Republican America redux: no free expression for you
A group named Soulforce is sponsoring a bus tour of anti-gay colleges and universities. What they're revealing about places like BYU is pretty shocking:
Kulisch's unauthorized act of "public expression" was a violation of the university's conduct code, said university spokeswoman Carri Jenkins.
"We do not allow campus to be used as a public forum," Jenkins said.
posted by $!# at 4/13/2006 12:05:00 AM
13 Comments:
So what about Soulforce's own censorship? http://www.soulforce.org/forums/faq.php?faq=soulforce_faq_item#faq_soulforce_faq_item1
It's legitimate to question their website policies; however, I think it's a bit misleading to equate the website of an activist group and a university.
I'd like to think that universities, at their core, are dedicated to the free flow of ideas. We all know that's not always the case, but to flatly state that a campus is not a public forum is an extreme example.
Web forums serve a very different purpose from universities, I'm sure you'd agree. And whether or not Soulforce's site policies open them up to accusations of hypocrisy, I would think that a university would welcome a bit of dissent.
The only difficulty with your argument is that, of course, BYU is private property and people have the right to restrain the behavior of others on their property.
Obviously, Soulforce's website falls into this category as well. Their demand that others treat their property with respect and complete control over their property is amusing, because they call other groups hypocrites for following this same practice.
The fact that the land is a university is irrelevant, as Soulforce was not protesting the university but its religious sponsor's beliefs. It's private property and people have the right to police the behavior of others while they are on it and have them ejected when they fail to comply with appropriate demands.
Soulforce wants to get its name in the paper - nothing more, nothing less. They make sure to get themselves arrested at every turn when possible. They decry the lack of "frreedoms" and demand that others bend to their beliefs while refusing opposing views to be posted on their property. Rather ironic for a group that claims to be determined to create a dialogue, don't you think?
I worked a bit on a post which discusses these issues while on vacation last week, and will publish it as soon as I catch up with work.
As I said above, Soulforce is definitely open to being called hypocritical. And there's no question that a private organization is entitled to control its property, real or virtual.
But I ask you this: are Soulforce's aims without merit? Or do you simply disagree with their techniques?
Their arguments are entirely without merit.
Religions have the right to believe as they will, and if you don't like it, you can leave and find one that agrees with you. The world need not shape around your opinion, you should seek out alternatives.
They complain that others commit "spiritual violence" against them, so they respond by using "spiritual violence" agains other groups. It's absurd. Targeting universities gives them a more acceptable target, but they're really after religions, which is entirely hypocritical given their own views on so-called "spiritual violence".
Any point they had to make is destroyed by their choice of venue (they chose to suffer mass arrest on a part of BYU's campus where few students ever go by, at a time when they were practically guaranteed not to have any audience other than the press), lack of attempt to create real dialogue by censoring their own website, and demand that all others change to accomodate them. It's laughable at best.
Ok, interesting. I'll try to post about this a bit later, and look forward to your reaction.
Inarticulate gay-haters
Hide behind technicalities
Hoping to disguise their xenophobia
Ooh, look at me, I'm a self-righteous neocon, and I'm going to artfully pretend that universities aren't places, the very point of which is to induce fundamental changes in those who attend them. Oh no, that doesn't happen, and those changes never involve opening oneself to new ideas, and are never fostered by an environment that's amenable to the coexistence a broad panoply of people, backgrounds, and opinions. Nosiree, why, if you go to University and change, you're a sinner! And the idea of actively censoring alternative viewpoints isn't at all antithetical to the very fundamental notions of broadening one's mind that are the raison d'etre of a university in the first place. Oh no, and morality and legality are always one and the same thing! And a university, where students matriculate as adolescent children and grow up as they're exposed to new ideas and people, is exactly the same as an activist web site (and, by the way, everyone who enrolls in a university always knows the sexuality they'll have as an adult. Always! And if they don't, it's their own fault, goddammit!) And freedom isn't free, and religious people should be free to club the gays to death, and if the gays object, it's unconstitutional spiritual violence, and trying to expose some religious people to new ideas is the same as hating all religion, and pointing out that American "Christianity's" obsession with gay sex has little or no biblical basis at all is the same as being a Christ-hating bigot. Because, being a neocon, I see reason and intellectual debate only as clever tools I can use to lie and cofuse the issue.
Honestly, anonymous, how do you live with such fundamental intellectual dishonesty? Is clear socratic thinking, like, evil or something, forcing you to be painfully reductive and pretend to not understand nuance, or do you just hate everything?
@ other anonymous
And people who can't form arguments sling about the word "xenophobia", which actually is a dislike of people from other COUNTRIES, oh articulate one.
Wow, Aaron. Way to use logical, mature expressions of opinion to further your argument. Why, I'm all but flying to your side!
"the very point of which is to induce fundamental changes in those who attend them."
That's funny, I always thought it was for education. Silly me.
In any case, amongst the rest of your blathering, you betray obvious biases (assuming I'm a neo-conservative, for example), and complete lack of understanding of religion, funny for someone who probably claims to be "open-minded".
Also, Soulforce's argument is that one is simply "born" homosexual, so shouldn't one have a fundamental understanding of that first?
the xenos in xenophobia can mean either "stranger" or "forgeiner", iirc. checking...
Yeah.
cf. dictionary.com, wikipedia
Bonus points for using it in verse.
Huh, the good old Oxford American defines xenophobia as an "intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries", but states that the xeno prefix relates to foreigners, strangers, or 'strange'.
From a purely linguistic and historical point of view, however (wow, look at how far this has strayed...), it must be noted that in the absence of traditional states as they exist today, foreigners were simply regarded as "strangers". The Chinese word for foreigner, roughly translated, means "barbarian", the Arabic word for westerner means "weird" or "weird one" (again, roughly translated), the French word is "étranger" and strange is "étrange", Spanish is "extraño" and a foreigner is "extranjero" (I'm sure the list goes on and on with the romance languages, which are influenced somewhat by Greek if memory serves), and of course in English someone we don't know is a "Stranger".
So... straying far, far, far from any topic of discussion here, I would argue that the historical root of the word discussed foreigners or people from strange/unknown lands, which today refers to people from other countries, as "countries" as we know them today didn't exist - they were simply people that lived in far away cities and spoke a different language.
This has been your linguistics lesson of the day...
they were simply people that lived in far away cities and spoke a different language
That might well define the gap between Boston and Provo.
Here's an additional source, the Columbia Guide to Standard American English. That's 3-1 for a broader usage, (and I think I can defend it reasonably without appeal to authority) but it's splitting hairs, and I don't really care that much. I'll let anonymous defend his/her usage.
Anyway, my thoughts on the equality ride, and specifically how it relates to BYU are in a separate post
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