> The issue is not with taking a position, it's with suppressing opposition to that position.

If that is the case, then allowing parents to teach opposing viewpoints should be a good thing, right? Saying parents can't teach such viewpoints would be suppressing opposition, right?

> I could write a persuasive paper against gay marriage. I could campaign against gay rights in the Republican club.

If you wore a T-shirt that said "Aristotle said the fundamental union of society is between man and woman and he was right" would that get you in trouble I wonder? Would that be seen as bullying? Should it be seen as bullying?

One problem I am seeing today is that there is a trend towards seeing such things as bullying today and therefore schools end up in the position of imposing cultural ideals, and that I think runs right up against the suppression of opposition that I think you are saying is not ok.

>If that is the case, then allowing parents to teach opposing viewpoints should be a good thing, right? Saying parents can't teach such viewpoints would be suppressing opposition, right?

Earlier in this thread I explicitly supported parents' rights to say whatever the want at home. My objection is to preventing their children from hearing what the school has to say.

>If you wore a T-shirt that said "Aristotle said the fundamental union of society is between man and woman and he was right" would that get you in trouble I wonder? Would that be seen as bullying? Should it be seen as bullying?

No, no, and no. It would lose you the respect of your liberal and/or LGBTQ peers, but the school can't stop you unless it stops all controversial or political speech on clothing (which is a Time, Place, and Manner restriction).

I've not heard of students opposition to gay rights in general getting them in trouble for bullying, although it sounds like something that could happen. That would be an inappropriate restriction of free speech. I have heard assholes defending the right to personally bully specific gay kids with derogatory language directed specifically to them, threats, physical violence, etc. That shouldn't and doesn't fly.

> No, no, and no. It would lose you the respect of your liberal and/or LGBTQ peers, but the school can't stop you unless it stops all controversial or political speech on clothing (which is a Time, Place, and Manner restriction).

What about the argument that it creates a hostile learning environment for GLBT folks and therefore denies them their right to an equal opportunity for education? What about the argument that such a T-shirt amounts to reinforcing discrimination regarding gender roles? In other words, to what extent does this put schools in a circumstance where if they tolerate the t-shirt they get sueed by one group under Title VII and if they don't tolerate it they get sued by another group under Section 1983?

The problem as I see it is that both sides end up with colorable arguments.

Moreover suppose the school decides to teach Aristotelian social theory and starts out at the married household level. Is this discrimination? Is this a one-way street?

Aristotelian social theory basically states that men and women come together in procreative unions which form households and these form the basic mechanisms of cultural transmission and development. Households come together to create communities. Therefore instead of the Lockean two-level contract (individuals and states) you have three (people and households, households and state). Aristotelian theory thus supports localism and local culture in ways that the theories of folks like Locke, Hobbes, and Hume do not.

>In other words, to what extent does this put schools in a circumstance where if they tolerate the t-shirt they get sueed by one group under Title VII and if they don't tolerate it they get sued by another group under Section 1983?

Good question. I don't think that would pass for discrimination in the courts, but avoiding the lawsuit is an excellent reason for a school to disallow political speech in its dress code and enforce that uniformly (no pun intended).

>Moreover suppose the school decides to teach Aristotelian social theory and starts out at the married household level. Is this discrimination? Is this a one-way street?

My English summer reading one year was the first five books of the Tanakh. Lots of slavery, genocide, passing around women like property, etc. We also read the first chapter of Mein Kampf in German, and excerpts from the Communist Manifesto in History. Teaching ideas is not the same as preaching them.

The courts are never going to rule against presenting what Aristotle thought in philosophy class. That's absurd. If the school decided to preach about the proper unit of family, people would be understandably pissed (including Christians who would rather that authority came from God than Aristotle), but teaching what Aristotle wrote about the proper unit of family as "this is what Aristotle wrote" is pretty cut and dried.

> Good question. I don't think that would pass for discrimination in the courts, but avoiding the lawsuit is an excellent reason for a school to disallow political speech in its dress code and enforce that uniformly (no pun intended).

How far does this go? Imagine a T-shirt which is intentionally provocative and offensive. Something like:

    Free Speech
    "Kill the niggers... We intend to do our part..."
    -- Brandenburg v. Ohio 1969

Now the offensive quote is from footnote 1 of the Supreme Court's majority opinion describing the speech at issue. It is some of the most vile speech one could imagine but it is protected due to extending precedents aimed at reining in McCarthy-era abuses. Or suppose it included a picture of a burning cross instead? (Cross burning has also been held in certain contexts to be free speech on the same basis.)

Now if you are a black student you might be pardoned for assuming this is glorifying KKK activities and their rein of terror. It very well might create an unwelcoming educational atmosphere for minority kids and thus run afoul with the civil rights act. On the other hand what does this say about the rule of law?

> The courts are never going to rule against presenting what Aristotle thought in philosophy class.

I would have thought his Politics would be more appropriate for social studies. "This is the way societies work." Interestingly it is hard to understand modern sociology or anthropology without having a general understanding of Aristotle's approach here.

Simple. "Kill the niggers" advocates indiscriminate violence, which you are never under any circumstances allowed to do in a school.

A more appropriate analogy would be "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a violation of states' rights and should be repealed." That was said in one of my classes. No one got suspended.

Right but the T-shirt is saying, in effect, "The Supreme Court said this was free speech." It is arguably only expounding how far the boundaries of free speech go.

This is an interesting question because it gets to the heart of the question of how far free speech goes in school. I have trouble imagining a court holding that summarizing and quoting from a Supreme Court opinion is not free speech and protected (and the hypothetical T-shirt clearly does this), but I am also pretty sure the Southern Poverty Law Center would sue in a second if the school didn't take action.

This is an example of a hypothetical where significant legal arguments could mean both that the school must act and also that the school must not act. It's even possible a school could be sued and lose on both sides.

BTW, the states rights argument regarding the Civil Rights Act is more complex and it has to do with unconstitutional efforts to ensure ratification (refusing to seat Senators from non-ratifying states). My view however is that these could have been raised early on and weren't. I think latches doctrine needs to apply at some point. Otherwise we get to nitpick everything in history all the time. The Equal Protection Clause should be included as a restriction of states' rights. (On States' Rights issues I generally agree with Sandra Day O'Connor.)

Looks like we've hit max depth.

It doesn't. That's an obvious biological fact. But depending on context, one could infer that it's part of an argument that homosexuality is unnatural and therefore wrong. If I told you that the love you feel is an abomination, that we should teach our children to be disgusted by people like you, I'm guessing you wouldn't be excited to strike up further conversation.

It's (in my mind) a horrible thing to say, but we still have the right to say it.

I don't think max depth exists; just hit "link" to reply.

Yeah, it's probably aggressive to wear it on a t-shirt. But I don't see the purpose in protecting flagrantly abusive speech.

Well, it all depends on who gets to define what is abusive, doesn't it?

One justification for allowing unreasonable speech is that in theory it provides a high enough ceiling that all reasonable speech is allowed.

Not that that stops extremists in the US from making their number one speech suppression priority about their political opponents' core political speech.

Well we disallow physical violence but we allow psychological violence, so it seems inconsistent since there's a demonstrated link between psychological violence and physical pain. I think if we can work out a definition of physical assault we can work out psychological assault.

Does that mean that some political ideas, like "at some point it will be necessary to overthrow the government"[1] or "someday we should exterminate the blacks and expel the Jews"[2] can be banned from public discourse?

If so, who gets to make these decisions? Isn't it reasonable to conclude that many hot-button issues today, like whether circumcision violates human rights, constitute psychological violence against, among others, Jews and Muslims?

If we end up saying this must protect minority groups, then I think we'd certainly have to say that advocating banning kosher slaughter or circumcision would constitute, particularly in the context of history (which Jews are usually very much aware) continuing psychological violence.

But if we go this route doesn't that basically give the state a way to say "hey we don't like that idea so you can't discuss it?" I think that would destroy what little democracy we have left.

[1] Yates v. United States, holding that the First Amendment protected abstract advocacy for overthrow of the government.

[2] Brandenburg v. Ohio, holding that the line in Yates above extended to protecting abstract advocacy of other violent ends, in that case genocide and expulsion of disliked ethnic and racial groups.

Most G8 nations 1) limit hate speech, particularly by limiting genocide advocacy; 2) don't have terrible abuses of hate speech laws; 3) don't have ridiculous abuses of terrorism laws to limit what amounts to hate speech, e.g. proselytizing about jihad; 4) have better functioning democracies than the two party system of the US where the parties are very ideologically close to each other; 5) have greater freedom of the press.

Try talking extensively about your desire to establish an Islamic Caliphate by eliminating the Christians. You will go to a very, very dark place. Having hate speech laws in place means there's a proper process for dealing with this stuff.

But mostly, I just think that "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" is a fallacy.

Do you think Yates v. United States was wrongly decided?

Now, if the US government showed during the McCarthy era that they would target unpopular ideas, like Communism, as beyond the bounds of democracy, doesn't the "intended and likely to cause imminent lawless action" law in Brandenburg follow?

What I am saying is that in the US, we do have an extensive history of abuse of restrictions on political speech. Whether other countries can be trusted, or not, to fairly enforce such rules (and I think there is some dispute on this btw), the US has shown a propensity to insist that political ideologies like Communism cannot exist.

I say there is some doubt for two reasons. The first is that the NSDAP experienced the strongest growth, percentage-wise, during the years when they were banned. The second has to do with the Jyllands-Posten controversy. This controversy erupted because Denmark was willing to enforce hate speech laws against anti-Jewish speech but not anti-Islamic speech. I don't think the outrage experienced at feeling like Muslims were less protected by the law than Jews is entirely unreasonable there. Of course Jews are both a religious and ethnic group, so if you protect their ethnicity, you protect their religion.

So I think there are two issues, and the first is that protected and unprotected categories often unevenly overlap leading to unequal protection necessarily, and the second is that removal of certain ideas from public discourse moves it from areas where public rebuttal is possible into only private conversations. In no country that I am aware of, is it a crime to advocate genocide one on one (rather it is limited to publicly advocating such).

> But mostly, I just think that "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" is a fallacy.

But our country showed, in trying to ban Communism from our public policy discourse, that this more or less ensures that the political process which depends on our nation on the people being able to discuss appropriate directions for government ends up getting short-circuited.

In essence, I think our government has shown they cannot be trusted with such.

So in the US, how do you propose to deal with the fact that a Muslim will get punished under terrorism laws for advocating we kill Christians, but a Christian will not get punished for advocating we kill Muslims?

I mean, the 1st amendment is what it is; anything decided in accordance with it is constitutional. I'm just saying I don't really care for free speech when it comes to hate speech (e.g. genocide advocacy). I'm fine with people talking about alternative political ideologies like communism; discriminating against those is distinct from hate speech. Proposing that we burn all communists on principle? Sure, that's hate speech.

But, if you're saying the US government simply can't be trusted to enforce hate speech laws fairly with respect to different ethnicities, well, they can't really be trusted to enforce any laws fairly at this juncture.

I'm more just speaking in general: I believe placing limits on genocide advocacy is good for society (and the same for other comparably violent kinds of speech).

> So in the US, how do you propose to deal with the fact that a Muslim will get punished under terrorism laws for advocating we kill Christians, but a Christian will not get punished for advocating we kill Muslims?

Well, it is worse than that, unfortunately. I think the answer is to strengthen first amendment protections rather than erode them. We have fewer problems I think than we tend to see in Europe in this regard, but with Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, I think we have a real problem.

That problem is that now first amendment rights depend in part on who you are talking to. If you tell the KKK, "we will need to kill black Muslims" that's different from telling Hamas, "You are right, we need to kill white Christians." The difference is that fully domestic terrorism is protected while foreign organizations are not. I think Holder v. HLP should have come out the other way because I do not think that is just.

> I believe placing limits on genocide advocacy is good for society (and the same for other comparably violent kinds of speech).

But surely "Someday the workers must rise up and forcibly take control of the government" qualifies if anything does, right? So distributing Marxist literature would certainly be outside of the protections of the 1st Amendment. That is exactly what was at issue in Yates and what the court said there was that there was a difference between saying that something would be desirable, and trying to make that same thing happen through tangible steps of preparation. It's one thing to say "the 2nd Amendment protects a right to rebel." It is something very different to add "and that is why I am training my private army." The rules which protect the Communists protect the NRA and I think more voices are generally good for discussion.

Oh, when I say limiting violent speech, I just mean with respect to one of the classes identified under existing anti-discrimination laws (e.g. the laws about employment), i.e. the same classes that you would commit genocide against. The government is not such a protected class. At least some of the non-US G8 countries with hate speech laws don't limit violent speech against the government, as far as I know, and I do understand why being allowed to talk about overthrowing the government is important.

Minimally though, I still don't understand why we need to allow people to advocate genocide. It's pretty clear what genocide is, and it's pretty clear that it is never good. In some countries, if I remember correctly, this is the only form of hate speech that is forbidden.

Like, I get that the argument is that it's a slippery slope, but many other countries have demonstrated there's a workable middle ground (Canada, UK, France, etc.). If you read the hate speech laws for each country on Wikipedia you'll see that in some cases they are quite narrowly defined, and I'd be perfectly happy with those.

So, suppose the secular humanists get their way and we remove religion as a class but ethnicity and race are.

Would that mean that advocating violence against Jews would be a problem but against Atheists would be ok? But at that point, do we have a problem where people are not equally protected under the laws?

This may seem manufactured, as a hypothetical and it is, but one can come up with plenty of cases where such would not. For example, if one advocates killing anyone with a felony drug record, this would hit blacks much harder than whites. One could effectively advocate genocide by attacking proxy issues like this just as one can effectively discriminate in such a way (why the EEOC has generally held that blanket policies of not hiring convicted felons are racially discriminatory).

But if you go to such analogies, I think you have a problem.

I don't think that hate speech bans are compatible with equal protection under the laws.

> I don't think that hate speech bans are compatible with equal protection under the laws.

Ok, so I'll agree with this, but only because most / all laws work this way. I believe that in those instances some protection is still better than no protection, e.g. protection against murder is good despite the alleged ethnic prejudice in the acquittal of George Zimmerman.

I mean, even though it's unfair and far from ideal, you're not losing anything if it's illegal to advocate genocide against Jews but not against Atheists, are you? What's the advantage of it being shitty for everyone?

At a very practical level, society needs heterosexual unions (however brief) to survive, but it doesn't need homosexual ones. Why does stating this basic fact lose me the respect of my liberal and queer peers? It's about as accurate and offensive as a t-shirt that says, "We are the descendants of apes, not Adam and Eve."

People can respect or not what they want. If culture flows from the grass roots this is a part of it. The question is what role the state has to play in this.

Either the state must enforce respect for whatever groups should be respected (you? gay rights advocates?) or they must remain neutral. I don't really see a viable third way. If the state must remain neutral (and hence same with public schools) then the state has no reason to say people must respect you for your political views any more than the other side.

The issue is to separate respect for opinions from respect for human beings.

I don't have to hold you in high regard or accept out your company, but I do have to be civil. You don't get to harass or beat the crap out of someone because "the state should remain neutral."

Is a T-shirt which states we should move back towards traditional marriage as the retirement safety net one which is harassment? What if one has a T-shirt advocating banning sperm banks or IVF?

My problem is that if the state does not remain neutral on political issues then we have no semblance of democracy.