#liberal values

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

This is a guest post by Jake Mackey, a professor of classics at a liberal arts college in California and co-founder of Free Black Thought. He has two prior guest posts here: Living by virtuous lies: On the "racism" of the SAT and White Doctors Kill Black Babies: Dubious Science and Anti-Racist Medicine (co-authored with David Gilbert).

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[ Depicts a scene from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, ostensibly about the Salem Witch Trials, but widely acknowledged as a metaphor for 1950s McCarthyism. Giles was accused of witchcraft but refused to plead either guilty or not guilty because his heirs could then be deprived of his considerable estate. As Giley is being pressed by the weight of massive stones, he is repeatedly urged to enter a plea. His response: “More weight.” It eventually killed him. Amusing side note, Lee writing here. I played Giles Corey in my high school play. ]

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I am 53 years old. The last four years amount to the most repressive, totalitarian era I've ever lived through.

By: Jake Mackey

Published: Dec 18, 2024

Noam Dworman, host of the Comedy Cellar Podcast, put it this way: If—

“the general atmosphere of fear that we lived through as people who want to speak and live our lives freely—if all that change in American society had the fingerprints on it of a particular leader, that leader would be a fascist. If any leader had brought that change into our lives, that would be the most fascist experience with a leader we have ever seen in this country.”

But the author of all this change was not a particular leader. It was the left.

It was a society-wide culture of left-authoritarian intolerance, not a fascist leader, that made me watch my words like a hawk in my classroom for half a decade.

It was fear of retaliation from the left, not from a fascist leader, that caused me to lay awake at night on more occasions than I can count, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancelation campaign against me.

It was not a fascist leader but fear of intolerant leftists among my colleagues that made me censor myself, as a yet-untenured faculty member, when I was asked to report on my findings about the efficacy—which is nil or worse—of diversity training. It was fear of my leftist colleagues that made me bite my tongue and not speak out when I was asked to sign a statement containing a defamatory lie about a student who had in fact made hateful comments about Asians in a private text message, but had not, as we were asked to affirm with our signatures, threatened violence. (I did not sign, but shamefully I did not defend this vulnerable 19-year-old against faculty lies.)

It was not a fascist leader but fear of a pile-on from the left that compelled a colleague and me to humble ourselves before 18-year-olds with a public apology when a small group of students held our jointly taught class hostage for 30 minutes, tearfully accusing us of traumatizing them by showing a brief scene from a film about war, The Thin Red Line, in order to illustrate a point that St. Augustine makes in his Confessions about the evil in the human heart.

We later learned that the majority of the students had disagreed with their peers’ performative accusation of “harm” and had resented their hijacking of the class with transparently nonsensical accusations. However, the sensible majority of students were as terrified of their peers as we were, and of their peers’ capacity to destroy them for even imaginary infractions, and so they had held their tongues as the grotesque event unfolded. (Worth noting here: I think the vast majority of students, and faculty and administrators, too, are reasonable people who were intimidated into silence by socially distributed authoritarianism, just as I was, over the past years. More on this dynamic below.)

Nor were my colleague and I unique among faculty on my campus. No, it was not a fascist leader but fear of attack from the grassroots left that generated countless whispers among faculty in the halls of my college and others. Professors were afraid to tell any but their most trusted colleagues about how students had stood up in class to denounce them for ideological apostasy or to accuse them of "traumatizing" or "harming" them by teaching basic scientific facts. Professors were afraid to show a “triggering” image, or to fail to teach a given subject from the now-mandatory ideological perspective of Afropessimism. Professors were afraid to teach historical or literary material, unobjectionable until seemingly just the week before, that was now deemed inherently "white supremacist."

[ Maoist public shaming ]

It was not a fascist leader but a merciless socially distributed grassroots left-authoritarianism that led a senior administrator, a black man, to remark to a small group of us whom he trusted—

“I live in fear that if I say one wrong word, it will be the end of a 30-year career. I worry that I can’t protect my staff if any of them says one wrong word.”

It was not a fascist leader but a leftwing culture of retribution enacted by 18-year-olds—before which a department chair, tenured faculty, and college administrators cowered and averted their eyes—that ended the career of a colleague of mine because she read out loud the name of a character in an antiracist comic book. Yes, it was a classroom of first-year students—acting with the tacit complicity of an entire college staffed by cowards (whose cowardice was nonetheless rational)—that ended her career for reading a name in a comic book whose entire lesson centered on the evils of racism. They denounced her as a white supremacist in a way that her fledgling career as a professor, which had begun only one semester before, could never recover from.

Off campus, I know an artist whose career and business a left-authoritarian mob, not a fascist leader, attempted to destroy because he did not post a black square, signaling solidarity with BLM, on his company’s social media in 2020.

I know a musician who lost his band and music career merely for revealing that he was reading a book that had been effectively "banned" by a censorious left. His experience of repressive, totalitarian retribution came not from a fascist leader, but from a faceless, intolerant mob.

[ Nazi book burning ]

It was not a fascist leader but fear of a cancelation campaign from the left—as well as fear that many of my colleagues and college administrators would tacitly endorse the campaign out of their own fear of defending me—that led me to issue a groveling apology to a small group of students and faculty for bringing this same musician to my campus, along with Daryl Davis, a musician and anti-Klan activist who has done more to combat the most virulent forms of antiblack racism in America than perhaps anyone since the Civil Rights era, as part of a Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) panel discussion.

[ Lee here. Daryl Davis has, miraculously, by befriending them, gotten over 200 members of the KKK to abandon the group. When they do so, they donate their KKK robes & hoods to him, which he keeps as a kind of trophy. I really wanted to post an image of him with a reformed KKK member in full garb, but because of the very reasons outlined in Jake’s essay, I decided against it. You can follow Daryl on X (formerly Twitter) here and see for yourself; he posts those images regularly. ]

The two musicians got into a spirited but friendly disagreement about the value of BLM’s approach during the FAIR panel discussion. Afterwards, I heard from a senior colleague that some students and faculty who had been peripherally involved with bringing the panel to campus were mortified that their names might be associated with an event in which someone had said something critical of BLM, and that I would do well to issue an apology. Perhaps these students and faculty really could not countenance hearing criticism of BLM. More likely, I suspect, they were motivated by the same terror of cancelation and ostracism that I was. If their peers learned that they had had anything to do with a panel on which BLM was criticized by one of the speakers, they could face social or professional death on our small campus.

I have read of accomplished leaders in the world of arts and literature who lost their positions not because they criticized BLM but because the statement of solidarity with BLM that they published was not strident enough. I have read (and written) of physicians who lost important positions, were subjected to star chamber proceedings, and whose words were scrubbed from the internet merely for suggesting that socioeconomic conditions and not the unscientific construct of "implicit bias" were responsible for racial health disparities.

I have read of a liberal, gay Canadian educator, who had served children selflessly for decades, who was quite plausibly driven to suicide after being derided as a racist in front of an audience of 200 of his peers by a DEI trainer in a COVID-era “diversity” Zoom call.

And I could go on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And I still wouldn’t have broached the repressiveness of our response to COVID, in which the government was involved, occasionally recruiting private citizens as instruments of repression!

Socially Distributed Authoritarianism: No Fascist Leader Needed

None of this repressiveness, this authoritarian intolerance, this insistence that only a single view was acceptable on pain of professional and social destruction—along with the fear that it all generated—was imposed by a fascist leader. No, it was imposed through the distributed channels of a small number of individual agents converging on an ideology that the vast majority of Americans found absurd, and on a set of repressive practices to enforce it on an unwilling populace. It was also imposed—and this is crucial—by the vast majority of individuals and institutions whose rationally self-interested fear of being subjected to these repressive practices made them turn their eyes away, allowing it to happen to those around them and tacitly endorsing it.

And I cannot but include myself in this indictment. So many of us, myself included, behaved like latter-day Peters, thrice denying the Jesuses of our colleagues, friends, and family in order to save our own skins by falsifying all our most dearly held preferences. My own cowardly failure, before 2022, when at last I got tenure and achieved a measure of security, to come to the aid of friends who were being unfairly scapegoated and professionally destroyed will forever be a source of shame for me.

John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty, noted that in cases such as I have described here, “society is itself the tyrant—society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it.” A collective tyrant of this sort—

practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

The risk of lapsing into a “social tyranny,” Mill believed, warranted a kind of prophylaxis that even measures like the First Amendment cannot provide—

Protection…against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

The Tyranny of the Minority and the Spiral of Silence

Mill, it must be noted, is describing here a “tyranny of the majority,” whereas the “woke” social tyranny we have lately lived through and of which we are perhaps now breaking free may better be seen as a “tyranny of the minority.”

The economist Glenn Loury—writing in the Journal of Free Black Thought, the periodical of an organization some friends and I founded in 2020 to fight burgeoning woke racism and the tacit suppression in our public discourse of black viewpoint diversity—describes how a minority can exert tyrannical power over a majority:

German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined a term that describes this phenomenon: the “Spiral of Silence.” In a spiral of silence, when holding a certain view entails a stigma, then, for fear of being seen as having that view, most people stay silent. Thus, the masses believe they are alone or in a small minority of people with the stigmatized view, when in fact they are indeed in the majority, one of the masses. In progressive-controlled areas of our society today, we are suffering from a spiral of silence…. [...] Though overt censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat arises from the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech that creates a spiral of silence.

The spiral of silence, with its “voluntary limitation of one’s own speech,” is the dynamic by means of which a “woke” tiny minority (estimated to constitute a mere 8% of the population) succeeded in enforcing the social tyranny of the past few years.

Crucially, for the majority of us to have stayed silent all this time, we had to submit ourselves to self-surveillance and self-censorship. The terrorizing spectacle of sudden, arbitrary cancelations, played out on the internet and on campuses, served a panopticon-like function, assuring us that we are always being watched, always subject to discipline. As Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it”—

assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.

Over the last few years, there was no need for a state apparatus of totalitarian control. Instead, each of us internalized the constraints on our speech and behavior that the “woke” wished to impose. Knowing that our own social media posts and others’ smartphone video recordings of us were always being uploaded to the “non-corporal” cloud, and in fear of personal and professional destruction, we self-monitored and self-regulated ourselves into a spiral of silence that left only extreme voices free to fill the void, until it came to seem like those were the only voices that had ever sounded.

Now, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there was an entire class of people who genuinely never entered a spiral of silence, who never felt the need to falsify their preferences, who never experienced so much as a moment of fear of their neighbors, students, colleagues, or acquaintances, who sincerely never were discomfited by episodes of mob-led retribution and cancelation such as I've described here. My theory is that (1) some of these were people who worked and lived in places and occupations blessedly removed from the haunts of the knowledge-economy elites who spearhead “social justice” persecutions, so they simply didn’t encounter the phenomenon; (2) some of these were people who observed somewhat ruefully what was happening to their friends, colleagues, and neighbors, and felt, with a sigh, that it was unfortunate, but rationalized it as a few eggs getting broken in order to make a beautiful omelet of social justice; and finally (3) some of these were people whose own ideology so effortlessly mirrored that of the dominant social configuration that they simply never experienced a moment of cognitive friction.

This latter group comprises the “woke,” whether narcissistic, sadistic, witch-hunting activists or merely complacent fellow travelers. I would posit that many people in this “woke” group have not, for the most part, antecedently and independently arrived at "woke" ideology on their own. The true fire of conversion and fanaticism burns in only a rare few. Rather, for most wokists, their minds are such as to spontaneously and uncritically conform themselves to whatever virtuous lie we are collectively supposed to believe or endorse in any given week—from abolishing slave-patrol policing in America, to mass graves of Indians in Canada, to human biology having no bearing on a person's sex or gender. This group has been, and appears to remain, in the grip of an ongoing mass delusion.

Moreover, this group is by and large the class of people that I fully expect to tell me in the comments that none of this ever happened or that I have fallen for a right-wing lie. Some of these people will also make a faulty inference from this essay and assume that I am a hardcore right-winger. In a classic case of the whataboutism fallacy, they will ask, Well, what about the Republicans?, and they'll accuse me of carrying water for a right wing that is supposedly far more repressive than any leftist or Democrat could ever aspire to be.

Even more incoherently, some people from this group will say that my supposed experience of intolerance (which they doubt ever really happened) is in any event exactly what a bigot should expect (and therefore it’s good that it happened). If I have views that it was impossible for me to express on campus over the past years, that is just and good, for their very rejection entails that my views must have been beyond the pale, and no campus is obliged to platform or tolerate Nazis and their ilk. On this view, people like those whose destruction I have chronicled here merely met with a social opprobrium that was symmetrical with their sins. Case closed.

These inferences and accusations are, of course, not only false but also logically fallacious, even if—alas—it has not been uncommon to hear them over the past 4 and more years. The simple truth is that I can be angry about left-wing repressiveness and still be plenty alarmed by right-wing repressiveness, as indeed I am. I have spoken out on Twitter/X against Florida's repression of speech, for example, and against the crushing of pro-Palestinian speech on some campuses, and just recently I shared my fear, which I think is not unfounded, that Trump may end up invoking the Insurrection Act.

Be all that as it may, there is simply no equivalency between the impact on my "lived experience" of the daily, grinding paranoia and fear that the leftist culture of repression and bullying has created in me and that I have seen it create in students and colleagues, and my more abstract and theoretical concerns about a repressive right, that is in any event far more distant from me because I am not obliged to go to or work in Florida or Texas. In contrast, the society-wide leftist culture of authoritarian tyranny that I have described here has been more or less ubiquitous.

I’m well aware that “wokeness” and its associated “cancel culture” kicked off in the 2010s and began to get really bad ten years ago, around 2015, but I have spoken here only of my own personal experience, which became untenable shortly before 2020.

Moreover, I am well aware that the excesses of the totalitarian left of the last few years can’t compete with the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or Stalinism, or theocratic Islamism (all three of which, by the way, are embraced to one degree or another by the left). Accordingly, I have used “totalitarian” here not in its proper sense, as a system of authoritarian government, but in an extended sense, as a socially enforced leftwing regime of authoritarianism, an attempt by a vocal minority to exert total control over thoughts, speech, and action. The fact that the abuses perpetrated by American leftists against their freedom-loving fellow citizens over the last few years were not acts of a totalitarian government hardly entails that the era was some sort of picnic, and it is telling that people who grew up in totalitarian regimes have seen echoes of what they escaped in the “woke” regime.

Feel free to deny my account of the last 4 years, but I refuse to be gaslit about what I have experienced and seen.

I close with a parting shot from Nevline Nnaji, whose work we have shared and promoted in the Journal of Free Black Thought:

[connectinglines]

4. Muslims in Israel Without Israeli Passports

4. Muslims in Israel Without Israeli Passports

Muslims in Israel who do not hold Israeli passports are mostly Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Their status is complex:

East Jerusalem: Palestinians in East Jerusalem were given the option to apply for Israeli citizenship after Israel annexed the area following the 1967 war, but most have refused, seeing this as an acceptance of Israeli rule over a city they claim as the capital of a future Palestinian state. As a result, most East Jerusalem Palestinians hold Israeli residency cards but not full citizenship, meaning they can live and work in Israel but cannot vote in national elections.

West Bank and Gaza: Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are under Israeli occupation, though Gaza is governed by Hamas. In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority provides limited self-rule in certain areas, but Israel maintains control over security and borders. Palestinians here do not have Israeli citizenship or passports; instead, they carry Palestinian Authority-issued documents.

[quillsword]

Ten Ways to Tell if You are a Democrook

10) You think it’s perfectly okay to lie, cheat and even steal if it benefits the Democrats but if Republicans so much as jay walk, it’s proof that they are evil. 9) You believe that watching any news source besides MSNBC or NPR makes you a Russian spy – and you’re beginning to doubt CNN. 8) You are convinced that the only way to save democracy is to ensure that only people like you can…

[thenewdemocratus]

Dan Mitchell: 'The Fiscal Case For Federalism'

Source:Dan Mitchell being interviewed by federalism.  “Fixing entitlement programs is the the most pressing fiscal need in Washington. In a discussion with the Club for Growth Foundation, I explain that we also need federalism – i.e., shifting programs to the state and local level. Some of those activities should be left totally to the private sector (agriculture, housing, etc) while others could…

[jebmungall]

Alien Invasion Films & Traditional Values

Alien invasion movies have long been a favorite for me. In these films, humans are forced to confront their limitations and vulnerabilities, both as individuals and as a species.

Shortly before the COVID-19 epidemic hit, my younger brother asked if I’d be interested in doing a movie-based podcast with him. While nowhere near the movie-buff he is, I thought it would be a good opportunity to spend some time together. We soon developed our gimmick for the “Cinesiblings Podcast” where we would draft films or pieces of cinema fantasy-style. Our first such draft was “Horror…

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

Every "Western" "democracy" in Northwest Asia aka Europe banning so much as hoisting a Palestinian flag I TRULY never want to hear you corny motherfuckers talk about muh censorship and free speech in China or w/e again

[bonefall]

I haven’t read these books in years WHAT is the angel fetuses. What is happening

LMAO yeah there's actually been three instances where Warrior Cats made fetuses into StarClan characters. We're joking about Moonpaw's absorbed fetus twin (Starpaw/The Voice) meeting with Clear Sky's first dead wife's unborn kids.

The first time they did this was in the last book of DOTC, on Gray Wing's deathbed. Bright Stream, last seen in early pregnancy and being carried off by eagles to be gruesomely eaten alive, shows up accompanied by Tiger Tail and Pale Sky. Her embryos.

Because they show up in this big fanservicey montauge of all DOTC's fridged wives happily living as eternal mothers in StarClan, I sardonically call them the Dead Angel Fetus Children.

(It's dark humor to cope with how much the concept freaks me out)

And with Moonpaw, I have to explain how fusion chimerism works.

There are a few types of chimeras, but when a single individual is created from the combination of two fully fertilized zygotes, that is called fusion chimerism. That's what Moonpaw is.

And you have to understand, we're talking zygotes as in cells. The fusion of haploid gametes. NOT embryos (developing major organs) or fetuses (has major organs). When multiple embryos or fetuses are detected during pregnancy, but one vanishes, that is called Vanishing Twin syndrome (VTS).

There is actually very little linkage between VTS and the chance of a baby being born with fusion chimerism. At best it's an overstated link. At worst, it is a general misconception of Vanishing Twin syndrome.

Fusion Chimeras can happen in a lot of different ways, most of them fertilization errors, very few of them involving the multiple embryos of VTS. Likewise, the vast majority of VTS cases do not result in fusion chimeras. I explained Chimerism in-depth over in this post, and I encourage you to follow my citations to learn more if you're interested.

Sooooo... we're not even talking fetuses for Starpaw and Moonpaw. If they ever were separate, it would have been as embryos at best.

Which means that Moonpaw is haunted by cells that hadn't even developed major organs.

Ergo, we're joking around about how peculiar it is that Supernatural Utero Ghosts have happened thrice.

[cyarsk52-20]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Dec 6, 2024

In the last two rounds of Premier League football, players have been wearing rainbow armbands in support of the Rainbow Laces Campaign which, in conjunction with Stonewall, seeks to advance LGBTQ+ acceptance in sport. Crystal Palace defender, Marc Guehi, caused controversy over the last few days for having written “Jesus loves you” on his armband one day and “I love Jesus” on another. The Football Association (FA) has kit regulations against religious messaging so there has been considerable discussion about whether he should be disciplined for this in the news and on social media. It has been decided by the FA that he should not but that he and his club should be reminded of the rules.

Most of the discussion, however, has centred around two related issues, both of which, I would suggest, are largely irrelevant from a liberal freedom of expression perspective. The first was what Guehi’s messaging meant and whether it was positive or negative towards LGBTQ acceptance. That is, was he saying “I, as a Christian, support Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer people’s right to be Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer and believe that Jesus does too?” Or was he indicating that he qualified his acceptance of LGBTQ people with the teachings of his Christian faith and saying something more like, “Homosexuality is a sin but Jesus loves everyone including LGBTQ people. I wish they would turn from their sin and embrace Christ.” This second interpretation is often referred to as “Love the sinner. Hate the sin.” Guehi’s own explanation of the meaning did not entirely clear this up although it ruled out hostility and a wish to discriminate against LGBTQ people in football,

I think the message was pretty clear to be honest. It was a message of love and truth as well, and a message of inclusivity so I think it speaks for itself.

The second point of contention on both mainstream media and social media was to do with Ipswich’s Sam Morsy who simply declined to wear an armband supporting LGBTQ acceptance at all on the grounds of his Muslim faith. If there is talk of the FA disciplining Mr. Guehi for signalling his religious commitments by writing on his armband but not of disciplining Mr. Morsy for signalling his by not wearing an armband at all, would this constitute a double standard that privileged Muslim beliefs over Christian ones?

From a pure ‘freedom of belief and speech’ perspective in the abstract, both men have the absolute right to express their religious views either by actively stating them or declining to state anything in contravention of them. This is the case whether Guehi was conveying that acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality and trans identity is compatible with his Christian faith or that it is not. People also have the right to express positive or negative views on this subject or refrain from affirming any views on it due to beliefs that are not religious.

However, this did not occur in the abstract or in a neutral public space. It happened when the men were at work. There is not an expectation of absolute free expression in places of work. Employees are quite reasonably expected to address work-related issues during working hours. However, people do, of course, naturally speak about or reference beliefs they hold at work and so policies exist which do more or less well at upholding the principle of freedom of belief and speech in the workplace. The best ones aim to remain neutral on issues of politics, philosophy and religion, make reasonable accommodations for employees’ deeply held beliefs where needed, mind their own business about what those beliefs are and refrain from interfering with the expression of them outside the workplace except in cases where an employee has said something that causes reasonable concern about their suitability to do their job. Many employers or regulating bodies require employees not to engage in political, religious or philosophical messaging while performing a public facing job and the FA is one of them. In this case, Guehi broke the kit rule about religious messaging while Morsy did not.

This is unsatisfactory, however, because the context in which both players were acting was one of pre-existing political messaging. Both Guehi’s decision to add to or qualify the message with his own beliefs and Morsy’s decision not to participate in it because of his beliefs should be understood as responses to beliefs they were being presented with. Guehi is conveying “Yes, and…” or “Yes, but…” while Morsy is conveying “No.” From a liberal perspective, if an organisation is going to engage in any form of political or religious or otherwise ideological messaging, it should have policies which allow individuals to adapt them to accommodate their own beliefs or opt out.

The basic template that I help employers customise when writing their own antidiscrimination policies to ensure that freedom of belief and speech are protected looks like this and is to be found in The Counterweight Handbook:

“1. Make a general statement of adherence to relevant antidiscrimination law. Such laws typically involve straightforward opposition to discrimination on the grounds of characteristics like race, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or genetic information, pregnancy, and marital status. 2. Make a commitment to treat all employees with equal courtesy and consideration and to refrain from any prejudice or hostility on the grounds of the above and ask all employees to do the same. 3. Take care to specifically state that employees are free to oppose discrimination on the grounds of their own political, philosophical, or religious beliefs, which they need not share publicly. 4. Make a commitment to not impose any religious, philosophical, or political beliefs on others at work and require employees to do the same. 5. Make a commitment to not tell employees that their particular religious, philosophical, or political beliefs are false or immoral and ask employees to do the same when at work. 6. Make clear that any demands that the company adopt any particular religious, philosophical, or political belief that goes beyond existing antidiscrimination law or company policy and that is contradictory to other lawful religious, philosophical, or political beliefs will be rejected. 7. Make clear that these statements and commitments are taken very seriously and that any contravention of them will lead to appropriate disciplinary action.”

Both Christianity and Islam are lawful religious beliefs and both can highly plausibly be interpreted as holding that homosexuality is a sin although not all Christians or Muslims interpret their faith this way. Christians and Muslims have the same obligation as everybody else not to be abusive towards or discriminate against same-sex attracted people, but no obligation to endorse messaging that they believe will harm them and to be untrue. I strongly suspect that this is what Guehi’s reference to ‘love’, ‘truth’ and ‘inclusion’ meant. Morsy’s non-messaging gives no indication of his feelings towards LGB or TQ people and we don’t actually have any right to know what they are. We only have the right to expect certain standards of behaviour and there is no indication that his has given any cause for concern. I very much wish that nobody believed homosexuality to be morally wrong, but a lot of Christians and a greater proportion of Muslims do and they must have the right to both hold and express this belief. Equally, those of us who disagree with them must have the right to both believe and say that this belief of theirs is morally wrong.

In a liberal society, we seek to co-exist, not to compromise. That is, we aim for a society in which there is a consensus that people can believe and say that others are factually and/or morally wrong and commit to not harming them or denying their freedom to believe, speak and live according to their beliefs. This principle should be enacted on a number of levels - legal, institutional and personal - and it should apply to all kinds of beliefs and ideas. The law should protect freedom of belief and speech. Institutions and organisations should commit to not institutionalising any religious, philosophical or political ideology (except religious, philosophical or political ones, obviously). Individuals who value the principles underlying our liberal democracies should commit to limiting their attempts to get others to adopt their worldview to trying to convince those who have agreed to engage with them of the truth and value of it. There should be no prioritisation of one kind of idea over another. Deeply held religious views should merit no more accommodation than any other kind of deeply held views, but nor should they merit any less.

The FA is not a religious, philosophical or political organisation. It is a sporting organisation. The rules under which Marc Guehi could have been penalised state that religious, political and personal slogans, statements and images are prohibited. It notes that ‘political’ is harder to define than ‘religious’ or ‘personal’ but includes “any organisation whose aims/actions are likely to offend a notable number of people.” This is unsatisfactory phrasing. A notable number of people can be offended by almost anything. Photos of my cooking once led to a lengthy Reddit thread discussing whether the English are even human. Certainly, a notable number of people are opposed to specific aims and actions of Stonewall especially when it comes to its stance on the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports, an issue that a significant majority of Britons (including me) oppose for reasons of safety and fairness. However, rather than considering whether people are likely to be offended, I would suggest it is better to think in terms of the policy statement 6. above, “any particular religious, philosophical, or political belief…that is contradictory to other lawful religious, philosophical, or political beliefs.” If the slogan, statement or image which you are trying to get everybody to wear would require anybody to convey something they don’t think is true or ethical, don’t try to get everybody to convey it.

Manchester United’s LGBTQ+ supporters’ group, ”Rainbow Devils” (not a name likely to inspire Christians or Muslims with trust) got things precisely backwards when speaking of the decision not to wear a jacket in support of the campaign after one player said he did not want to,

"We respect the right of this player to have his own views, whilst also feeling disappointed that he put the rest of the squad into a position where they felt that they couldn't wear their jackets.

It is extremely unlikely that one person could put everybody else into that position but much more likely that everybody else could dissuade one person who wished to abstain. It is very difficult to be the lone dissenting voice in a group and liberals should work consistently against the establishment of norms which make this harder, even when we believe the dissenting voice is wrong. By protecting the lone voices in the majority whom we believe to be wrong, we protect our own when the majority thinks we are wrong. Supporters of the rights of sexual minorities should know this better than anyone.

==

Organizations should not be engaging in any of this in the first place, unless it's part of their core business, such as Walmart asking staff to wear Christmas paraphernalia.

As Helen says, none of this has anything to do with the FA's business. It's pure virtue signalling.

Companies like Disney are up to their armpits in this stuff, actively destroying their business by making movies and TV shows to signal to a tiny minority of people - who aren't even interested in those franchises - alienating everyone else in the process. Rather than making movies and TV shows for the broadest audience (i.e. paying customers) possible.

[cleofem]

Women used to sell their engagement / wedding rings to escape abusive marriages. Learn from your foremothers. Never tell a man you have your own money. Financial freedom is the most important of all.

Having your own savings and source of income that can't be stolen from you gives you so many opportunities. Don't fall for their smooth words under the guise of 'fairness' and 'trust'. Protect yourselves and only trust yourself. For your safety and autonomy.

It can be the difference between being homeless and being safe. Spread the word.

[girderednerve]

the theory of law that says it matters a lot what the particular text of a given policy says, what loopholes the specific language might leave, &c., is best described as "LSAT prep" or perhaps "wishful thinking." the actual practice of the law is not a rhetorical exercise, it is a power negotiation; these executive orders are written to signal clear intention to judges & create chilling effects for people who are bound by the law but not empowered to interpret it. the viciously transmisogynist executive order signed yesterday says "at conception" because it's a popular phrase among people who oppose abortion, & the violent repression directed at trans women is connected directly to all other attempts to subjugate women as a class, not least by suspending safe, legal access to reproductive care

[succulentsiren]

Shame is a choice. Make the decision to be free of it.

[thenewdemocratus]

Salman Rushdie: Freedom of Speech

Source:Ingur– Author Salman Rushdie, making the case for free speech. Source:The New Democrat Salman Rushdie: “Nothing should be immune from criticism.” From Imgur “Author Salman Rushdie, who lived for years under a death threat after his 1988 book The Satanic Verses drew the wrath of Iranian religious leaders, said the right to free speech is absolute or else it isn’t free. Following a speech at…

[paranormeow7]

finally trying to like. watch the flipside bc I don’t have money for the game and honestly like? it didn’t kill my family and salt my crops or anything it was just a mid, weird game that came after absolute peak (the re up). I agree that the characters felt ooc but they felt like stupidly exaggerated versions of what they already were. like we all knew Jeffery was a freak. he was a self insert of SBN3 written so he could be weird to women. he took a photo of Nicole in her underwear and blackmailed her with it, shot up the school over his fetishes being exposed, etc. honestly the game just wasn’t as funny bc like. each game had these girls in miserable situations, they can technically both be “torture porn”. but flipside just wasn’t handled well LOL… the foot shit was nasty, especially considering they didn’t SHOW any of Nicole’s sex work when she did it in the first two games. the Taliban shit was nasty, felt especially weird considering current events and like. general racism. I don’t know like. I do agree that the game just kind of left a weird unresolved pit in my stomach instead of being cathartic and clever like the re-up. idk like I guess snb3 just wanted to alienate his fanbase who wanted fun yuri content? which yknow it worked!! but the game was never really all fun yuri content (even though I do love it). I don’t blame people for hating the flipside, I certainly don’t really like it, but like. again. it just feels like a middle finger kind of exaggeration of what the game Already Was. it was always edgy it just stopped being edgy in a relatable and fun way and just started being edgy in a “cmon man” kind of way. I already see people going through what Jecka went through every day, you’ve got to do more with it to make me want to see it. Re up made it funny, Flipside was just like “HEY SJWS. YOU WANTED A RELATABLE GAME FOR QUEER PUBLIC SCHOOL KIDS? FUCK YOU. IM SHOWING THIS TEENAGE GIRL GETTING SEX TRAFFICKED IN THE MIDDLE EAST. TAKE THAT LIBERALS”.

doesn’t matter tho sbn3 bullies autistic kids for fun and hates gay people so. fuck that guy lol. I fully support people taking back his characters bc how do you make a game that is so perfectly relatable to gay teen girls and then decide you hate gay teen girls like

[iwieldthesword]

"Oh wow OP sounds like you weren't Their Good Jew™ enough to avoid experiencing antisemitism in antizionist spaces, I guess you'll change your mind about antizionism now!"

Actually this is so crazy, but my political activism isn't actually based on what will personally benefit me or if I'm rewarded for it, but is in fact a reflection of my moral compass and what I think is right. Way to tell on yourself that your political views and activism are 100% based on other people's approval and what you think will personally benefit you best, though! Couldn't be me.

[sadbeautifutragic]

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