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I decline to extend political or social rights to those who hate me that have been systematically stripped from and denied to myself and my allies for decades or more, and will never in any case be allowed to protect us in any way in the future.
If you pride yourself on your memory, exercise it by recalling the legal term "hostile work environment", the similar terms that cover most social spaces, and the numerous examples of how they have been applied by courts nation-wide over the last few decades.
Anyone who is moved by appeals to free speech at this late date deserves their victimization. Free Speech is a spook. The First Amendment offers me no meaningful protection, and I see no benefit to compromising my interests to honor its thoroughly-desecrated corpse. Complying with your proposal will not delay by a single second the next attempt to censor and criminalize my beliefs and to render people like me unemployable when identified. I defy you to argue otherwise.
Principles are things you are willing to lose for. I decline to treat free speech as a principle.
What do you want to say at work that you think you're being prevented from saying because of potential employer liability under "hostile work environment" standards? What makes you think than your employer would have no problem with you saying that even if the potential liability didn't exist?
I am a physician, I have beliefs that are mainstream in this country that would result in me being removed from promotion consideration, teaching, and could lose me my license.
Fired? Maybe, maybe not - certainly put under a microscope and given zero slack.
I didn't vote for Trump this last time in spite of interest in doing so because I was afraid that I'd be tired one day, lose my poker face and reveal who I voted for.
It's possible I am being histrionic, but I truly believe this - and I know lots of other physicians and working professionals in big name companies who believe the same thing.
In 2Way Morning Meeting yesterday some guy from a big four firm nearly broke down telling the same kind of story. Blue regions are littered with people like us and we are just about done.
And you think that if the hostile work environment doctrine were removed then you'd feel free to speak your views? Or is this just the zeitgeist among people you happen to work for?
It is the impression of some people that items like this are the cudgel used. Is it really? Is it the only one? I don't know the answer, presumably they can come up with any legal fiction they want to get rid of the undesirables, on the other hand systems follow incentives and if the system feels like it is required to use this tool against a specific group it will.
It doesn't really matter. FC's point is that he is being oppressed. I shared that I feel like I am also being oppressed. A very large chunk of the country feels oppressed and that isn't good.
Pulling out one specific detail of the administrative apparatus of oppression and litigating it is potentially academically interesting but isn't going to help with these feelings.
What's the solution? FC feels oppressed, you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed. We all support the ending the oppression. But when FC's tribe gets into power they go around oppressing everyone who isn't them. So I now still feel oppressed. The Right had the moral majority in the 80s and they went around oppressing everyone with their Christian morality. The lefties felt oppressed and did something about it, they took over. Now everyone feels oppressed by the woke feminist instead of the church lady. Is the solution really just to give it back to the right so they can go back to oppressing everyone?
It really seems like the majority of people can't live with the idea that other people want to do different things with their lives and you shouldn't go poke sticks in their eyes because they are different.
I mean, the 80s is half a lifetime away. The right wing that existed then doesn't exist today, and the lineage is rather thin as well. But regardless, the solution seems to be to just... stop oppressing the likes of FC. Stopping oppressing such people does not, in any way, mean giving power back to the right or whatever - that'd only be the case if we presumed that the only way the left keeps power is through oppression of people like FC, which I would consider completely false. And, TBH, the opposite of what it is when the left is actually living up to its ideals; the value of the left is that it's, in some real sense better than the right, and the only way that'd be the case is if it arrives at its policy prescriptions without oppressing people who would fight against it tooth and nail; it's this ability to win over the people despite giving every leeway to its opponents that actually verifies the superiority of our ideals over those of our enemies in a liberal democracy. Without that verification, we're just two groups killing each other over whether bread should be buttered on top or on the bottom.
I mean fair but also there's definitely enough Christian conservatives on this forum advocating for a return to Christian morality even if they only make up a minority of the Right. And that's even before we get into the dissident rightists. Different flavors, but I imagine the feeling of being oppressed for having a different morality than them will be the same. I think the cultural memetic scars are also much longer lasting.
The left probably doesn't feel like they are deliberately oppressing FC. It's that C.S. Lewis quote all over. They feel they are freeing the people FC's tribe were oppressing. And if a few "bigots" need to be stomped on then so be it. I agree that they aren't deriving power from it directly but they are flexing that power, and to quote some Fantasy/Sci-fi Author I can't remember (Our that my memory invented: "Power is alive and it seeks those who will wield it, those it can corrupt to increase the power, so that they may wield it better. Power always grows in the hands of tyrants" Power is an egregor, and all entities exist to perpetuate their own growth and existence. The power they are flexing, that we feel oppressed by, will just be taken up by who ever replaces them. You can see that with the Rights return to cancel culture. After being affected by it for 2 decades, is the answer "Lets put the superweapon back in the box" no its "lets turn it on our enemies in our brief moment of power"
I like this phrase I'm stealing it. I despair that it will ever be so.
Not sure I want to wade into the discussion about the merit of the lefts vs rights values, too nebulous for me.
This forum is so tiny and uninfluential that literally everyone here could be hardcore RETVRNers or whatever, and it wouldn't really mean anything of national consequence. I do think the specter of a return of Christian conservative domination isn't completely gone, so eternal vigilance is justified. After all, in the 90s, it appeared as if the specter of open, explicit, systematic government-mandated racism and sexism were gone, but it returned with a vengeance within just a couple of decades, by the ideological allies of the folks that had turned it into a specter in the first place!
But I'd argue that the whole Moral Majority Christian Conservative thing really is just a specter right now, and if jumping at ghosts leads one to harming living people, it's one's responsibility to stop jumping at ghosts, at least until they prove themselves corporeal.
This is where some basic introspection by the left would be productive, both for discourse and for the left to self-improve. As a graduate of a liberal arts college that was almost the exact perfect stereotype of the progressive leftist breeding ground formed by critics of leftist indoctrination in academia, I find the lack of introspection to be depressing now, though I found it surprising in the past, because our ability to introspect was one of the things that we prided ourselves in as educated college students who were learning the truth about the hidden bigotry in ourselves.
By introspection, of course, I'm referring to the fact that one of the consistent strong propositions by the modern progressive left is that people can oppress others without being aware of it, due to being raised in a society that bakes in the oppression, allowing individuals to become oppressors by benefiting from the oppression in a way that's unjust to the oppressed despite the fact that these oppressors never had a single oppressive thought or feeling or emotion in their mind, body, soul, etc. There's also a somewhat well-known idea (I think this was more popular 10 years ago during the "SJW" era than it is now, during the "woke" era), "When someone is telling you you're hurting them, you can't decide that you didn't."
Now, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the people pushing forth these ideas were using them as tools with which to oppress people they disliked, but if we're being charitable, we should hold that these people really do believe what they're pushing. If they truly believe it, then they should be willing to accept the very real possibility that they're oppressing others accidentally and that the likes of FC ought to be listened to when they say that they're oppressing them.
Also, CS Lewis is an extremely well known figure, even before the film adaptations of the Wardrobe books a couple decades ago. Leftists are disproportionately more educated than rightists, IIRC, and at least the thought leaders ought to be held up to a standard high enough that they should be aware of his quotation and the dangerous game they're playing by their fight in favor of people they've labeled as "oppressed," and have credible ways to control the risks.
So your explanation makes sense. It's just a depressing one.
I disagree that there's some sort of "oppression constant" by which oppression is created to fill a vacuum when people don't keep oppressing. First of all, that puts into question the entire project of modern progressive leftism. If getting rid of Christian conservative oppression of yesteryear means that someone else will just come in and oppress us - and by oppressing us, discredit themselves as any better than our previous oppressors - in equal amounts? Second, living through the 90s and 00s, I know that a society where neither side is oppressing each other in nearly the same amounts as they have been attempting and succeeding to do over the past 1-2 decades is very possible. Maybe it can only last 10-15 years long at a time, but that's still a solid fraction of my adult life that I'd rather spend without either being oppressed by my ideological enemies or feeling ashamed of my ideological peers for being, in practice, somehow worse than my enemies, by our own values.
Ha, you'd be stealing it not from me, but from one Dr. Seuss and his
Build Back BetterBig Beautiful BillButter Battle Book. Another book that I considered referencing was The Sneetches, which has a similarly appropriate moral.More options
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