Two items of relevance before we can hop off the free-speech bandwagon (I have one in the queue for tomorrow as well). First, you should read the interview in Christianity Today with Kirsten Powers, who’s not only a Christian but a correspondent for Fox News. How screwed up is it when someone with those credentials has the right attitude on free speech and someone who works for the American Humanist Association (see below) gets it wrong? Well, Powers is also a Democrat and a free-speech advocate, and has just published a book called The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.  The title is right on the mark, and with her background Powers is really going to rile up the Left. There’s nothing more telling than the cognitive dissonance we see among Liberals when their professed concern for the underdog collides noisily with their professed concern for free speech. What you get is lip service to the latter and genuine osculation of the former.

It’s bizarre when I find myself agreeing with a person like Powers, but in the whole interview the only thing I find dubious is her claim that Christians are being muzzled—a familiar and insupportable claim from the Right. However, look at these other excerpts from her interview:

Our conception of free speech in this country comes directly, indisputably, from liberals. We would not understand free speech the way we do today if not for—and I’m sorry to say, conservatives who don’t want to hear it—the American Civil Liberties Union, and liberal Supreme Court justices who charted the course of expanding the view of the First Amendment, and activists during the Vietnam War. So this is a core part of American liberalism. So we have people who call themselves liberals on the Left of the political spectrum, acting in complete contradiction of their values and the arguments that underlie them.

In the book I reference Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and somewhat of a libertarian. He says that you can’t have knowledge where disagreement and dissent are not possible. That should be intuitively obvious; otherwise you get groupthink. But the illiberal Left is circumventing that process: “We’ve already decided what’s true, and if you dissent from that, we’re going to treat you as someone who deserves to be punished and lose their job or be expelled or get a bad grade.” The loss is that we all lose information and knowledge. Research doesn’t get done because people are afraid of reaching the wrong conclusions, or they’re never there in the first place because they can’t even get hired.

Liberal theorists came up with the correct theory that you can’t have real knowledge without diversity; you have to have different people coming with different ideas. If you have such a homogenous group racially or gender-wise, [the illiberal Left] would be alarmed. They argue that you need to have people of different cultures and people of different experiences and people of different genders because that brings a robust diversity to education. Today it’s, “Let’s get a bunch of people with different skin colors and different genders and different socioeconomic backgrounds who all think the exact same way.” And what they’re doing is intellectually rigorous?

And doesn’t the following excerpt remind you of anyone—or perhaps of a group of people?:

But what struck me while writing the book is that the illiberal Left reminds me of religious zealots, except of a secular religion. The average religious person has their beliefs, but they’re not trying to get people fired who don’t have their beliefs. But zealots do do that. It’s not enough for them to believe it; they can’t tolerate other people who don’t believe what they believe, and they have this absolute certainty that they’re right. It’s self-sanctifying. They have to establish that they are morally superior to people who disagree with them. It’s social signaling: “My identity comes from the fact that I’m pro-gay marriage and pro-choice and believe in climate change and oppose charter schools.”

There’s nothing wrong with believing those things. It’s the need to de-legitimize anybody who doesn’t believe them, that puts them in a different category.

What strikes me about the liberalism of today’s students versus that of my generation (here’s the Old Geezer talking) is that we didn’t have the Internet, so we couldn’t just sit behind our keyboards and demonize our opponents. Any activism had to involve actually getting out and doing stuff: leafletting, demonstrating, doing sit-ins, and the like. In fact, I feel bad now that I spend most of my time writing about social change and not time doing stuff to change society. At any rate, the illiberal Left that Powers chastises is substituting the policing of language for the changing of a culture. The notion that the former causes the latter has yet to be demonstrated.

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On the other hand, we have a true member of the illiberal Left, Matthew Bulger, chewing out Pamela Geller and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for stirring the pot and, in fact, supposedly making things worse in the guise of promoting free speech. The scary thing is that Bulger is the legislative associate for the American Humanist Association, and wrote his screed, “Artistic activism or disguised discrimination?“, at The Humanist.com. It’s the usual mealymouthed lip service to free speech followed by the big BUT conveying that we should be very judicious about how we use it. A sample:

The right to criticize and even publicly lampoon important religious teachings and figures is receiving a robust public defense because many Americans rightly see attempts to limit free speech and satire, whether by the government or by fellow citizens, as undemocratic and dangerous. Still, concerns about the increasing ostracism of marginalized communities like Muslim Americans and how that social exclusion may simply breed more religious extremismhave raised fair questions about how far speech can or should go.

Do these events further free speech? Or do they just serve as an outlet for some to express Islamophobia and create propaganda for Islamists who can use the drawings to convince vulnerable Muslim Americans of their isolation from society and of the appeal of fundamentalist religion and its sense of community?

It’s clear where the answer lies for Bulger. We should simply shut the hell up and stop antagonizing Muslims, for in the end that just makes things worse for everyone. Here’s the big BUT:

The question is not whether these events should be allowed to exist, but whether or not the free speech advocacy community should utilize them in their valiant effort to protect one of the most essential human rights. It’s highly doubtful that the press surrounding these events and the occasional yet horrific attacks on its organizers do enough to promote the idea that no one or no thing is safe from the pen. More often, it just alienates the large number of progressive Americans and moderate Muslims who support free speech but oppose the race-baiting and Islamophobia that can be present at the events and in related media.

Well, perhaps these events might motivate the large number of Muslims said to support free speech to get off their duffs, disavow the terrorists, and actually do something about defending free speech. Granted, many American Muslims did just that after the Texas attacks, but would they have done so had not two of their coreligionists tried to commit murder? In my view Geller, however odious you find her, did the right thing by having an exhibit of Muhammad drawings, for it made American Muslims sit up and realize that they had better say something to decry this violence. And once they say that, it’s hard to take it back.

Bulger goes on. I’ve put his lip service in bold, and his big BUT in italics:

As a humanist, the freedom of speech, and even the freedom to cause offense or insult to religious Americans who hear my sincere criticisms of their religious beliefs, is a crucial right that I will always work to defend. But humanists also place a lot of value in being reasonable and pursuing ideas which will leave a tangible and positive impact. While there are claims that “Draw Mohammad” events further the freedom of speech, the proof just isn’t there. Our rights are no more secure than before these events started, and the only noticeable change in our society since they began is more violence and discrimination.

This is reprehensible nonsense. What Bulger is arguing here is that the way we must make our freedom of speech more secure is not to use it, at least not when it riles up people. But that’s precisely when free speech is most needed. As Powers said, “Liberal theorists came up with the correct theory that you can’t have real knowledge without diversity; you have to have different people coming with different ideas.” One of those ideas is that much of the religious ideology of Islam, including its murderous response to mockery, is to be publicly decried. Presumably Bulger wouldn’t have a problem with “sincere criticism” of Christianity. But when it’s sincere criticism of Islam—and that is surely what Charlie Hebdo, and even Geller, were trying to do—then we’d better shut up because our precious necks are on the line.

Shame on the American Humanist Association for promoting such censorship.