise you that (even in the dark ages, things like that came up). One of the things people forget about speech is its power, and also forget what it is like to be on the other side. It is also a bit disingenuous for conservatives to talk about being PC, not being allowed to speak, when history,during periods like the 1920’s and the 1950’s, are full of examples of where conservatives used fear and hysteria to trample on those who believed or acted differently, during the McCarthy era simply espousing ‘liberal’ positions, like belonging to a group advocating the separation of church and state, or women’s rights, would be tagged as a pink and face all kinds of repurcussions…I think a lot of the PC whine is about those who once were able to heavy handedly say anything they want about anyone because they were in the majority (or thought they were, maybe because out of fear people were afraid to challenge them), now suddenly have found their old ways of operating are no longer acceptable, that denigrating gays or blacks or others they don’t like using deragatory language is not socially acceptable (in some ways, the claim about having their speech suppressed is remarkably like the claims of smokers whining about the proscriptions on smoking in public places, it totally leaves out why those proscriptions came about ie that the very act they are doing affects others in a negative way).
). Well, on many college campuses right now (speaking of public ones here), it is the liberals who have this power. So, where that power exists, the burden is disproportionately on them to protect the rights of the minorities in their midst to speak freely without fear of attack (again, attacks by school administrators–i.e. suspension, expulsion–or the mob/crowd in the form of physical attack–both of which HAVE happened). This is why I what the ACLU did was no noteworthy and exemplary (liberals protecting far right minority speech rights in the courtroom). We need to teach our children to do the same in the classroom/playground/college quad, too.