From American Fascists by Chris Hedges, Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute, former reporter for the New York Times and NPR, and (paragraph break added):
This is the awful paradox of tolerance. There arise moments when those who would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible should no longer be tolerated. They must be held accountable by institutions that maintain the free exchange of ideas and liberty.
The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts, watched by tens of millions of Americans. They must be denied the right to demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication. They must be made to treat their opponents with respect and acknowledge the right of a fair hearing even as they exercise their own freedom to disagree with their opponents.
Passivity in the face of the rise of the Christian Right threatens the democratic state. And the movement has targeted the last remaining obstacles to its systems of indoctrination, mounting a fierce campaign to defeat hate-crime legislation, fearing the courts could apply it to them as they spew hate talk over the radio, television and Internet.
And to the extent there's some ambiguity about whether he's calling for legal suppression (which "denied the right" seems to strongly suggest) or just social pressure, he seems to have clarified it in favor of legal suppression (and "hate crimes legislation" in the sense of bans on supposed hate speech) on NPR's Talk of the Nation, Jan. 25, 2007:
JIM (Caller): Yes. Yes, I am. I needed to ask the author -- I mean, I myself am a Christian, but I wouldn't even somewhat agree with Pat Roberts. But the author stating that you need to restrict someone's free speech just for mere words, he's advocating -- I mean, what he's advocating is fascism, is he (unintelligible)? ...
Mr. HEDGES: I think that, you know, in a democratic society, people don't have a right to preach the extermination of others, which has been a part of this movement of - certainly in terms of what should be done with homosexuals. You know, Rushdoony and others have talked about 18 moral crimes for which people should be executed, including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and all - in order for an open society to function, it must function with a mutual respect, with a respect...
JIM: Sure.
Mr. HEDGES: ...for other ways to be and other ways to believe. And I think that the fringes of this movement have denied people that respect, which is why they fight so hard against hate crimes legislation -- such as exist in Canada -- being made law in the United States.
[NEAL] CONAN: But Chris, to be fair, aren't you talking about violating their right to free speech, their right to religion as laid out in the First Amendment?
Mr. HEDGES: Well, I think that when you preach -- or when you call for the physical extermination of other people within the society, you know, you've crossed the bounds of free speech. I mean, we're not going to turn a cable channel over to the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the kinds of things that are allowed to be spewed out over much of Christian radio and television essentially preaches sedition. It preaches civil war. It's not a difference of opinion. With that kind of rhetoric, it becomes a fight for survival....
It'd be funny if more people got the joke...
The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts, watched by tens of millions of Americans.
Fairness Doctrine here we come.
If you want the Christian Right not to be dangerous, then free speech is your best friend. Let blow-hards be blow-hards. However, almost any religion or non-religion driven underground is going to nurture any criminal elements within it.
Censoring speech through anti-hate codes would eventually backfire on those protected, though I'm sure many would get great pleasure in using the laws of the United States to censor Jerry Falwell and his less famous brethren. Hugo Black was a Baptist from Alabama who had heard a lot of preachers spew fire, water, oil, and smoke, but in his Baptist way, he saw the First Amendment as literal and inerrant. Justice Black knew that ultimately America cannot be free for just me and my friends. It needs to be free even for the self-righteous clerics and revolutionary agitators who would preach hatred against all but a few.
Those who want speech codes will think they are fine until the codes are turned against them. Remember how Robespierre died.
We are at war and in times of war people expect their civil liberties to be curtailed. So far we have had rightwing Christian terrorist attacks on our soil by Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph - we either have to fight the terrorists over there or we will have to fight them here. (Okay that last part will need to be tweaked.)
I wonder if all those who agreed with trying to suppress Stimson's speech by going for his bar license would support thousands of fundamental Christians filing grievances against this guy were he a lawyer?
Second question where does this guy get this crap about talk radio and christian TV preaching for the physical extermination of homosexuals and others. I've never seen or heard this ever, and I've been listening from time to time.
My suspician is that anyone not preaching the PC line that agrees with his thoughts on these issues is interpreted by him to me they speaker is preaching extermination, and then he calls for their forced re-education/suppression and then says *THEY* are the fascists.
The Chutzpah of the left wing PC moonbats seems to have no bounds. I mean a book calling for the abolition of the free speech and free exercise rights through the use of unconstitutional criminal laws (like hate speech laws and others) being titled "Fascists In America" is pretty damn amazingly ironic and humorous. Too bad such idiots are not just fools deserving of laughter and derision but also quite dangerous at the same time.
Guys like this scare me way more than some harmless old believer like Pat Robertson.
Says the "Dog"
I'd never heard anything linking McVeigh to religion before, and wikipedia was easy. I think you're full of it. Please retract or clarify?
However, the reason I said 'theoretically' is that I do not trust our lower level judiciary to be uniform in any application of the first amendment. Being far too self-absorbed, these judges (and folks like Hedges) view that "if the speech is offensive, it should be illegal" rather than "if the speaker intended to incite violence [insert temporal limit], it should be illegal."
When the criteria is 'offensive,' it becomes a de facto heckler's veto. Moreover, when the person making the 'offensive' determination has his own biases (as we all do), he will invariably make 'offensive' determinations in a non-uniform manner. Thus Hedges will find no anti-christian or anti-joooo speech offensive, and would find nearly any anti-muslim speech as offensive, merely by virtue of its being directed against a politically powerless minority.
Just look at his trademark views on christian fundamentalist condemnation of sodomy, and his insistence on equating this with a call for genocide against homosexuals. Status =/ behavior, at least post-Romer and pre-Lawrence.
I do pose one small caveat.
Does tolerance mean that we must tolerate the intolerant?
That information comes from our allies. Also, he had several meetings with people who were admitted Christians. All you have to do is connect the dots . . .
I've seen the claim made seriously before, and although your last post was obviously tongue-in-cheek, there was no indication that the part claiming McVeigh was a "christian terrorist" was.
As long as we're clear...
Note that, in America, if an "islamofascist" organization calls for the extermination and destruction of others, they're inviting at a minimum some serious scrutiny from the Feds, and they risk having their funds frozen or cut off. I hope the same kinds of investigations befall other organizations of whatever origin if they agitate for the execution of others. But I would add that I think there's a difference between saying "there oughtta be a law" or "society should execute such and such" on one hand, and "listeners should go find _____ and execute them." I think both are positively evil, but only the latter seems actionable. That is, I'd call the police if I heard the latter (and I have done so before). I think the former should be protected.
For reasons Eugene's stated many times already, speech (even despicable speech) should be protected. I'm all for giving the nuts enough rope to hang themselves. I much prefer that to letting the government do it.
We are all facists now.
JLD - I was agreeing with the basic idea of your post until I got to the 'left wing PC moonbat' tripe. You know how to play to your audience.
I'm not a legal scholar, but is the "social value" of speech a basis for protecting it or not?
Wrong. This is one misguided man. Sorry, but I will go out on a limb and say that most self-respecting liberals will vehemently disagree with banning speech. Unlike the Rush-Hannity crowd, we have the courage of our convictions and stick to our guns. This guy is no more representative of liberals as Michael Savage is of Republicans.
I'd prefer to worry about the people who control the mainstream media and who occupy many seats in Congress and the Senate who believe that a person who insults one of their sheltered constituencies, such as the blacks or the gays, should be sent off for counselling . . . so they can be "re educated" and "get their mind right."
We've seen this twice lately. Michael Richards and his outburst against blacks, and just last week with this actor fellow who slurred his gay co-star. Both "eagerly" agreed to go off somewhere for counselling.
No, its not the religious types who scare me, its the secularists, who claim to answer to no one.
I hope so. But I was at the University of Michigan during their repeated attempts to impose speech codes on students. That was quite--shall we say--illuminating. "No free speech for fascists!" was a not-uncommon rallying cry by the predecessor organizations to BAMN. They defined "fascist" as "to the right of Castro."
Since the issue raised by this “one misguided man” was the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” is it your position then that most liberals will oppose it?
Oh and I would be curious if you could provide us with actual examples of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity in favor of banning political speech that they disagree with.
Maybe it’s because “regular Christians” realize that the sort of morons who throw around epitaphs like "radical Christian right" probably think that they’re part of it.
Sigh. Give me a name to call those people who advocate the creation of a theocracy based on their interpretation of the Christian bible. Please. I'll gladly use your term (and not theirs) to describe them, so that you'll understand who I mean.
By the way, the FBI tracks some of those organizations. I guess the FBI must be comprised of morons, as well.
I fondly remember when conservatives told us we had to restrict the free speech rights of communists because they would use those rights to destroy our freedoms. Some of you older readers may even remember those horrible Islamofascists who needed to be suppressed for the same reason. Can you believe one of them even wanted to use the Koran in a private ceremony?
I wonder who it was who insisted on upholding principle in the face of such attacks. Guess we should thank them now that our own rights are in danger from Chris Hedges (a majority of one, I'm guessing).
He's not just criticizing the "radical Christian right", he's proposing to abridge free speech. You don't have to "conflate the larger community with the extremists" to see that.
When I read comments like this one of yours I suspect that you worry that any criticism of an enemy or your enemy equals support for your enemy. If the radical Christian right or whatever fringe group you allude to is as dangerous as you warn, it won't be made any more or less so by criticizing Hedges.
So, you think we should be cool with speech suppression, as long as it isn't our speech being suppressed?
Although it is true that at present advocacy for censorship comes to a large extent from the left, it isn't that simple. Historically the right is just as guilty, and even now there are plenty of leftists, such as myself, who oppose laws against "hate speech".
Oh and I would be curious if you could provide us with actual examples of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity in favor of banning political speech that they disagree with."
He may have been making a point about the FD, but the issue at hand and the one to which I referred was his claim that "when you preach -- or when you call for the physical extermination of other people within the society, you know, you've crossed the bounds of free speech," which was interpreted to mean government censorship of such speech. On that topic I will boldly and humbly attempt to speak for all liberals. On the FD I will not be so bold and thus have no position on what all liberals think of it.
As for your second point: are you seriously defending Rush and Sean? I mean, these guys are notorious for pushing intolerant views and branding those who disagree as traitors, treasonous, anti-American, etc. Again, are you seriously defending them and they're positions? I presume you're too smart for that. Shit, there are entire books and websites dedicating to exposing their nonsense.
I don’t think that’s true that the right is “just as guilty” as the left when it comes to censorship. Most of the examples of government attempts to suppress political speech seem to have come from the political Left. Wilson and Roosevelt were particularly notorious for it during WWI and II. We had Al and Tipper Gore’s attacks on the music industry during my childhood but I honestly cannot recall any similar or comparable attempts at censorship by the political right.
We've seen this twice lately. Michael Richards and his outburst against blacks, and just last week with this actor fellow who slurred his gay co-star. Both "eagerly" agreed to go off somewhere for counselling.
Have you got any basis for thinking Michael Richards or Isaiah Washington headed for counselling at the behest of members of Congress rather than out of a desire to avoid the career damage that comes with being regarded as a hateful person? (cf Mel Gibson).
Jeff, one of the only known criteria for defining obscenity is the lack of "social value." Miller v. California 413 US 15 (1973).
One guy states that perhaps that lawyers who defend insurgents might be due some criticism sets off numerous threads.
This guy echos what people like Garrison Kellor have stated before, and we the ones painting with a broad brush?
Reporter for the NYT and NRP.... What liberal media?
I like that perspective.
This guy echos what people like Garrison Kellor have stated before, and we the ones painting with a broad brush?
What did Garrison Keillor say about this? Did he really advocate suppression of speech?
Chapman: Isn't it a good thing that this happened on NPR? The broader population would have never heard this guy if he hadn't been on there. Better we know about him and this kind of view than not, no? I mean, how many people are actually buying this guy's book?
Hedges is a fascist. You don't have to scratch very deep to figure out why. Elton John's recent call for state suppression of religion because Christianity "promotes hatred ... against gays" (while ignoring Islam, that executes gays, instead of politely disapproving of it) shows what is really going on. No surprise on this; homosexuals played a key role in bringing the Nazis to power.
Hedges is an intolerant person. But I'm not a fascist. I'm prepared to tolerate his intolerance and even his promotion of fascist ideas. Why does this remind of the incident under the Sandinistas where one of the opposition newspapers ran a story about press censorship, and the government shut them down for telling lies, because there was no censorship?
I am NOT a fundamentalist Christian. I think Pat Robertson's theology is suspect and his politics even more so.
That said, lumping the Christian Coalition with Christian Identity is sophitically stupid. [Please make substantive arguments, rather than simply insulting the people you disagree with. -EV] I had thought that the most important thing we learned in law school was how to think critically. The commentary by some on this thread makes me realize how much law school failed them.
But I kid, of course... I know nothing about NPR's ratings, and I care less. The old saying "The answer to bad speech is more speech" doesn't require giving this guy a taxpayer-funded soapbox.
You know, I might be including him in the group of those who wrongly, and too easily, conflate the two communities.
I'm a very strong supporter of free speech. Without free speech — fought for and never really a given — gay rights would never have emerged as a movement. A lot of people went to jail or had their lives ruined for expressing the rather unpopular idea that gay people should be fully equal members of this society. I oppose "hate speech" rules and laws. I do, however, support "hate crime" laws in those cases where it can be shown that the motivation was hatred of a group of people, especially if the victims were randomly selected. (but that's another topic)
We're not in Lake Woebegon anymore...
Here's the discussion on the VC from that time.
Stimson, the "[o]ne guy" from your post, is the deputy assistant secretary of defense of detainee affairs, Garrison Kellor is a comedian. I don't think that's a reasonable comparison. Anyway, I don't delude myself into thinking that most conservatives believe that attorneys representing GITMO detainees are terrorist sympathizers. I realize that is a fringe position; will you admit that the subject of this thread is a fringe position that is held by less the 1% of serious people one the left? Note: not that I would consider myself "one the left," I just tend to gag at irrationality in people I agree with more then in people I don't.
Censorship clearly isn't the answer. Hedges is right that these folks peddle misinformation to their followers by millions. He must have become so frustrated while researching them that he lost his mind.
One reason why I so intently debunk their "Christian Nation" thesis, even though very few scholars in the academy think it worth the time to even address, is because millions of people believe the twaddle coming from the likes of D. James Kennedy, David Barton, and William Federer.
Not that I think we necessarily should dig into his personal life, but this passage suggests Hedges is gay. Is that true?
Uh... I guess that believing that homosexuality should be punishable by law doesn't necessarily mean that gay people should be in prison, but that's quite an odd interpretation, isn't it, Clayton?
You're really reaching to tar your opponents with whatever brush is at hand. See, e.g., Cramer's classic "homosexuals played a key role in bringing the Nazis to power."
the whole apparatus of the McCarthy era, in which membership in a leftist organization or expression of leftist views led to persecution, the attempt to ban the publication of the Pentagon papers, the censorship of "obscene works" (which has relatively recently acquired support from a part of the left), and the repeated attempts to ban the burning of the flag.
That makes them substantially different than say, a comparison between Shia and Sunni within Islam.
I'm not Christian, so I don't have a particular dog in this fight, but there is nothing more inherently nutty about Christian Identity ideas than there is with Pat Robertson's ideas. I mean, unless you think it is perfectly reasonable and sane to believe that God punished New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina.
I am not making this up.
From what little I understand about the Sunni/Shia split, they both claim to be Muslims but there is disagreement about (among other things) who was the rightful spiritual heir of Mohammad. This split is so strong that a great many of these folks are now actively slaughtering each other in Iraq. (And some in Lebanon, too.)
Christian Coalition folks may dislike Christian Identity folks (or maybe that should be Volks) but that doesn't change the fact that both groups claim to be following the true Christian faith. You could even make the argument that they are more ideologically unified than Sunni/Shias are because the Coalition/Identity people are not actively slaughtering one another (not yet anyway.)
I suggest a bipartisan compromise. The Right agrees to ban the worst forms of theo-rage if the Left agrees to ban flag burning. Everyone can agree to that, right?...right?
Serious Question: What are the limits of implied threats? (And remember that the entire point of a threat is to shut down someone else's activity.) Examples such as:
-Listing the home addresses and information of abortion doctors on a stridently pro-life website (and nothing else, more info can get you in trouble)
-A public speech in which you say to your followers that Person X "deserves to die" withoutn actually calling for their murder
-A letter to the Dixie Chicks saying that "I hate you and my gun is loaded."
It seems to me that people like this are deliberately playing upon the lawyer's need to draw clear lines. The activity is unacceptable, but unpunishable.
It is Hedges, not "regular Christians", who is lumping a few extremists in together with the masses of Christians in this country. He specifically refers to restricting the speech in mass-market broadcasts:
He is saying flat out that tens of millions of Americans regularly watch shows that: "demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication." This is indeed demonizing tens of millions of Christians because of the small number who actually call for a theocracy and other such horrible things as he and commenters in this thread have described.
The left, as well as the right, needs to be more specific in their arguments. If Hedges wants to limit the free speech of Rushdoony, he should say so, not assume that most Christians, even most very devout Christians, agree with or support theocracy nonsense. There are plenty of regular church-goers, even in deeply fundamentalist churches, who consider themselves part of the Christian right.
You make the point better than I have. The "few extremists" in the so-called Christian Identity Movement do not make up more than a miniscule percentage of the population--yet those defending Hedges want to tar all Christians with an overly broad brush. As I said originally, I am not a fundamentalist; I do not support Pat Robertson. However I do take umbrage when the crackpots are lumped with mainstream Christianity--including the fundamentalists within maintream Christianity.
See e.g., Jonah Goldberg's latest book: "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton." Apparently, that kind of hysterical hyperbole is what passes for conservative these days.
A good start would be to acknowledge that one person espousing a specific view hardly constitutes the "left" or the "right."
When you get past the "Fascism = Corporation" mistranslated quote of Mussolini, and realize that Mussolini was not referring to things like Haliburton but actually to things like the teachers' union... you'll realize that Goldberg actually has a legitimate point (even if he stretches it to the bounds), and that Mussolini was totally insane.
But I suppose you would think I'm crazy for saying that Stalin was not a right winger.
<blockquote>
I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives. . . . I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.
</blockquote>
Like many polls, that one seems to tell us more about the pollster than anyone else.
Which popular politician said that?
YOu don't have to get very far in expressing any doubts about the exten of anthropogenic global warming to get someone arguing that your voice, and the voice of those like you, should be shut down...
Reference: several threads in the last month in Volokh
While I see how you might infer that from what I wrote, that's not what I was implying. What I was implying was that Hedges's concern about anti-homosexual talk is driving this. There are liberals who support totalitarianism because they are homosexual, and some who support totalitarianism because they know that's the only way to suppress disapproval of a preferred interest group of liberals.
2. There are laws that can clearly state a preference without criminalizing homosexuality. For example, a law that prohibited homosexuals from adopting, or that define marriage as "one man, one woman."
3. I have heard quite a bit of support for refusing to recognizing homosexual marriage. Clearly, laws that criminalize homosexual conduct (along with laws that criminalize adultery, premarital sex, and many other forms of sexual conduct) are Constitutional. That doesn't mean that they all make sense. I agree with Clarence Thomas's description of the law challenged in Lawrence v. Texas as "uncommonly silly." I would not have voted for it. I supported California's decriminalization of oral and anal sex in 1975.
2. The same cynical willingness to suppress opposing points of view.
Actually, it was quite a bit worse than that. A relatively well-known environmentalist argued that there should be Nuremberg-style trials for "global warming denials."
Now, more sensible environmentalists told him to shut up and sit down. (But who knows what they might do?)
And Senators Rockefeller and Snowe publicly suggested that corporations that have funded research by reputable scientists on this topic should have their tax status changed as punishment.
Yes, liberals do believe in suppressing free speech.
The primary areas of difference are that fascism allows private ownership of property to continue, although usually not allowing owners to have that much control over that property, and fascism tends to have a more cynical, more realistic view of human nature. Socialism destroys people because it doesn't want to face that human nature is corrupt, and in the interests of high ideals, ends up giving power to evil men. Fascism destroys people because it cynically accepts that human nature is bad, while pretending that it is aspiring to higher ideals.
I do think an excess of bubbly emotions poses a threat to civilization, but I don't see how it is scary.
Tim Robbins kept talking about a "chill wind" blowing, but it's been a real gale force since the November elections. And it's blowing from the left.
Not to detract from what should have been the nadir of your frankly spiteful rhetoric ("homosexuals played a key role in bringing the Nazis to power"), but did you really just say that "[t]here are liberals who support totalitarianism because they are homosexual"? I'm beginning to think that you just jumble all the words you don't like--liberal, gay, Nazis, totalitariansim--in a hat, and pull them out in random combinations to express whatever it is you're trying to express.
I sincerely hope that I misread you.
Now, more sensible environmentalists told him to shut up and sit down. (But who knows what they might do?)
We know that they might exactly what they did do: tell the radical nut to sit down and shut up. You said so yourself. I've already expressed that you seem to be pounding the partisan drum rather than really analyzing these issues, but this is ridiculous. One guy says something objectionable, other liberals actually do object, and that's evidence to you of "what liberals think"? If that is the standard, then the ultra-extreme views of the Xian Dominionists really can be imputed to conservatives, even if the vast majority of conservatives openly repudiate those views.
I wonder if they are aware that Al-Jazeera has established a TV network and hired David Frost. Has anyone in the Liberal community denounced this anti-Semitic hate network as vehemently as Hedges denounces Christians? Hedges assumes that we would not turn a cable network over to the KKK, yet we have done the equivalent by turning a network over to people who believe that Hitler didn’t finish the job.
It depends. If they objected out of strong moral disapproval for the idea, then it doesn't show that that's what liberals think. If they objected to it because they agreed with the general idea but thought it was a little too quirky, or if they objected to it merely for public relations, or if they decided that the guy was such a good friend that his support of such a nutty idea doesn't matter, then it shows a lot about "what liberals think".
What happened to the guy after he said that? Was he made a pariah by leftists, or was this treated as just a minor misunderstanding?
@ r78
1.
You call that PROOF?
There's speculation, but nothing else. What possible definition of "proof" are you using? The abridged version?
The fact is that McVeigh was at best a renounced Christian and was NOT a practicing Christian at the time of the bombing. This nonsense is the favorite repetition of the far-left twits who try and use it to smear Christians.
It's false, you have no proof and thus you're a liar.
2. Hitler wasn't a "liberal" he was a *socialist*, i.e. leftist. The mistaken conflation of liberal and leftist is a fairly recent thing where those claiming the mantle of liberalism have instead adopted leftist ideology and largely abandoned classical liberalism.
Well, I don't think it shows "a lot" about anything in particular. It's tricky to extrapolate so much from one instance, especially when you're using so much conjecture to interpret what was happening in people's heads.
To turn it again, we don't know why most Xians disclaim the beliefs of, say, Howard Ahramson. We only know, as a matter of fact, that they do. He's hardly a pariah--many right-leaning organizations, think tanks, etc. take his money. But despite his broad acceptance (or the broad acceptance of his cash, which I accept is a slightly different thing) and our inability to know for a fact why most conservatives repudiate his hard-core dominionism, it's not fair to impute his views to conservatives in general. It's just too much reinterpretation, too much conjecture, and too close to conspiracy theorizing.
If he ain't noticed by now, he ain't gonna.
/joke
Second, Timothy McVeigh was an agnostic and fallen away Catholic, not a member of the religious right. To equate a couple dozen neonazi hate groups with 40 million born again Christians is another libel.
As for me, I'm a liberal Catholic. We go in for nuances, not strict interpretation. And, as the NYTimes found out when they misquoted Chaput, some of our bishops when misquoted place the entire interview on their website to point out when their words are twisted...
No offense, but I think it's a mistake to conflate ad hominem attacks with suppression of free speech.
Who made the claim that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks? I hear people saying someone or another did this, but I've never been told exactly who.
I didnt say they did.
But you tell me . . . what could have caused Gibson, Richards, et al, to think that "re education" was necessary to save their careers?
I can't tell if you're trolling or if you've never actually met a Christian. The link you provided to show a connection between McVeigh and the "Christian Identity Movement" does nothing of the sort. In fact, there's no inference anywhere in the text about what McVeigh's religious beliefs were other than the words some nut put in his mouth after he was dead. Did you not think anyone would read the link?
Equating the Christian Coalition, which is a grassroots lobbying group, with violent extremism is ridiculous. Shall we also equate PFAW with the Weathermen?
Adeez,
Calling someone a traitor or saying he's anti-American isn't the same thing as saying the government should step in and muzzle them. You'd think you'd be able to find one quote by Limbaugh that advocated the restriction of free speech. I mean, after all, he's been on the air for decades now. Or maybe those "entire books" are mostly about the projection of leftist paranoia? Does calling someone a "big fat idiot" count as exposing nonsense on the left?
Most of the criticism of Limbaugh that I've seen is either aimed at his personal life or based on a quote taken out of context.
Hedges' views are more of the same bovine effluvia, just tarted up a bit. It was wrong then and it's wrong now.
A staffer for one Jewish member of Congress insisted that the CCA was spending millions of dollars per year to make Jews convert to Christianity. That sure was news to me...I think the total budget for converting Jews was the $50 per month that CCA President Roberta Combs spent taking me to dinner when we would discuss religion.
Pat Robertson does not speak for everyone in the Christian Right. He knows that. The people who contribute to the CCA know this. Jay Sekulow knows this. Roberta Combs knows this.
As for liberals wanting to ban speech...I can remember my senior year of law school at the Ohio State University. The law school newspaper endorsed Ronald Reagan for reelection. A number of student groups were angered and wanted the members of the editorial board to be punished.
"Dominists" are also active in Republican circles. I don't think they represent mainstream Christian Republicans or even the mainstream "religious right." Rather, they are the right-wing of the religious right. But they do influence millions of folks.
The two biggest players are probably D. James Kennedy's The Center for Reclaiming America for Christ and David Barton's Wallbuilders. They are intimately involved with GOP politics.
They try to inculcate zeal in their followers by telling them America was founded by evangelical Christians for evangelical Christians to rule, and that heritage has been "stolen" from them by the secularists, which they rightly should "reclaim." The problem is their historiography is abominable.
Why not? Why should the KKK not have a cable channel? And if not, why stop there? Why not insist that every kind of speech you find 'hateful' be banned? Indeed, ban Michael Richards and Mel Gibson for things they might say about 1% of the time. (No point taking chances.) Stifle Joe Lieberman if he doesn't toe the line. Ban groups pre-emptively, using the slogan 'Why Wait for Hate?'
If you want to censor, first thing you do is call it something else. All this leads to nothing good. What self-righteous fools these people are to advocate such conduct.
I could go on and on, but you dont' have to go far on the internet to find these views. And they are not limited to gays -- they include liberals of all kinds.
Now, I'm not saying that their free speech should be limited, but Hedges is right that they say some pretty inflammatory things. And worse, there are people who really believe them.
ErrAir America makes it clear that this is not an attempt to build up liberal speech (problematic enough in its own right), but to make conservative talk radio unworkable. During the last presidential contest, we heard Howard Dean openly suggesting that the federal government attempt to break up Fox News parent News Corp., a call that has continued to circulate amongst liberal pundits. While I'd like to believe Hedges' comments represent some idiosyncratic oddity on his own part. Unfortunately, they're all too recurring for me to have much confidence in that interpretation.Yes, as I pointed out earlier, he's conflating two groups to some extent, as well. but....
Now, you're distorting what he said. Millions of Americans DO watch shows that demonize gay people. And every now and then, people on those shows go over the line and say something really objectionable. They don't do it often, but they do it. The Canadian government has, on occassion, banned the broadcast of episodes of the 700 Club. I don't remember if it was for Pat's anti-gay rhetoric or his anti-Islam blather. I've watched the Coral Ministries show (whatever it's called) and have heard anti-gay demonization. I've watched the 700 Club and heard outrageous lies about gay people. I've watched Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blame gay people for 9/11 (among others). Oddly enough, hateful speech from them seems to increase viewership rather than get them fired.
Does my complaining about that demonize the listeners? How so?
And more importantly, why don't all the reasonable people in the Christian right start ignoring these folks instead of sending them money and listening to their voting suggestions? Why do men like these have the President's ear?
My question, Clayton, had more to do with your assertion that you have NEVER heard anyone call for gay people to be put in jail. Are you seriously suggesting that those who favor the re-criminalization of sodomy (Santorum, for example) are just encouraging fines? Care to retract the "never"?
You would not have. Good for you. The Texas Legislature, however, did. And Bush, as governor, supported the Texas law. And nice as it was for Thomas to find the law "silly", he found it constitutional.
Good for you.
Take up your complaint with those political leaders who host and court the favor of "the crackpots". Start with the White House. The GOP has based its strategy on allying itself with at least some of "the crackpots". Read the guest list for Justice Sunday.
Yeah, I miss All in the Family.
Who the hell is Rushdoony [rhetorical question - I looked him up]? I must be living under a rock because this is the first I've ever heard of him. Sorta reminds of me the great "right" scourge of a decade ago - the militia movement.
For which they were criticized by people of all political stripes. Not that it matters to you. Again, free speeh allows us to spot the idiots--in this case, Pat and Jerry.
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35919
Just today another "angel" has come along to resuscitate the moribund Air America. I don't suppose the lefties posting here remember how much spleen, invective and hatefulness the AA folks directed toward GWB and "the right wing", do they? You know, the BushHitlerSmirkingChimp crap? Yet how many conservatives took to the national airwaves, as Hedges has to urge censorship against the Christian right, to argue that AA should be shut down? And why do such sensitive souls as Hedges and Keillor avert their gaze, and stifle their public comment, while Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and the other Internet foamers routinely call for Bush and Cheney to be killed and our country to be defeated? Did they object when Alec Baldwin, on national TV, called for Henry Hyde and his family to be stoned to death? Or how about the Left's attempt to conflate the right with Islamofasicm by referring to the "Taliban wing of the Republican Party"? Did Hedges object to that as "hate speech"?
Cue up the sound of crickets chirping, please!!!
Myself, I am struck at how much more often the left is driven to impute evil, not intellectual or moral error, to the right than vice versa. Take the Diebold voting machine flap: the lefties said Bush and the GOP would fraudulently use the machines to tip the 2006 elections their way. When it didn't happen, the left was curiously silent. Nor did they (or their media lap kitties), acknowledge that the GOP didn't send brigades of lawyers into states where their candidates lost to challenge the results, claim fraud, etc., while the left did the opposite in 2002 and 2004. If the right, especially the Christian Right, are so dangerous, why do they play...by...the rules???? Funny how the left projects its own actions onto the right, fantasizing that the right will engage in nefarious practices that the left uses all the time.
Cook County 1960: anyone remember???? The Left certainly forgot, when they huffed and puffed, and nearly threw the country into a constitutional crisis, in 2000.
QED
I've met with some Christians. Does that mean...
They were roundly criticized from the left. A few on the right chimed in, some only after being asked to give an opinion.
What matters to me is that Pat and Jerry still conference call with Dubya whenever they want. There was a time when leaders were "disgraced" and left the public eye. Not so much anymore.
Yes, it means...
We already do. Here in Richmond, the first year I moved here, I was treated to racist and anti-Semitic shows by some of the local neo-Nazi movements on our local cable channel. It ran at any time of the day or night, and finally stopped because--well, I'm not really sure. Perhaps nobody was watching it, and the bigots decided it was a waste of money.
This is America. Speech is still free, as far as I can tell.
Some highlights:
And:
Just remember, it is a two-edged sword. One day the pendulum of political power might swing the other way and your views might be censored as "hate speech" or as some other variant of unprotected speech. The freedom of speech is designed to protect the rights of people to say things we don't want to hear.
I read the actual website for Justice Sunday. Not my cup of tea from a theological standpoint actually. That said, I read the actual website as opposed to its demonization by the left. But please identify which of the speakers you find so objectionable that we should not discuss their views in polite company.
Despite including them in the same sentence, Justice Sunday was not at the White House, though it was designed in part to support President Bush's judicial nominations. If you want to complain about White House meetings, please name names and don't engage in ad hominem attacks. I am particularly interested in which leaders of the Christian Identity Movement have been visiting the White House and when they did so.
When you do this, please name direct sources and not the delusions of either Frank Rich or The Nation.
You're the one who mentioned "crackpots" you would not want to be associated with. Forgive me for assuming that Pat and Jerry and the like were among them. Your words from a previous post:
Yes--but if you read the entire context of all of my posts, I have been differentiating between the Christian Coalition and Christian Identity throughout this discussion. While I support neither, my thesis has been that these two organizations are very different--and that I consider the Christian Identity people to be the "crackpots." Unless you wish to provide evidence that either Falwell or Robertson is part of the Christian Identity Movement, then quoting me out of context does a disservice to your argument.
If you think I was quoting you out of context, feel free to quote yourself in context. I still think the sentence was confusing.
I'm sorry you don't consider Pat Robertson to be a "crackpot". You might want to re-examine the issue.
"I was silent when they came for....but who will speak for me?"
This is the far left's opening salvo's in the war to suppress the conservative right. Next the "Fairness Doctrine" will eliminate the right's ability to get out it's message by muzzling conservative radio shows. Then blogs will be muzzled...finally, everyone will be democrats...
The liberal left is beginning it's push to total control of government and the means to deliver information...just like the Nazi's did (remember Nazi is the acronym for national SOCIALIST workers party).
Does it change your mind to remember that at least 4% of America is gay, so = 12 million people.
1.) Socialism (Communism) and Fascism don't just have similar tropes, they are branches of the same political and ideological tree. Mussolini created fascism by replacing "international" socialism with "national[ist]" socialism after the workers of the world failed to unite in WWI. This is well established, see Hayek, Muravchik, and others
2.) What is "Christian terrorism"? McVeigh et al operated under a paranoid anti-government conspiracy theory that had little if anything to do with any religion, Christian or otherwise. Some of you seem to be trying to mentally balance the world by inventing a "Christianist" movement similar to the Islamist movement that actually does exist.
Living in the Middle East, I've seen plenty of alJazeera. If it's an anti-semitic hate network, they're hiding it pretty well. Unless you count reporting on internal Israeli graft and corruption scandals and highlighting frictions within Isreali society as "anti-semitic." Do you have any actual basis for your statement, Moneyrunner?
Also, those claiming that Hitler was a leftist because his party was called the "National Socialist Workers' Party" really don't understand history. All the members of the Nazi party who actually believed the "socialist" part met a nasty end in the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler built the party based upon support of the most conservative elements in German society: the large industrialists and the army. He felt that the worker class was were the traditional elements of Aryan (and thus, German) nationalism resided, as opposed to the petty bourgeoisie, who were in favor of actual socialist economics, personal social liberty and democracy. That's why he had "woker" in the party name: it was an act of pragmatic populism.
Some people might get some personal mileage out of calling Hitler a leftist or socialist, and thus connecting him to modern "liberals", but those people know nothing of history.
I started the whole Nazi/Socialist thing by using it as analogy to my comments on Christian Identity versus the Christian Coalition. From a historical context, to say Nazi = Socialist is silly. So is Christian Coalition = Christian Identity.
Martin Niemoller--a Protestant Pastor in Nazi Germany is usually credited with the "First they came" bit, as explained here.
My position all along is that while I disagree with much of the Christian Coalition, and agree that people associated with it have made some statements I vehemently disagree with, I will defend them against those who want to associate them with the truly repulsive people in the Christian Identity Movement.
This reminds me of my own consideration of tolerance of speech around the topic of 9/11 deniers/conspirators, who frankly have said the most risible things I can recall perhaps in my lifetime.
I finally concluded that their vocalized idiocy was proof of a healthy republic, and that their right to say outrageous things did not deny me the right to shout them down in the public square. The shouting down of such things is not censorship, it is as old as the most basic social order itself. While nearly all speech is protected, not nearly all speech carries value. It is right to speak ones mind, it is also right for society to let it be known when such things are so utterly foolish as to deserve derision in unison.
MEC2
P.S. While too little space exists to discuss this fully, socialism and Nazism occupy much of the same political space . You cannot ignore the contortions by socialists and their apologists to compartmentalize Nazism so as to not notice their shared undergirding of statism. Once the state is supreme to the people, where the state goes is simply semantics, though I don't think it's accidental that widespread liquidation of humanity is common to statist regimes, be they led by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot... anywhere where individual liberty is secondary to the state.
Ok, cool. Then NAMBLA is to PFLAG as Sunni is to Shia.
Are we having fun, now?
This seems to be a protected form of free speech--rather like when environmentalists call for "Nuremberg-style" trials for global warming skeptics. Nuremberg's punishments included hanging--not a tongue lashing.
It must be abominable indeed to think that America was founded by evangelical Christians--especially when so many states required one to be a Christian (e.g., Maryland), or in some cases, specifically a Protestant (e.g., South Carolina, North Carolina), to hold public office. Massachusetts's 1780 Constitution even directed the legislature to pass mandatory church attendance laws. See
the Pennsylvania 1776 Constutition or the Delaware Constitutional Convention delegate oath for examples.
Now, Jon has made some good points about the unorthodox (by modern fundamentalist standards) beliefs of people like Jefferson and John Adams--but the constitutional and statutory requirements of the early Republic are blindingly clear that this was a Christian nation.
Let's be blunt: dismissing someone's concerns about being silenced, or playing tu quoque games is hardly a liberal form of argument. Hedges book deserves debunking, and his notion that some people in America simply need to be silenced ought to be strongly contested by people across the political spectrum. I'd like to think the ACLU would among the first to protest, but so far that doesn't seem to be happening for some reason or other.
Does it change your mind to remember that at least 4% of America is gay, so = 12 million people.
The First Amendment doesn't bar speech. It's permissible under the First Amendment to bar some speech, but I doubt that you'll find anyone here who would include that statement--even us liberals. The VC tends to attract civil libertarians in roughly equal proportion to the hardcore ideologues, and neither in this case are big fans of banning speech. In fact, nearly your exacty hypothetical comes up in the case of Holocaust deniers, and I think it's pretty clear that
Given the sorts of speech that may be banned, I think the statement you propose is less likely to be suppressable than a statement like, "That gay guy over there should be put to death." The broader and less specific it is, I think, the less likely it is to qualify as actionable speech. The First Amendment is hardly my field, but fortunately there are plenty of people here who can correct me if I'm wrong.
NB, the moral and ethical nature of the speech is (to a certain extent) unconnected to whether it's protected. Your hypo is a fine hyberbolic example of loathsome speech, but it doesn't seem to approach the specific characteristics that would make it, say, fighting words or obsenity.
>> The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts, watched by tens of millions of Americans.
Here it's the "radical Christian Right". Unfortunately, a lot of Christians might consider themselves "radical" for their particular views, denominations, or simply strength of faith. "Radical" is a very weakly defined "some-but-not-all" distinction.
Coupled with "watched by tens of millions of Americans", he's referring to some rather large and popular Christian organizations, not just the ones planting IEDs on the roads the secular humanists frequent.
>> Passivity in the face of the rise of the Christian Right threatens the democratic state.
"Christian Right". No need to even mention "radical". It seems to me if you're going to hatemonger against a subset of a group, you ought to do the larger set the courtesty of making some brightline distinctions.
Of course, we are fortunate that the Left-self-identifying Hedges is no more emblematic of the entire Left as the Right-self-identifying murderers of doctors at unpopular clinics are of the entire Right.
And I'm grateful that doesn't need to be mentioned because the much cherished and eminently respectable Right-wing commenters here at VC are sufficiently intellectual and honorable not to commit an association fallacy just because it feels good to do it.
In legion with the devil? Never heard anyone, anywhere say that. AIDS is God's Just Punishment? I have heard Christians point out that the wages of sin are death, and that the high promiscuity of the gay male community made this inevitable.
It is true that child molesters are disproportionately homosexual (about 20-30% of molesters), but I've never heard anyone, anywhere make that claim about all homosexuals, or even imply it. There is just barely some discussion of the connection between child sexual abuse and adult sexual confusion.
I don't think I've EVER heard any radio station discuss the coprophagic subculture.
I'm not saying that these things aren't discussed somewhere, but I've never heard it, and I live in one of the most conservative parts of the U.S.
But he’s still just one guy. One. Until there’s evidence that his proposal here is being taken as anything more than a curiosity, an example of extremist rhetoric, it’s as ridiculous to impute his beliefs to other liberals as it is to impute the Dominionist movement’s ideals to the Christian Coalition.
Whether he represents some undertow of left-wing fear about "Christianists", or is just getting to be cranky I can't say. But to dismiss his writing and the words in an interview on NPR as something "some guy" said is really not a very thoughtful response. What we have here is a serious left-wing thinker who is proposing that some part of the US polity be silenced. While he did not say "by any means necessary", the history of leftism in the 20th century leaves certain echoes within many people, no matter how hard the left tries to dismiss their concerns.
Now you’re assuming (a) a “by any means necessary” clause, a huge expansion with no support in what he’s actually said, and (b) some greater significance to his words beyond the fact that they’re his words, and no one else’s. When Pat Robertson says that God is giving him prophecies about terrorism and that New Orleans was destroyed for its sin, we don’t assume, “Oh, he must mean that sinful cities must be destroyed, even if we have to do it ourselves,” and we don’t assume, “Oh, he’s a serious guy, we should assume this is a common position.” You’re injecting complete inventions with no factual support.
I'd like to think the ACLU would among the first to protest, but so far that doesn't seem to be happening for some reason or other.
Completely ridiculous. The ACLU would absolutely be the first to file suit if he was actually in a position to suppress speech. We know that because they do, in fact, take action in analogous situations. Your blue-sky hypothesizing is a baseless smear, and it does no credit to your comprehension of the issues or your willingness to approach them seriously. Do you really have to make things up to make your point?
Nope, the First Amendment doesn’t bar any kind of speech.
I don’t believe for a minute that this unsupported claim is true.
What I find most troubling is that Hedges appears to put conversion and eradication in the same category. As a Christian, I'm called to obey the Great Commission. So, yes, Mr. Hedges, I want to convert people. (So does Sam Harris, by the way. He just wants to convert people in the opposite direction.)
But I certainly don't want to eradicate anybody. I think Reconstructionism is a wicked perversion of God's word. As a Christian classical liberal, I disagree with the Robertson-Falwell crowd about a whole host of policy matters.
Back to Hedges: it is extremely troubling that he appears to put attempts at conversion and attempts at eradication in the same category. Both free exercise and free speech protect evangelizing. Mr. Hedges appears quite ready to destroy the village in order to save it.
Yes, Hitler and the Norwegian prime minister are virtually indistinguishable.
I'd like to think the ACLU would among the first to protest, but so far that doesn't seem to be happening for some reason or other
The ACLU tends to protest when agents of the state act to restrict free speech, not when private citizens exercise it.
My real concern with tripe like this is the effect it can have on younger minds. In particular, I believe a society that places a premium on the freedom of speech would be wise to have classes on logic and critical thinking strategies within the public education system.
I wonder about that. I agree that evangelizing is protected as free speech, but as free exercise? I’m not very familiar with scholarship on that clause. Does it extend to religious activities that necessarily include non-coreligionists? Insofar as it would protect an evangelist’s freedom to ask for permission to share a message, I don’t see how it differs in practice from the speech right. Is there any way in which exercise and speech aren’t coterminous with regards to evangelism?
How many posters on this thread actually take liberals seriously on their professed free speech act, their precious 1st Amendment? Stay calm, there is sentiment in Congress to raise the laughably named Fairness Doctrine from it's grave,dust it off and get the FCC back in business as referee for once free speech. "Fairness", a code word if ever there was one and allied in usuage to "free speech", duck when you hear them.
Hedges at least gives us the benefit of seeing the sentiment behind the charade.
It appears that Colin is looking for some way to justify a ban on evangelism to "non-coreligionists". Sorry, but this is not going to work. Christianity at the time the Constitution was ratified was heavily into evangelism, and the notion that the government could prohibit evangelism without running afoul of the free exercise clause would have been completely incomprehensible
to the Framers.
It appears that Mr. Hedges is not alone on the left in trying to find ways to suppress points of view that they don't like.
I find Chris Hedges to be hateful and intolerant. He should be silenced.
Only insofar as there is a distinction between a mugger and a pick pocket.
At the state level yes (and given it was at the state level one should not then use the word "Nation" after "Christian") but not at the Federal. And not according to the principles enunciated in the documents Founding the nation (the Declaration, Constitution, and Federalist Papers) in 1776-1789.
Is it any surprise that given our Founding principles, all states would eventually disestablish, Mass. being the last to do so in 1833?
I agree with your characterization of him but would prefer that his right to speak be protected even though he doesn’t believe in respecting the rights of others to do the same.
The dittoheads rarely make such nuanced distinctions. Leftist/liberal/socialist/welfare statist/collectivist are usually considered synonyms. And then there are those "Re-defeat Communism" T-shirts with HRC's face on them. Perhaps this whole thread merely illustrates that broad-brush overgeneralization is a convenient tool for the intellectually lazy, regardless of his political home.
An absolutely absurd insult. It is beyond belief that you could have read that into my comment any support or sympathy for a “ban on evangelism.” You should be ashamed of yourself for blatantly mischaracterizing my comments - as I said before, you reach to incredible depths to tar anyone who irks you with whatever brush lies close at hand, no matter how despicable. If you truly did misunderstand my comment—which I do not believe—then you need to work very seriously on basic reading comprehension. Reread what I wrote, looking specifically for these clauses: “I agree that evangelizing is protected as free speech,” and “Is there any way in which exercise and speech aren’t coterminous with regards to evangelism?”
The federal government's authority was extraordinarily limited (at least, that's what everyone claimed), and as Noah Webster observed, the diversity of denominations within the country rendered the sort of establishments that were common at the state level impracticable. The federal government's authority in the area of religion was limited precisely because state authority was not.
Actually it is surprising. The federal government's power was limited; the state governmental powers were not. More importantly, it was not because it was unconstitutional for states to have establishments of religion, or religious preferences, but because the popular sentiment against establishments changed.
The First Amendment did not prohibit all manners of state establishments and preferences, and if you want to understand what Americans felt on the subject, look not at what the limited federal government could do, but look at what the states were allowed to do.
In any case, no one is pushing for state establishments of religion. The problem is that the ACLU has argued for, and the courts have largely accepted, an understanding of the First Amendment that is contrary to the evidence of original intent. The federal government repeatedly took actions that showed a clear preference for religion over irreligion, and even using the status of state laws with respect to religion in 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, it would be impossible to defend the ACLU's position.
>> How many posters on this thread actually take liberals seriously on their professed free speech act, their precious 1st Amendment? Stay calm, there is sentiment in Congress to raise the laughably named Fairness Doctrine from it's grave,dust it off and get the FCC back in business as referee for once free speech.
Well, I do, for one. I'm definitely more liberal than conservative (and not particularly good at either of them). I comfortable with the forced redistribution of a portion of your and my individual private properties to individuals suffering from an extreme lack of said properties. I'm also all for auctioning off wireless spectrum to the highest bidders, ending content regulation on radio, broadcast television, and cable and satellite services, and then shutting down most of the FCCs bureaus and offices.
As a result, as a liberal I do not support a "referee for once free speech", which may or may not please some liberals. Also as a result, I suspect there will be something of an invasion of softcore porn on many channels, probably not an effect many conservatives will be in love with either.
Ultimately there are two groups of people who think free speech is best when censored to their own preferences by a gov't agency. We call them "the Right" and "the Left". It can be challenging to take either at face value on the topic of free speech some days.
I saw what you wrote--and in the context of a discussion of Mr. Hedges's attempts to justify silencing the Christian RIght, what possible reason would you have for making this distinction, except as part of his campaign to suppress free speech?
Thorley Winston:
OK, so I went to a non-Gay-lovin' website that collected data on this. The Family Research Institutite. (They've got a nice picture of the Supreme Court on their website, but I'm sure they are impartial.) Here was what it said about people who have had homosexual experiences:
I used the 4% number because I understood it to be the most widely accepted. (I had heard it repeatedly even before I looked it up; I even think there was a volokh-comment argument over it a while ago.)
So don't believe it if you don't want to I guess. Gay advocacy groups (with their own leanings and biases) find the number to be more like 10%.
Not every commenter is a hyper-partisan, out to score points against the opposition. I'm interested in whether the FE and FS clauses are functionally identical when it comes to evangelism, or whether there is a practical or theoretical distinction. I assume that FE doesn't empower an evangelist to force an audience to listen to their message, so the right seems co-terminous with the speech right to present or offer a message for receipt by a willing or already-available listener. I'm curious about the interaction of these two overlapping freedoms, and whether ScurvyOaks or others see a difference in the coverage of the clauses in this context. (And thanks to ScurvyOaks for responding to my question; I'd be very interested in hearing others' ideas.)
I've made several comments disparaging Hedge's remarks, and pointing out how ridiculous others' attempts to impute those remarks to liberals in general are. Your pretense at incomprehension is a farce. How could you honestly believe that I support his proposal, after my several specific responses above? If you were not notorious for comments accusing those with whom you disagree of every conceivable grotesquerie, then I would take it more personally. (See, e.g., your earlier comments blaming homosexuals for the rise of Nazism and totalitarianism in general.) As it is, I'm just glad you didn't contrive an excuse to accuse me of something more loathsome. Do you not mark a distinction between academic discussion and nasty, personal insinuations?
...Nevermind that his proposal is not unheard of in certain nations of the [newfound] leftist EUtopia of Europe.
Like it or not, he's calling for a segment of the polity to be silenced. Like it or not, he's a leftist. Like it or not, leftism for over 100 years has demonstrated a tendency to silence its enemies "by any means necessary". No, Hedges did not say that, but he's part of a much larger movement with a history, a past. The American left in the 1920's and 1930's idolized Lenin and Stalin. The American left in the 1950's and 1960's cheered Mao. For a brief time in the 1970's, there were leftwing admirers of Pol Pot; Anthony Lewis of the NY Times took quite a long time to finally admit the truth of what leftists had done in People's Kampuchea, for example. Sure, leftists look back today at these things for the most part with distaste, but the fact remains that for three generations, American leftists have flirted with totalitarianism over and over and over again, and not just overseas, you may recall the Weathermen to pick one example. One of the commonalities on the left was the tendency to dismiss dissidents, and to go along with their silencing for far too long. Find a leftist today who has read "Against All Hope", and reached a conclusion about Fidel's paradise, for example.
You can't wish away this history. So when an American leftist talks about silencing American Christian people, it's going to call to mind the Soviet silencing of Russian Christians, the Chinese treatment of Christians, and so forth. You may not like it, I'm sure it strikes you as unfair, but the complicity of the American left in oppression of religious people by other Leftists has too long of a history to simply dismiss out of hand, if you are actually debating in good faith.
The ACLU does not just file lawsuits. Its various chapter Presidents also make public statements from time to time, as do board members, on issues such as free speech. Perhaps ACLU has already criticized Hedges idea, and I am not aware of it. But so far I am unable to find any such criticism. I find that to be curious.
If some writer at the Hoover Institution put out a book claiming that atheists were a danger to the republic, and it was high time that the were silenced, I daresay there would be a huge outcry about it, and the Northern California ACLU would make a public statement rather quickly. The fact that there is no such outcry from the NYCLU that I can find is interesting. The fact that liberals and leftists, who are so quick to find bigotry and danger in the writings of their opponents, are dismissive of this book and idea as the notion of "just one guy" is also interesting.
Which ones, MIR?
There are state-imposed restrictions on speech in every country on earth, including the US. The difference between the US and Europe is quantitative, not qualitative. High-minded rhetoric notwithstanding.
In the modern sense of the term "evengelical Christians" did not exist in the 18th century. Today's evangelical Protestantism arose in the mid 20th century as a reaction against stricter Fundamentalism. To be sure it has some roots in the Great Awakening of the 18th century, but the Founders of our nation were not in any sense "Evangelicals". Most were Christisns (though a few were Deists). They tended to belong to what we now label as liberal or mainstream Protestant churches, and would have more in common with Bishop Spong than with Jerry Falwell.
Re: but the constitutional and statutory requirements of the early Republic are blindingly clear that this was a Christian nation.
Oh, nonsense! Yes, most of the population was Christian, but it's blatantly apparent from the Constitution and their writings that the Founders did not intend for the republic to be in any sense religiously governed. Good grief. And those creeds and such that people were required to affirm at the state level were NOT drafted by the Founders; they were left-overs from English law, drafted either back at the time of the Glorious Revolution (1688, which chased Catholic King James II from the throne) or even from the days of Elizabeth I. And most of these things were speedily gotten rid of, or simply ignored like the obsolete Puritan blue laws.
Re: I have heard Christians point out that the wages of sin are death, and that the high promiscuity of the gay male community made this inevitable.
Um, everybody dies. Gays are no more mortal than anyone else.
Re: the state governmental powers were not.
Many state constitutions included their own bills of rights, or such were speedily added to them after the Founding. The Founders most certainly did not think state governments should hold unlimited, despotic power either.
You and Hedges are pretty much neck-and-neck in the bogeyman-spotting sweepstakes. I can't wait for your finishing sprint.
The strawman argument is a logical fallacy. Please make a note of this for future reference.
Pro-FCC Censorship?
Writers, Filmmakers, Performers and Free Speech Groups Urge Court to Reject FCC Censorship
http://www.aclu.com/freespeech/censorship/ 27546prs20061130.html
Anti-God?
ACLU of New Jersey Applauds Ruling in Favor of Student's Right to Sing "Awesome God"
http://www.aclu.com/religion/schools/ 27673prs20061212.html
Fairness Doctrine?
Past support well-known; current support unknown, to me at least (link is to 1994 article. I couldn't find anything more recent.)
http://www.reason.com/news/show/32218.html
IANAL, but my impression is that city ordinances banning door-to-door proselytizing are constitutional so long as they ban all proselytizing. I'm not as sure that this isn't a "time, place, and manner" restriction such as the courts permit for speech, meaning that it really doesn't answer the question.
Reconstructionists/Dominionists are fundamentalist Christians who want society reconstructed around Biblical principles (oversimplified, Leviticus should be the Penal Code).
Christian Identity (also known as British Israel) is a racist movement that argues that white Europeans are the descendants of the tribes of Israel, and are God's chosen people (many of them also believe that Jews are the spawn of the snake copulating with Eve). A large portion of their people are the Aryan Nations members.
Nick
The Cantwell opinion includes the following, which I think Hedges might profit from reading:
"In the realm of religious faith, and in that of political belief, sharp differences arise. In both fields the tenets of one man may seem the rankest error to his neighbor. To persuade others to his own point of view, the pleader, as we know, at times, resorts to exaggeration, to vilification of men who have been, or are, prominent in church or state, and even to false statement. But the people of this nation have ordained in the light of history, that, in spite of the probability of excesses and abuses, these liberties are, in the long view, essential to enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of the citizens of a democracy.
The essential characteristic of these liberties is, that under their shield many types of life, character, opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed."
In Murdock v. Pennsylvania, a 1943 case, the Supreme Court noted that “hand distribution of religious tracts is an age-old form of missionary evangelism–as old as the history of printing presses. It has been a potent force in various religious movements down through the years… . This form of religious activity occupies the same high estate under the First Amendment as do worship in the churches and preaching from the pulpits. It has the same claim to protection as the more orthodox and conventional exercises of religion. It also has the same claim as the others to the guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.” 319 U.S. at 109.
I agree with some of what you say, but on this point I differ. The deists among the founders had more in common with Spong than Falwell. But the regularly church-going, communion-taking Anglicans/Episcopalians among the founders would have thought that Spong was an utter heretic. The PECUSA of the 1780s/1790s was not like today's Episcopal church.
The founders who wrote our founding documents unanimously agreed that individuals have the right to freely exercise their religion, which in principle, extended to all religions or lack thereof and that government should in no way deny any privileges including holding office on the basis of religion. They didn't support state religious tests and either weren't involved in writing state constitutions with religious tests, or to the extent they may have been, stood against those provisions but didn't possess the requisite power to see them removed.
[For instance, Ben Franklin was involved in writing PA's Constitution yet he despised the following language in it:
And Franklin helped to get such an unequivocal violation of the rights of conscience removed from PA's Constitution.]
Some of key Founders like Adams and Washington thought a mild religious establishment was okay as long as it didn't violate the right to Free Exercise. All founders including Jefferson and Madison thought that religion was important to society because of the morality that it produced. But they also made clear it wasn't the Christian religion in particular but "religion" in general which could do the trick. In Mass., many of the Congregational Churches who were awarded such legal privilege preached "infidel" unitarian and universalist doctrines (hence weren't even "Christian" churches).
Jefferson and Madison thought use of public funds to directly support religion violated the rights of conscience (though I think they would have been okay wiht aid to religion given on neutral or secular grounds). Adams and Washington probably would have been okay with public funds going to any Church, even Islam, because all religions -- to them -- produced the morality that republics needs.
In short, the vision that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Morris, and Hamilton had for America was not to "found" it as a "Christian Nation," though their political theology does have theistic underpinnings.
Moreover, you'll have to give a pretty good definition of a homosexual experience -- does it include being on a sports team where you all shower naked in a giant room? Fraternity initiations? Drunk college girls making out?
Clearly, the subset of people who have had "homosexual experiences" and those who ARE homosexual is NOT coterminous.
Couple that with the reality that most people, even today, really don't think being gay is a positive thing, so they try to hide it from others, and often from themselves. Studies have shown that often times the most homophobic men are often same-sex attracted themselves, but the self-loathing overcomes their innate desires and turns it into hate towards other gays.
The percentage of openly gay people is around 4-5%, as the previous studies have shown. California believes that 10% of the voting public is gay there.
My belief is that the number is much, much higher than 5% Why? Just take a look at any chat room such as on Craig's List or AOL. You will find plenty of men freely admitting that they are married but looking for gay sex. Does that make them homosexual? I don't know, but if you are asking for blowjobs from a man, whether giving or getting, it seems to me that these guys are not entirely hetero either. But they would never consider themselves 'gay' and would not respond as such to a survey. And so they are vastly undercounted. (Ask Ted Haggard, even today, if he is gay. He will likely say no. Six months ago, he certainly denied it, even to himself.)
A friend of mine is a top notch oncologist. Of course, as a medical professional, he needed an accurate history of his patients, including their sexual history. He said that in the past, they would ask if you are gay, but that severely undercounted the real number. So then they began to ask, Do you have sex with other men? The numbers rose quite a bit, but they still felt they weren't accurate. So now they ask, "Do you fuck other men?" The numbers have increased even more, and therefore are much more accurate.
So the question isn't how many men are gay. The question is how many men fuck or get fucked by other men. That number, I can assure you, is much, much higher than 4%.
The conservative website I quoted from earlier had other studies specifically focusing on "gayness" and not "homosexual activity" that I found after I posted earlier. In short, even the religious right admits that there are millions of gay people in this country. I am sure there are even some at GMU.
Colin:
That's really interesting and I'm not sure that you're wrong. It would be very hard to draw that line though.
A speaker tells an "activist" meeting of the Amry of God:
-That guy deserves to be killed for performing abortions
-The gay people in this small town should be put to death
-The gay people in this state should be killed
-Gay people should be put to death
You argue that the first statement has less free speech protection, and the protection increases as we move down. I think that's correct, but it has the funny side effect of insulating the claims that could be the worst.
The last claim supports a mass murder that would numerically exceed the holocaust, yet it is the one we offer the most protection to because it also the most abstract and therefore the least likely to cause imminent violence. That's legally interesting, IMHO.
I agree in a very limited way that the protection can wax on the statements you list even as their potential harm goes up, but only if you ignore probability. That is, the worst claims are also the ones that are less and less likely to ever be realized. In other words, protection waxes as the speaker's and/or audience's ability to carry out the threat wanes. I agree that this is a legally interesting result, but I also think that it's the most appropriate, not just Constitutionally, but ethically and morally.
As an aside, I believe that extremely abstract remarks are certainly possible of causing atrocious wrongs. But because we can't reliably discern which abstractions pose a real danger and which are mere rhetoric, there's no principled way to regulate abstract expressions, even if that was the agreed societal goal.
"Religion gone bad: the hidden dangers of the Christian right"
"Piety &politics: the right-wing assault on religious freedom"
"Atheist universe: the thinking person's answer to Christian fundamentalism"
"Thy kingdom come: how the religious right distorts the faith and threatens America"
It appears that demonizing Christians is a well-funded activity, and that Hedges is hardly alone in his efforts. If there were a bunch of books in Big Box stores proclaiming the dangers of Judaism, Islam, or atheism, I'm sure it would be viewed with alarum by the self-appointed defenders of diversity.
But demonization of Christians is no problem, no big deal, no sweat. How very interesting.
The Reconstructionists at least are fairly extreme Calvinists-- more extreme in some ways than Calvin himself. As such there is a fair amount of animosity between them and Baptists and Evanglicals. I even saw a post online by a Reconstructionist who referred to Pat Robertson as a "heretical, premillennialist idiot".
Re: I agree with some of what you say, but on this point I differ. The deists among the founders had more in common with Spong than Falwell. But the regularly church-going, communion-taking Anglicans/Episcopalians among the founders would have thought that Spong was an utter heretic. The PECUSA of the 1780s/1790s was not like today's Episcopal church.
The gentleman of the Enlightenment had some very unorthodox ideas about theology in their day. Even those who attended the Anglican Church. But even then the Anglican Church was a sort of grab-bag of people with religious views all over the map; it was mainly a club for the elite. Had Ms Florence King been alive then and made her rather charming remark "I am High Church Episocopalian atheist" it would have been considered a classic drawing room witicism (perhaps more so then than now), not a shocking admission of heresy. We need to remember that the conservatives of that era were not the people who founded our nation: they were the Tories who stayed loyal to the British Crown. The politics of the Founders was decidedly leftwing by the standards of their day and by and large so too was their philosophy on most other matters. And also, more than a few were also Masons, and their personal views on theology seem to be more influenced by the mystical universalism of that organization than by the Fathers of the Church.
Re: Couple that with the reality that most people, even today, really don't think being gay is a positive thing
Most peopele in the entire world, maybe. But in the US, opinion is pretty well evenly divided on the question (with a large segment that doesn't care one way or the other) and the seriously anti-gay contingent is dwindling every year as the oldest generation dies off.
Re: The percentage of openly gay people is around 4-5%
Probably accurate (key word: "openly") given that in the election of 2000 4% of those polled admitted to being gay, lesbian or bisexual, while openly gay people voted at about 80% the rate of the general population. Of couyrse if you take the closet into acccount there are a lot more gay people still.
What claims have I made that are "obviously detached from reality", exactly? Can you please be specific?
I found two books promoting atheism quite quickly, in addition to the one I listed above, and did not see any opposing atheism in my quick survey. Perhaps I missed some, so surely you can provide the titles? I was unaware that David Limbaugh had written shelves full of books. I also did not see any books proclaimiing any danger from Islam, although there was a book by Esposito and one by Karen Armstrong on the shelves.
I apologize if the facts I have seen do not match your preconceptions.
Perhaps you can address the substance of my remarks next time around, rather than engaging in sneering and namecalling? That might be more useful and interesting.
Wow. Two books promoting atheism? You should frequent larger bookstores. Does yours not stock, e.g., Ann Coulter's Godless, or Danger of Islam by Gene Thompson? Buddy, that's from ten seconds of searching the Borders website. If you really expect us to believe that you can go into a B&N or Borders and not find a book of Ideology A Badmouthing Ideology B, then you really are detached from reality. Or, more likely, you're used to forums where you can make baseless partisan claims and not get challenged on them.
Off thread but I must demur at your advocacy of the "forced" divestiture of both my and your assets to people I don't know.
Yours alright, but mine?? The lack of something may, or it may not, prove a need. In itself it cannot prove a claim. You might if you haven't already done so consider the full implications of the word "forced". That is, moral, social, and political.
As I said, off thread and so signing off.
"If you really expect us to believe that you can go into a B&N or Borders and not find a book of Ideology A Badmouthing Ideology B, then you really are detached from reality. Or, more likely, you're used to forums where you can make baseless partisan claims and not get challenged on them."
Thanks for sharing that, it really adds to the discussion.
The only “evidence” you offered was a survey of various “studies” which claimed that the number who had a “homosexual experience” was about 4%. Both you and Randy R mistakenly confused that as representing the percentage of the population which is actually homosexual. As GMUSL 3L pointed out, but such a broad and ambiguous standard then every victim of same sex sexual assault (e.g. prison) or LUG could be included as part of that number. Which means that the number who are actually homosexual would be much smaller.
You forgot the part where I said there was other evidence about people who were "openly" gay. These numbers, on the flip side, do not take into account "closet" homosexuals, of which I expect there are many. If you want to run your own survey, go ahead, but don't just keep carping that 4% is flatly unbelievable to you.
The bottom line the entire time, and the real point I was trying to make was this:
- There are millions of gay people in the United States. -
True or false?
It's true. And it should therefore make you shudder when you hear someone say that gays should be put to death, because you should realize they are calling for a slaughter on the same scale as the holocaust.
So much wrong. Evangelical Protestantism includes fundamentalist Protestantism along with a number of more liberal denominations. On matters such as Biblical literalism, for example, 18th century Christians were much closer to modern fundamentalists than any liberal Christian denomination today. The rise of modern stratigraphic geology and evolution, for example, created great tensions with even quite mainstream denominations such as the Anglican Church. Fundamentalism as a distinct movement appears in the first decade of the 20th century in response to the increasingly liberal theology being taught at the close of the 19th century in the existing American seminaries.
The notion that the Framers had more in common with Bishop Spong than modern fundamentalists is laughable. Bishop Spong is gay--and in 18th century terms, that made him a felon. In most states, subject to capital punishment.
The national government, agreed. But the state governments created state establishments of religion and imposed religious qualifications for holding public office.Utterly wrong again. These requirements appear in state constitutions adopted at the time, such as the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. The Delaware Constitutional Convention delegate's oath was NOT a piece of ancient work that just happened to fall into place. They amended the text at least once to make it more clear. Making this stuff up as you go along isn't going to work.
Maryland did not amend its religious test to allow "religious Jews" to hold public office until 1809.
Take a look at the death rates from AIDS. If you aren't a gay man, a IV drug abuser, or someone who has sex with one of the two, your risks of getting AIDS and dying a premature and horrible death, are quite tiny.
To clarify: the U.S. Constitution limited the federal government quite severely, and took away a number of powers from the states, but otherwise left them free to do whatever their state constitutions and the wisdom(?) of their legislators chose.
The one thing our key Founders (Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin at the least) did seem to have in common with liberal Christians of today like Gene Robinson is their willingness to scrap traditional Church doctrines and "read out" wholesale entire portions of scripture and replace such with the "judgments" of man's reason, which they held to be the ultimate arbiter of truth.
Thus, arguments like homosexuality is wrong because my Church says X or Leviticus says Y or Paul said Z really wouldn't resonate with them (a Thomistic argument from Nature more likely would).
All in all, I really don't see Howard Dean's vision of a Nature's/liberal Christian God who created gay people qua gay people to be inconsistent, in principle, with Jefferson's, Franklin's and Adams' "benevolent" Creator.
I think you confuse Bishop Spong with Gene Robinson. Bishop Spong is, I understand, pro-gay, but heterosexual himself.
Franklin gives us a pretty good reason why he would oppose that clause -- he himself wouldn't have passed such a test! In Brooke Allen's book, she notes that Franklin as President of the Executive Council of Pennsylvania, has this clause removed. But I'm still trying to confirm this in the primary sources.
Rush calls it a "a stain from the American Revolution." This is what I mean when I suggest we try to view the Founding from the perspective of its ideals rather than its compromises with those ideals. The key Founders regarded religious tests to be not unlike slavery, grave compromises with Founding ideals as enunciated in the Declaration.
Arguing that the speech of your philosophical opponents should be suppressed absent any legal mechanisms for actually suppressing that speech is...just more speech.
As to the Fairness Doctrine, since it only ever applied to the media broadcast over the "public airwaves" (that seemingly scarce resource, at the time), and since most TV has already migrated to cable, I suspect the biggest beneficiaries of a reinstituted Fairness Doctrine would be the Satellite Radio folks.
This is patent nonsense. The 18th century had not yet abandoned the centuries-old tradition of ecclesial hermaneutics-- meaning that the interpretation of the Bible was left (even among Protestants) to Church authorities and those with special training, including fluent knowledge of the original languages of Scripture. The sort of know-nothing populism which supposes that anyone can open the Bible and pronounce infallibly on doctrine was rejected as heresy as much by Protestant churches as by the Catholics or the Orthodox (see: Luther's ferce denunciations of the Anabaptists and other self-inspired movements in the Reformation). Scriptural literalism and personal interpretation is a child of the 19th century. If you read the Christian doctrinal literature from earlier periods you will find a profoundly symbolic and typological approach taken to Scripture, a search for deep meaning beneath the surface words.
Re: The notion that the Framers had more in common with Bishop Spong than modern fundamentalists is laughable.
Bishop Spong's particular beliefs may not have been common in the 18th century, but his liberal approach most certainly was, at least among the elites. It is quite impossible to view the Founders as a group as having anything but theological heterodox (a fancy word for near-heretical) notions, just as they did in politics. Again, they were the liberals of their day. The conservatives believed in things like monarchy, aristocracy and the divine right of kings.
Re: But the state governments created state establishments of religion
Your verb has the wrong tense. Use the pluperfect and (and de-universalize the subject) you will be correct: SOME state governments HAD created established religions-- long before the Revolution, often at their own founding. The founders did NOT create established churches-- they inherited them only, and worked to disestablish them at the state level.
Re: These requirements appear in state constitutions adopted at the time
They are simply repeated in constitutions drafted at the time, with their source being earlier constitutions and royal charters and ultimately English law as shaped by Elizabeth I and later amended by the post-Jacobian Whigs.
Re: Take a look at the death rates from AIDS.
Your point is what? Do you know any immortal humans? I mean immortal in flesh. I'll give you Jesus, but even He died, you know. Whether we die of AIDS, cancer, a heart attack, a car wreck, or whatever-- we will die. It's theologically correct to say "the wage of sin is death" but it is absolutely not correct to go on to state that that is somehow more true of some people than of others. The greatest saints alawys considered themselves the chiefmost of sinners. While the Pharisees went about pointing out others' sins to inflate their own righteousness. But you can no more be semi-mortal than you can be semi-pregnant. And for that matter, my cat will die and so will the rose bush outside my window. Pray tell what dire sins they are guilty of?
Re; On the homosexual/sexual morality issue our Founders -- even the Enlightenment ones -- certainly weren't social liberals; but I see little evidence of philosophizing about sexual issues anywhere in their writings.
It's worth noting that several new states (e.g., Ohio) decrminalized sodomy and several other sexual offenses when they redrafted their laws on achieving statehood as men at the time, still influenced by the Enlightenment, considered these to be superstitious laws, unfit for a free and educated people.
Uh, no. You misread my comments. I said that most studies have found that about 4-5% of the entire population is 'openly gay,' which is in fact a very limited definition, as I explained. A closeted gay person is by definition someone who will not admit to being gay. The looser the definition, the higher the numbers go up. So if you put together open gays AND closeted gays, the number will be much higher than 5%. If you put that group together with those who secretely harbor the desire to have sex with men but don't act upon it, the numbers go much higher. And so on. In fact, I have seen studies that state that as much as 20% of the population has had same-sex attraction for a certain duration at some point of their lives. Whether that means a person is "gay" is a labeling issue. (I know so-called straight men who routinely have sex with men, but it doesn't 'count' as sex because they don't kiss! As so in their minds, their are 100% heterosexual, and get angry if you suggest otherwise. Men can always rationalize a way to get what they want....)
But the point remains regardless of these facts: The number of people having same-sex relationships in the US is at least in the tens of millions.