Category: First Amendment

The pushback against free speech begins

October 19, 2020 • 10:00 am

A while back I predicted—though I’m not sure it was here—that, just as college students are questioning free speech, so the Left-wing media would also begin questioning it, eventually calling for an end to “hate speech” or “fake news.” After all, it’s not called the Authoritarian Left for nothing, and their goal is not to allow free discussion, but to force people to adhere to their own ideology. It’s natural, then, for “progressive” Leftists to kvetch about free speech, which allows people to say things they don’t like to hear. Free speech causes offense and harm and is even violence!

Today I’ll treat you to another prediction, at the bottom, and then ask you for yours. Also, I’d like readers to weigh in on the issue of whether we should restrict America’s First Amendment beyond the form it’s been construed by the courts. Should we go to the European system in which some speech, including “hate speech” is banned and can be subject to criminal prosecution? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Within the last two days I’ve seen two articles in Woke sites (the New Yorker and the New York Times) implicitly and explicitly calling for more bans on speech. Granted, some of the bans would be legal, like those at Facebook described in the New Yorker, and it would be hard to alter the legal interpretation of the First Amendment given today’s conservative Supreme Court, but many of us free-speech absolutists find this media pushback a worrying trend.

Here’s an article from last week’s New York Times Magazine:

And one from the latest New Yorker, which I believe is free online:

 

Both articles refer to the kind of “hate speech” or “fake news” appearing on platforms like Facebook, and both suggest that perhaps the U.S. needs to modify what we think of as “free speech” to prevent these occurrences. Neither article, curiously, actually defines “hate speech,” and that’s perhaps because it’s a notoriously slippery term.  That in itself highlights the problem of censortship.

Here are a few statements suggesting that we need to rethink free speech in the U.S.

From the NYT:

It’s an article of faith in the United States that more speech is better and that the government should regulate it as little as possible. But increasingly, scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. They think our formulations are simplistic — and especially inadequate for our era. Censorship of external critics by the government remains a serious threat under authoritarian regimes. But in the United States and other democracies, there is a different kind of threat, which may be doing more damage to the discourse about politics, news and science. It encompasses the mass distortion of truth and overwhelming waves of speech from extremists that smear and distract.

. . . These scholars argue something that may seem unsettling to Americans: that perhaps our way of thinking about free speech is not the best way. At the very least, we should understand that it isn’t the only way. Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies.

. . . In other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas. “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing,” the philosopher Jason Stanley and the linguist David Beaver argue in their forthcoming book, “The Politics of Language.”

And another system, that of many European countries:

The principle of free speech has a different shape and meaning in Europe. For the European Union, as well as democracies like Canada and New Zealand, free speech is not an absolute right from which all other freedoms flow. The European high courts have allowed states to punish incitements of racial hatred or denial of the Holocaust, for example. Germany and France have laws that are designed to prevent the widespread dissemination of hate speech and election-related disinformation.“Much of the recent authoritarian experience in Europe arose out of democracy itself,” explains Miguel Poiares Maduro, board chairman of the European Digital Media Observatory, a project on online disinformation at the European University Institute. “The Nazis and others were originally elected. In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas. It’s because of the different democratic ethos of Europe that Europe has accepted more restrictions on speech.”

Finally, in the last paragraph:

As we hurtle toward the November election with a president who has trapped the country in a web of lies, with the sole purpose, it seems, of remaining in office, it’s time to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually keeping us free.

As the title implies, the New Yorker article is about Facebook, and it’s quite absorbing to read about the ever-changing standards of that platform and its double standard when leaders and politicians like Trump violate its “community standards” versus when regular folks do. (Leaders get to post “hate speech.”) While the criticism of free speech is nowhere near as obvious as in the New York Times article, the fact that the magazine is quite concerned with how to restrict “hate speech”, as well as “fake news”, shows you that they think it’s a serious problem. And both articles don’t mount any extensive defenses of letting social media post whatever it wants; in other words, they are showing but one side of the free-speech debate.

To be fair, the NYT does suggest non-censorious ways of dealing with this problem, including fact-checking and labeling (as Facebook already does), the use of anti-trust laws, and so on. Too, it also faults the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United case saying that, for the purposes of political speech, corporations can be counted as individuals—a decision that I think was badly misguided and harmful.

Finally, the First Amendment applies only to speech in public or connected with the organs of government, not to corporations like Facebook. But I’ve argued that, as far as possible, platforms with that much reach and power should strive to abide by the First Amendment. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t favor monitoring and counterspeech, including labeling posts as misleading or false if there’s fact-checking. That’s just counter-speech, though it’s counter-speech by the authorities.

The term “hate speech,” too is slippery. If Holocaust Denial is hate speech, well, I don’t favor criminalizing or censoring it. People need to hear the arguments against the Holocaust, for how can you counter them (many sound quite convincing!) until you know what they are? Further, allowing “hate speech”, including stuff like praising Hitler, simply outs people who are bigots, letting you know where people stand. To ban such things implicitly assumes that Americans are stupid, and will be easily swayed by arguments that are false but sound good. And it drives the “hate” underground, but doesn’t do a thing to eliminate it. Free speech is what’s needed to get rid of bigotry, and was largely responsible for the decline of racism in America in the last 70 years.

And if you think that people can’t be trusted to suss out the truth, or consider all ideas, then somebody has to appoint A DECIDER to work out what speech people can read and what speech they are too credulous to be exposed to. Do you want Mark Zuckerberg to do that? Indeed, Facebook’s standards for taking down posts, as the New Yorker shows, are so confused and contradictory that the company won’t even make them public.

My prediction continues: in the next year we’ll see an increasing number of articles in Left-wing or liberal media questioning the need for “free speech” in America.

And here’s another prediction, which is mine. As Wokeness continues to seep into the fabric of America, we’ll see increasing calls to get rid of qualifications that support the meritocracy of colleges and other institutions, because meritocracy is considered racist. This has already started, with colleges getting rid of requirements for standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, even though those tests have palpable predictive power on how well students do in college (the University of California system is weeding out all standardized tests in the next few years). This erosion of meritocracy will continue, I predict, with calls to get rid of grades as well, perhaps replacing them with other criteria that don’t involve directly comparing students against each other.

At any rate, here’s my question. The NYT article implicitly argues that Europe is doing fine despite its hate speech laws (some of those, by the way, include blasphemy laws, specifying that it’s a crime to make fun of religion), so why can’t America be like Europe?  Shouldn’t it be illegal to deny the Holocaust or praise Hitler? Shouldn’t it be illegal to say that we should ban Muslims from immigrating to America? Shouldn’t it be illegal to say that the Jews are trying to take over the country?  After all, is our democracy really better than France or Germany? According to the New York Times, we’re “drowning in lies.”

Weigh in below, and if you have any predictions like the two I’ve given, let us hear them.

The University of Chicago professes free expression as a “core value”, and a call by one of our faculty to “end the rot”

July 25, 2020 • 12:00 pm

“The point of education is not to make you comfortable; it’s to make you think.”

—Hanna Gray (former President, University of Chicago, speaking in video below)

I greatly fear that one of my roles over the next few years, should this website continue, will be to chronicle the downfall of the University of Chicago as it abandons several of its foundational principles: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the refusal of the University to take political or ideological stands. The last foundational principle has two exceptions, the most important being this one (from our “foundational” Kalven Report of 1967):

From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.

We are now in the process of abrogating the Kalven Report big time, as several departments have made or are in the process of making official departmental statements that don’t just espouse racial and gender equality in hiring and treatment (that would indeed be part of our mission), but adhere to aspects of Critical Race Theory and express political support for controversial tenets in society at large (see two examples here and here, which I wrote about a few days ago). As departments are the core units of the University, and the statements are presented as official positions, not a collation of the views of some individual faculty, this is a serious dismantling of our university’s official political, ideological, and moral neutrality—a stand designed to buttress our mission of free expression.

Below is an official University video, put up last fall, that affirms our principles. Among the affirmers are President Zimmer, former President Hanna Gray, and Vice Provost Gilliam.

Note that diversity (characterized as “of perspective and backgrounds”, as well as “people of different generations and from different countries”), is seen as essential to an open and liberal education. I agree, but an open and liberal education, in which you’re free to express and explore all ideas, is what is slowly being strangled by social-justice statements issuing from various departments.

This video was clearly created to sell the unique mission of the University of Chicago to prospective students (two are interviewed in the video, touting the benefits of free expression), and it does a very good job. I’m proud of the guiding principles limned by the three administrators.

The problem is that the unique atmosphere is disappearing, and so far only one petulant faculty member (yours truly) is trying to be the canary in the coal mine. Will we remain unique in this way in the future? Not the way things are going.  I urge the administration to nip in the bud the encroaching wokeness of our school, which sweeps freedom of thought under the rug. It’s not just a matter of selling our school accurately, but a matter of remaining the only elite university with such a strong commitment to freedom of speech and thought, and also a matter of attracting those students who find that agenda irresistible. (Also see this video, which I’ve highlighted before.)

 

Although Charles Lipson, a well known professor of political science here, hasn’t specifically criticized our school (at least not that I know of), he has written a good article in RealClear Politics (click on screenshot below) proposing ways to stop the “rot” that’s eating through college campuses, with his diagnosis of the “rot” being a “rigid groupthink” that apparently cannot be resisted:

It’s not just that a careless word can cost your job, it’s that people tremble in fear that they might say the wrong word. Today, as in the past, the loudest, most extreme voices claim the right to control speech and judge whether it is worthy of being heard at all. The giants of technology and media have either bowed to these demands or embraced them enthusiastically. The result, as in the early 1950s, is a shriveled, impoverished public square. Genuine debate is suppressed, even in classrooms, which should nurture informed discussion with multiple viewpoints. All too often they have become pipelines for indoctrination.

What’s wrong with this rigid groupthink? First, it takes real problems, such as police misconduct or Confederate statues, and inflates them for political purposes. It vastly exaggerates their extent and gravity, mistakenly generalizes them (Ulysses Grant is not Stonewall Jackson), ignores significant progress in correcting old errors, calls any disagreement “racist,” and relies on intimidation and sometimes violence, not democratic procedures, to get their way. The loudest voices say America and its history are fundamentally evil, that its institutions need to be smashed so they can be reestablished on “socially just” foundations. The mob and their fellow travelers will determine what is just. Who gives them that right? This arrogation of power and attack on public order will not end well.

The second problem is that America’s major institutions have been overwhelmed by these demands and have bowed down to them. Public trust has eroded in all America’s major institutions since the late 1960s. We now see the supine results. Instead of standing up to this swelling irrationalism and intimidation, they have appeased it—and sometimes embraced it. Predictably, appeasement has only fueled more extreme demands.

Here, in Lipson’s words (indented) and mine (flush left) are his three solutions:

1.)  Universities must reiterate and then reinforce the principles of free speech. 

In the midst of this full-scale assault on free speech, have universities issued full-throated defenses of open inquiry as the foundation of education? No. Hillsdale College in rural Michigan has done so, and perhaps a handful of  “Bible schools,” but they are rarer than Republican professors of English literature. What almost all universities have issued are vapid letters, reaffirming their commitment to “diversity and inclusion.” Many have said they will pump more money into those projects, which they have already sustained for decades. They say nothing about intellectual diversity, which they don’t consider diversity at all.

Stating principles of free speech and free inquiry is essential, but it is not enough. Sound principles must be reiterated, and they must be reinforced with best practices. Students, faculty and staff need to know the university’s commitment is more than an empty gesture. Before freshmen arrive on campus, they need to be told their university supports free speech and free inquiry and will not tolerate their suppression. These crucial points should be emphasized during Orientation Week. . .

Lipson adds that while boards of trustees should not interfere in the day-to day-workings of the university, they too can emphasize and enforce the principles of free speech.

2.) Principles of free speech and free inquiry should be upheld in class discussions and debates.

. . . individual teachers should be told they will be protected if they encourage debate and free inquiry in class. They need a “safe harbor,” even if some students don’t like what they hear, see, or read. University administrators need to give them that protection. You and I might be offended by D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” or Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” but they are important movies and perfectly appropriate to screen in some classes. Of course, students should be prepared for them and told why they matter. If some students would be traumatized, teachers should try to find ways to accommodate them. But it is no better to exclude important films for fear of political objections than to exclude Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs for fear of religious ones.

As an alternative to the malleable and weaponized “trigger warnings,” faculty could add to their self-protection (and students’ education) by including a statement of principle to their reading lists. They ought to say—and mean—that they never intend to hurt, insult, or denigrate any student or belittle any group. Rather, they intend to use their scholarly skills to illuminate these issues as best they can.

3.) State legislatures should ensure that public universities adhere to the Constitutions’s First Amendment rights.

. . . state legislatures should insist that public universities adhere to the First Amendment’s protections for free speech and peaceful assembly, with the normal restrictions that apply to those freedoms. (No bullhorns in the dorms at 2 a.m., and no shouting down of invited speakers at any hour.) Like boards of trustees, they should not intervene in day-to-day university activities; that, too, would threaten academic freedom. But they should insist that university presidents and deans of students reiterate the importance of freedom of speech, explain its role in higher education, and avoid watering it down with qualifying statements implying “social justice” can override free speech. Social justice, like other important concepts, must be debated, not used as a “cone of silence” for discordant views. Legislatures, governors, and state boards of higher education have every right to demand clear principles of free speech and effective procedures to punish violations.

I’m a bit more worried about this since legislatures can, and have, used “free speech” bills to push particular political viewpoints on their state’s colleges, but I suppose there’s nothing wrong with a legislature affirming that all public universities in a state (which are, after all, organs of government) adhere to the First Amendment. Lipson is more wary of the federal government doing such a thing, but thinks it’s worth discussing. Not on Trump’s watch, methinks!

At any rate, Lipson thinks the problem is exigent, and I hope he realizes that it’s knocking at his own door:

Whatever role Washington plays, universities need to act now, on their own, to reassert the core value of free speech in education. Free inquiry depends on free speech. These values are the bedrock of liberal education in democratic societies. Right now, that bedrock is being washed away in a tidal wave of irrational outrage.

Should we narrow the First Amendment to forbid speech urging violence?

July 8, 2020 • 11:00 am

The limitations on “free speech”, as construed by the courts’ parsing of the First Amendment, are well known. No personal threats, no harassment in the workplace, no child pornography, defamation, or false advertising. And, of course, no calling for violence that will predictably lead to imminent violence.   The Encyclopedia Brittanica describes the law. 

. . . a few narrow categories of speech are not protected from government restrictions. The main such categories are incitement, defamation, fraud, obscenity, child pornography, fighting words, and threats. As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building). But speech urging action at some unspecified future time may not be forbidden.

I’ve been having a discussion of this with my Polish surrogate mother, Malgorzata, who feels that the law doesn’t go far enough: that any speech that calls for violence to people or groups of people should be banned, whether or not violence ensues. (I think she means “personal violence,” like killing or injuring, not damage to property.)  (She is a staunch defender of free speech in general.)

First, what speech should be banned? Her response:

If somebody during Farrakhan speech goes outside and kills a Jew or a gay, the violence was imminent. But if he does it an hour later, or a day later, or a week later (like one of the synagogue shooters) it’s no longer imminent and it’s a protected speech. Will criminalizing all words calling for killing or maiming any other human or group of humans really be detrimental for society? It should not be so difficult to decide which words are calling directly to violence: “Go and kill”; “Go and maim”. X,Y,Z has no right to live”, “All X,Y,Z should be killed”. Are there many more variants of it?

About the time limit corresponding to “imminent,”  I said, “It’s flexible. It’s meant to prevent people from inciting crowds to do immediate violence.  And saying ‘go and kill’ is easier to criminalize than saying ‘the Jews are destroying humanity, we must do something about it,’ which could incite people just as much.”

She responded:

. . . Yes, it could, but with a very, very restrictive law “we must do something about it” would not be banned, but “they must be exterminated” would. It’s more than chilling to hear such blatant calls to murder, to know that people do act on these calls and that many already been murdered, and just do nothing.

When I said that a fuzzy time boundary would be bad for society, and how long after violence-inducing speech was the limit for saying that it violated the First Amendment, she responded this way (I also said that immediate violence, like lynching of blacks in the South), is easy to discern, but that this doesn’t happen any more, she responded:

If you look at Europe and the Middle East, there is an abundance of examples of killing after calls to kill. And I don’t care whether it’s an hour or 100 days. I would be for banning all calls to kill and maim.

Now I have to say that in principle Malgorzata’s point sounds good. What good is done by allowing speech that calls for the killing or maiming of others? Is it good for society to permit that?

But my response would be this. You must allow all speech, however odious and hateful, unless it makes violence happen immediately thereafter, and in a predictable and specific way. If you extend that limit to infinity, so that a lone gunman can write a manifesto citing, say Farrakhan’s hatred of the Jews as a reason he shot up a synagogue, the connection between the speech and the violence because more and more tenuous. Thus the connection must be near-immediate and obvious. And an infinite time limit is of course the same thing as saying that, as Malgorzata opines, no violence need ensue. The call for it alone should be illegal.

But why allow people to call for the extermination of others at all? My response would be that it accomplishes several things. First, it outs one’s opponents rather than having this kind of hatred fester underground. Second, it can inspire discussion. For example, if someone says in a speech, “We should exterminate all the Jews” (this is indeed illegal in several Western countries), then you can ask them “Why?” and answer with counterspeech. If no violence occurs from the statement, then one has a potentially teachable moment.

I don’t want to dwell on this at length; my purpose is to see if readers agree with the courts’ construal of the First Amendment, or with Malgorzata’s view that all calls to kill and maim should be illegal whether or not they lead to violence to people’s bodies.

Weigh in below, please. Malgorzata and I will be reading the comments to respond or clarify.

 

Supreme Court hands victory to Right and religion, compelling taxpayer to fund religious schools in Montana. Roberts votes with majority.

June 30, 2020 • 1:45 pm

I haven’t read the decision, so I’ll just leave this in passing. But save your approbation for Chief Justice Roberts, for he joined the court’s 5-4 majority, and wrote the opinion that tax money could be used to support religious schools. The Montana Supreme Court had previously struck down a voucher scheme for school funding because that scheme would have given financial aid to religious schools, violating the Constitution. Religious people brought an appeal, requesting funding for private schools that included religious ones (the bulk of Montana’s private schools). Now the Supremes have ruled that the scheme was indeed Constitutional, and Montana can go ahead and tax people, with some of the money going to vouchers for religious schools.

Here’s the summary from SCOTUSblog (click on screenshot):

The first link below goes to the entire opinion:

Judgment: Reversed and remanded, 5-4, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts on June 30, 2020. Justice Thomas filed a concurring opinion, in which Justice Gorsuch joined. Justice Alito filed a concurring opinion. Justice Gorsuch filed a concurring opinion. Justice Ginsburg filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justice Kagan joined. Justice Breyer filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justice Kagan joined as to Part I. Justice Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion.

From the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which filed an amicus brief:

In Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue, the Supreme Court overturned a ruling by the Montana Supreme Court, which held that a neo-voucher school funding scheme violates the “No Aid” to religion clause of the state Constitution. The state court struck down the entire neo-voucher scheme as it applied to all private education, religious and secular. Nearly 90 percent of Montana’s private schools are affiliated with religion. Christian parents, represented by the pro-voucher Institute of Justice, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to declare that No Aid clauses violate the federal Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, illogically ruled that religious schools were indeed being singled out.

“A state need not subsidize private education,” the majority judgment states. “But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

The absurdity of the majority decision is laid bare in a dissenting opinion. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, points out that the Montana Supreme Court had made no distinction between religious and nonreligious schools.

“Because Montana’s Supreme Court did not make such a decision — its judgment put all private school parents in the same boat — this court had no occasion to address the matter,” the dissent states. It adds: “The state court struck the program in full. In doing so, the court never made religious schools ineligible for an otherwise available benefit, and it never decided that the Free Exercise Clause would allow that outcome.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor has a stinging dissent of her own.

“Today’s ruling is perverse,” she writes. “Without any need or power to do so, the court appears to require a state to reinstate a tax-credit program that the Constitution did not demand in the first place. [The court] rejects the Religion Clauses’ balanced values in favor of a new theory of free exercise, and it does so only by setting aside well-established judicial constraints.”

To show the absurdity of this ruling, which reinstated the voucher system including religious schools when it didn’t have to reinstate anything, reader Tom cited this paragraph from Gorsuch’s and Thomas’s concurring opinion.

Seriously? “Properly understood, the Establishment Clause does not prohibit States from favoring religion”? The Establishment Clause was put into place to prevent the government from promoting religion and favoring one religion over another. This ruling clearly uses government funds to promote religion in religious schools, and it favors Catholics, who surely run the bulk of Montana’s religious schools.

“They can legislate as they wish”.  There goes the First Amendment, and the noise you hear is the toppling of the long-established but recently-eroding wall between church and state. This is a really, really bad, and importantly bad, decision.  It moves us closer to the theocracy that Trump and his supporters want.

A conservative argues for mandatory school prayer to stem the increase in nonbelief

May 16, 2020 • 11:30 am

Where else would you find a mushbrain argument like this except in The American Conservative? For it not only sees the decline in religiosity in America as a bad thing, but, importantly, blames it on the lack of mandatory prayer in schools, which, they say, makes religion seem “taboo” to kids and weans them from their faith.

Implicit in all this is that the First Amendment is a bad thing, at least insofar as it is held by the courts to apply in schools. Also implicit is the idea that religion is a good thing. The argument, also implicit, is that we should change the First Amendment, or at least the way it’s been interpreted, so that kids can not only pray in schools (which they can—on their own), but have organized prayer in schools.

So here is the argument:

1.) Religion has declined in America not because of increasing wealth, well being, education, but because of the increasing secularization of education. Author Helen Andrews gives two lines of evidence for this conclusion:

A new report from the American Enterprise Institute has a different explanation. “The most likely causes of declining religiosity are the increasingly intense role that more and more secularized educational institutions play in children’s lives,” author Lyman Stone writes, plus “the continuing delay and decline of marriage.” It is not education that makes people less religious, he argues, but specifically secular education.

There’s no further mention of marriage in the article, though it’s also supposed to contribute to America’s godlessness.

I haven’t read the report, and maybe they have real data about this, but I doubt it, for the “increasingly intense role” of secularized education simply means the banning of mandatory school prayers in American schools, which occurred in the Sixties. And, as the chart below shows, the real increase in “nones”—those lacking affiliation to a church or feeling that they have no religion—has occurred after 1970. When I went to secondary school in the sixties, there was already no school prayer, and yet since then the loss of religion has skyrocketed. If the author’s argument is correct, nonbelief should have begun increasing in the 1960s, not as late as 1975, and of course there would be no reason for a continual increase.

 

Source

2.) In fact, the decline of religiosity is imputed almost solely to a “more secular schooling” rather than people becoming less religious because they either give up faith or were raised in a less religious home. The New Atheists take a hit:

That education would have something to do with secularization fits with what we know about when secularization happens. Contrary to the New Atheists’ heroic pose, the rise of the “nones” is not driven by the mature decisions of adults but by habits being formed (or not) in childhood. “The story of secularization in America is not mostly a story of lots of people who were raised religious leaving their religious faith as adults,” Stone explains. “It is a story of fewer people having a religious upbringing at all.”

Yes, but why are people having less religious upbringings? Even if this were the case, It must be a case of the priorities of the parents, not the absence of prayers in schools.

3.) Further evidence for the importance of religion in schools comes from—get this—countries where religious school systems shift to secular ones:

Stone points to test cases in France and Turkey where secularization followed not just from expanded access to education but from shifts from religious to secular schools. “If educational attainment drives secularization, then spending two more years in school should reduce religiosity, even if that school is a religious school,” he theorizes. In fact, longitudinal studies have found that attending a religious school is associated with greater religiosity later in life.

But of course when you’re immersed in religious education during the whole day, and that’s taken away, you’re not going to be as wedded to faith. But that’s different from having a two-minute school prayer once a day: the frequent drill in America in the Sixties.  In religious schools you’re marinated in delusion all day.

3.) Equally dubious is Andrews’s argument that if you can’t pray in school, kids see that as abnormal, a taboo. And that makes them less religious.

But if the AEI report is right, there is something irreplaceable about those hours between nine and three. The atheist’s knockdown argument against school prayer — that there are plenty of other hours in a day to pray in — was based on a fallacy. Society either teaches its children that religion is something normal or something taboo. Banning prayer from schools teaches them that religion is not normal.

Seriously? If there’s no mandatory prayer in school, people are going to think religion is taboo? I doubt they’d think of it at all. And if they asked “why can’t we pray in school”, they could get an answer from Andrew Seidel of the Freedom from Religion Foundation: you are allowed to pray in school on your own time; it just can’t be mandated. You can pray in the cafeteria, at recess, on the playground, and so on, and no teacher is going to stop you! In fact, they wouldn’t be allowed to stop you.

Andrews is making a desperation argument based on the unstoppable secularization of America. But she’s not going to get her school prayer, and the “nones” will continue to increase. So it goes.

h/t: Barry

University of Wisconsin mandates punishments for violating free speech

April 10, 2020 • 10:30 am

I have mixed feelings about this report from The Cap Times of Madison, Wisconsin, because while the University of Wisconsin’s (UW) regents seems have taken the issue of students disrupting free speech seriously, I worry about the regents (the University’s governing board) mandating punishments for a single student misbehavior when it doesn’t do that for other behaviors. On the other hand, many universities don’t take disruption of free speech seriously, don’t punish disrupters, and, in fact, in some places students demand that they not be punished for such disruptions.

Click on the screenshot to read:

What happened is that on April 3, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin voted (it’s not clear what the vote was) to change the University of Wisconsin’s administrative code to require mandatory punishments for students who have disrupted the free speech of other people. “Free speech” is not defined, nor is “disruption”, which is why some people have objected, but I don’t much care about definitions, since the punishments will be adjudicated by formal boards convened by the University,—the same process that happens elsewhere. (The University of Chicago has also said it will punish students who disrupt free speech without more specific definitions.)  Since UW is a state school, “free speech” must follow the courts’ guidelines for application of the First Amendment, and it’s not that obscure what “disruption” means. It could be physically preventing speakers from speaking, harassing them within the venue, blocking entrances to buildings, making noise during speeches, and so on.

Further, the punishments, as is proper, won’t kick in until a student disrupts others more than once. The regents’ rules start with a warning at first, and then a hearing after the second violation, which could lead to at least a semester of suspension. If you engage in a third incident, you’d be expelled for good.

What bothers me about this rule is that it appears to be a completely Republican initiative, and I wonder why the Left, which has traditionally sided with free speech, is opposing it. In fact, civil liberties organizations have opposed this proposal, which has been kicking around Wisconsin for years. A similar bill passed by legislators in 2017 (but which apparently died in the the state Senate) was opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union because, they said, it would have a “chilling effect” on free speech because protesters would be unsure about what forms of protest violate the code. That, to me, seems a bit extreme, since it’s well known what kind of peaceful protests are considered legal.

According to the article above, people had other reasons for opposing the regents’ recommendation:

One commenter said the rule would have the opposite effect and chill free speech, intimidating “students from protest policies that could be detrimental to campus life,” according to meeting materials. Another said that it removes individual schools’ freedoms, “eliminating any autonomy that each campus currently has to adjust for the different learning and social environments present.”

But some of the opposition seems wonky. From another article on the same site published in October:

Regent Ed Manydeeds spoke against the amendment at Friday’s Board of Regents meeting, held at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. As an attorney who has vowed to uphold the Constitution, he said, “it’s a very hard road to go down” to punish young people for saying things they have the right to say. Manydeeds was one of Gov. Tony Evers’ first appointees to the board in April.

This is wrongheaded. The students don’t have a “right” to disrupt others’ speech. They can “say the things they have the right to say” without shutting other speakers down. In fact, Manydeeds’s argument is self-refuting, since the protected speakers also have a right to say what they want to say.

It is distressing that, as advocates of free speech, we “hard liners” are aligned more with Republicans than with Democrats. As I noted, Democrats are the traditional defenders of free speech. The reason Republicans are behind such initiatives is largely because, since most college campuses are liberal, it is conservative speakers who are more often disrupted or shut down.  And Republicans may have other motives as well.  But I cannot side with those on the Left who want to limit or curtail speech, or who favor initiatives allowing others to shut down or disrupt speech of any kind without sanctions.

At any rate, this new rule may be moot, for the resolution apparently must be approved by Wisconsin’s governor. But Governor Tony Evers is a Democrat, and his spokesperson said that he won’t approve the plan.

So the upside of this resolution is that it formalizes a way to prevent disruption of free speech. The downside (besides the objection that the resolution doesn’t define free speech or disruption, which I don’t see as serious arguments) is that it takes the power away from local administrators to customize their policies.  As a UW math professor noted:

Even if speech disruptions are to be considered an offense, [Jordan] Ellenberg said, administrative decisions to penalize a student should be made locally, not by the board. “Just as an administrative matter, that makes no sense to me,” he said.

The problem is that few colleges seem willing to punish disruptors. There are reports that about 60 Middlebury College students were punished for deplatforming Charles Murray in 2017, but the punishments were apparently not severe (no suspensions or explusions, and no clarification of what punishments were levied, despite physical attacks on Murray and his host). Few colleges have risked specifying the nature of punishments for disrupting free speech, though the University of Chicago has mentioned an escalating system similar to the one proposed by the UW regents.

So I’m a bit ambivalent about this, but do think that colleges need to specify that disruptors will be punished. In fact, I think a module on free speech should be a part of every entering student’s program of college orientation, just as new students are now inundated with modules about sexual harassment, hate speech, safe spaces, and so on.

Why don’t we vote?

 

 

Pandemic relief causes U.S. government to violate First Amendment by paying churches

April 9, 2020 • 9:30 am

You can either read the transcript of this 3-minute National Public Radio report or listen to it—both by clicking on the link below. It turns out that, as part of the $350 billion dollars that the U.S. government has earmarked for loans to help cash-strapped small-businesses during the pandemic, churches and “faith-based organizations” have also been classified as “businesses.”

You can read the guidelines from the Small Business Administration here, which note that “faith-based organizations are eligible to receive SBA loans regardless of whether they provide secular social services.”  Note that this distinguishes religious organizations from other non-profit outfits, which do provide secular social services.

In this case, then, the government is taking the place of the collection plate, and by so doing violating the First Amendment, which has been interpreted to forbid government subsidies to religion. (Will they give loans to atheist organizations?) According to NPR, this initiative was the product of—who could guess it?—President Trump and Vice-President Pence, clearly trying to firm up their religious base.

Now I wouldn’t object too strongly if, during emergencies like this, subsidies could be given to religious organizations to help fund purely social activities: feeding the homeless, providing clothing and essentials, and the like, but not for proselytizing or doing religious outreach. But, over time, federal courts have slowly been taking down the wall between church and state, allowing religious monuments on public lands because they’re said to be “cultural monuments without religious significance,” and so on. That’s on top of continuing but palpably unconstitutional activities like allowing ministers (but not heads of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation) to have a tax-free housing allowance. As the report notes:

Advocates for government funding of religious institutions argue that denying them aid that is available to nonreligious institutions amounts to discrimination, and the U.S. Supreme Court has recently declined to challenge such support.

“In the last 15 years, the Court has moved increasingly in a permissive direction,” says John Inazu, who specializes in religion and law at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Law. “There’s just an increased willingness by the court to allow for direct funding of religious entities.”

In prior years, the federal government has generally steered clear of such funding, although it has freed religious institutions from paying taxes and made donations to them tax-deductible.

Under existing SBA regulations, among the for-profit businesses declared ineligible for loans are those “principally engaged in teaching, instructing, counseling or indoctrinating religion or religious beliefs, whether in a religious or secular setting.”

That rule, however, may soon be eliminated.

The SBA statement on the participation of faith-based organizations in the new loan program declares that some agency regulations “impermissibly exclude some religious entities. Because those regulations bar the participation of a class of potential recipients based solely on their religious status, SBA will decline to enforce these subsections and will propose amendments to conform those regulations to the Constitution.”

The rationale, then, is that by not giving loans to churches and other religious organizations, the government is discriminating against them, which advocates say is itself a violation of the First Amendment. But it’s one thing to further secular activities of businesses, and another thing entirely to support proselytizing and worship, as the current SBA policy recognizes. If anything violates the First Amendment, it’s our government giving financial aid to further worshiping and proselytizing.