As Jazz pointed out yesterday, the NY Times has finally decided to report on the actual controversy over trans women competing in women’s sports. That’s significant because the most powerful tool the left has in these cultural debates is the power to bully people into self-censoring. If they can make speaking up too costly for their opponents, then instituting their own dogma is that much easier.
Today, Jamie Kirchick wrote a piece for Bari Weiss’ Substack site in which he argues the far left’s lack of respect for freedom of speech is at odds with the history of gay rights and at odds with the experience of most gay people. He opens by mentioning the recent effort by law students at Yale to shout down a debate.
The disgrace at Yale reflects a worrisome trend among the rising generation of LGBT people. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, LGBT students are significantly more likely to support “shouting down a speaker or trying to prevent them from speaking on campus” than their straight peers…
The archness that was once so central to gay culture, a product of having to develop a thick skin and embodied by icons such as Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Fran Lebowitz and John Waters, has been replaced with a moralistic hectoring redolent of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. That censoriousness would become such a prominent feature of gay life is a tragedy born of ignorance or revisionism, considering that every advance gay people have made in this country has been the result of the exercise of free expression…
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The first gay rights cases to reach the Supreme Court challenged laws that deemed gay publications “obscene,” and therefore illegal. It was an August 1953 cover story in ONE, the first gay magazine in the United States, presciently entitled “HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE?,” that prompted Los Angeles postal officials to seize all copies. (This was still a time when merely uttering the word “homosexual” was taboo. Upon the first outing of an American politician in 1942, the majority leader of the United States Senate decried an “offense too loathsome to mention in the Senate or in any group of ladies and gentlemen.”) ONE’s editors appealed all the way to the highest court in the land (without the assistance of the ACLU, which at the time declined to involve itself in cases challenging anti-gay discrimination). In 1958, ONE won…
Each successive advance in the march for gay equality—the first picket for gay rights outside the White House (1965), the Stonewall uprising against police harassment (1969), the decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders (1973)—was enabled by the free speech and association rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. As the gay legal historian Dale Carpenter argued, “the First Amendment created gay America.”…
Only in a society committed to freedom of expression could a group of people stigmatized as sinners, prosecuted as criminals, and diagnosed as mental defectives improve their status so dramatically over such a relatively short period of time. No one should be committed to defending that freedom more than us.
The whole piece is worth reading but its main theme is that the First Amendment is something that gay Americans have particular reason to see as valuable. But increasingly there’s a small contingent of far left activists who just aren’t interested in a debate. They’d rather shout down and cancel their opponents on the grounds that speech is akin to violence and violators of their views must be punished. It’s a very short-sighted approach and one that the majority of Americans are increasingly rejecting. Let’s hope that trend continues until the woke ideologues realize that bullying people into silence won’t work in America.
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