This weekend, “anti-Donald Trump protesters blocked an Arizona highway and created a traffic nightmare in a bid to keep the GOP frontrunner and his supporters from attending a Saturday rally,” reported the New York Daily News. The incident follows the successful effort by protesters to force the cancellation of a Trump rally in Chicago, after which the candidate handily won the Illinois GOP primary.
You don’t have to look warmly on Donald Trump (I certainly don’t) to see that preventing him from speaking is all wrong, totally counterproductive, and completely in keeping with the contemporary worldview of progressive activists. Instead of countering Trump’s speech with their own message, they want to prevent him from speaking, and then celebrate their victory while Trump claims—as hard as it is to believe—the moral high ground.
In January, LGBT progressive activists created a disruption that succeeded in forcing the cancellation of a reception with an Israeli gay rights group at the LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change conference in Chicago. One can think Trump wrong on just about everything, and the Israeli gay rights speakers as courageous and virtuous, and still condemn progressive activists in both situations for their tactics of “de-platforming” (that is, forcibly silencing) those with views they disagree with. As I wrote at the time:
On college campuses progressivism now means shutting down or otherwise eliminating the expression of viewpoints that are not deemed sufficiently and correctly progressive. It’s a new streak of authoritarianism that reflects back to the pro-Soviet leftism of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
Freedom of speech isn’t the only constitutional right progressives believe we would be better without (ok, they support freedom of speech they agree with; it’s just “hate speech” that shouldn’t be protected). You can’t pick up an LGBT paper or visit an LGBT website and not see articles and editorials informing you that religious liberty is nothing but code for the right to engage in anti-gay discrimination. Just like the right to freedom of speech is just code to engage in hate promotion. And then progressives wonder why, in rejecting their brand of authoritarianism of the left, a growing number seem inclined to embrace its opposite, authoritarianism of the right.
8 Comments for “Illiberal Progressives Empower the Right”
posted by Tom Scharbach on
You can’t pick up an LGBT paper or visit an LGBT website and not see articles and editorials informing you that religious liberty is nothing but code for the right to engage in anti-gay discrimination.
The media, mainstream or LGBT, progressive or conservative, does a poor job of legislation and separating the wheat from the chaff. So does the blogosphere. IGF does a particularly poor job of it because the nature of the laws themselves are never discussed in the posts.
Over a hundred and fifty “religious freedom” bills are currently proposed in state legislature.
A few — a very few — follow the formula of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the operative language of which reads:
The RFRA-clone language restores the Sherbert/Yoder test to state law, as it existed before conservatives on the Court eliminated the “compelling interest” test with respect to laws of general application (Employment Division v. Smith, 1990) and declared that Congress had no power to impose RFRA on the states (Boerne v. Flores, 1997). By doing so, the proposed bills correct two Court cases that diminished religious freedom, and, in my view, anyway, restores the proper balance of law and religious objection to the law.
Notice that the RFRA-clone language is both issue-neutral and class-neutral, as well as religion-neutral in the sense that it singles out no particular religious belief for special protection. It is not entirely religious-neutral, because it does not protect non-religious freedom of conscience, but it protects all religious belief, and favors no particular religion.
But RFRA-clone laws are a small number of the so-called “religious freedom” laws being proposed, and in some cases, enacted. Most are, at best, odious.
Look, for example, at Missouri’s SR 39, which proposes to amend Missouri’s constitution to include this language (emphasis mine):
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Second try, properly formated this time around:
You can’t pick up an LGBT paper or visit an LGBT website and not see articles and editorials informing you that religious liberty is nothing but code for the right to engage in anti-gay discrimination.
The media, mainstream or LGBT, progressive or conservative, does a poor job of legislation and separating the wheat from the chaff. So does the blogosphere. So does IGF and the articles it links.
Over a hundred and fifty “religious freedom” bills are currently proposed in state legislature.
A few — a very few — follow the formula of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the operative language of which reads:
The RFRA-clone language restores the Sherbert/Yoder test to state law, as it existed before conservatives on the Court eliminated the “compelling interest” test with respect to laws of general application (Employment Division v. Smith, 1990) and declared that Congress had no power to impose RFRA on the states (Boerne v. Flores, 1997). By doing so, the proposed bills correct two Court cases that diminished religious freedom, and, in my view, anyway, restores the proper balance of law and religious objection to the law.
Notice that the RFRA-clone language is both issue-neutral and class-neutral, as well as religion-neutral in the sense that it singles out no particular religious belief for special protection. It is not entirely religious-neutral, because it does not protect non-religious freedom of conscience, but it protects all religious belief, and favors no particular religion.
But RFRA-clone laws are a small number of the so-called “religious freedom” laws being proposed, and in some cases, enacted. Most are, at best, odious.
Look, for example, at Missouri’s SR 39, which proposes to amend Missouri’s constitution to include this language (emphasis mine):
In addition to creating a legal black hole (what the hell, exactly, are “goods or services of an expressional or artistic creation” other than an open invitation for lawyers to make themselves rich litigating the question**), the proposed constitutional amendment is expressly, specifically aimed at protecting a singularity of religious belief — religious opposition to same-sex marriage. Unlike the RFRA-clone bills, the law is intended to be neither issue-neutral nor class-neutral. It is intended to grant government sanction to a opposition to same-sex marriage, and that alone, to exclude other forms of religious objection to marriage (religious objection to remarriage after divorce, for example) as unworthy of protection, and to target a single class of citizens, same-sex couples.
And then progressives wonder why, in rejecting their brand of authoritarianism of the left, a growing number seem inclined to embrace its opposite, authoritarianism of the right.
I would quietly suggest that gays and lesbian opposition to so-called “religious freedom” bills (like Missouri’s) that grant government sanction to religious opposition to same-sex marriage, and that alone, has much less to do with the frenzied introduction of such bills than does politics in an election cycle, particularly in states where gays and lesbians are not protected by public accommodations laws. I’ll bet dimes to donuts that the frenzy over “religious freedom” is going to die down relatively quickly after this election cycle is concluded.
** Language like this has only one redeeming value — in the hands of a sadistic law professor, the hypotheticals the language easily spins off could be used to drive law students barking mad.
posted by Tom Jefferson 3rd on
WOW. Stephen is off his meds or recently changed his dosage.
Trump has brought nativism, reality TV sleeze and violence to the GOP primary. But….tg
posted by Tom Jefferson 3rd on
The real problem is the people protesting Trump. Yeah. No red flags with that logic.
Quite a few Republicans and Independents are tuned off my Trump and the violence that follows him.
Quite a few progressives have supported religious freedom and civil rights.
Quite a few progr
posted by Mike in Houston on
Another separate reality post from Stephen… fortunately the comment system is about as awful as his repeated attempts to smear all progressives to a) curry favor with other homocons; b) curry favor with the right-wing nuttosphere; or c) all of the above… for reasons, that I can only conclude that either wants a job a Brietbart or REALLY doesn’t like the fact that LGBT people are gaining civil equality (equal means equal).
posted by JohnInCA on
I’m curious what kind of protest Stephen considers ethical and permissible.
That said, by all indications Trump cancelled the Chicago rally of his own free will, and then lied about his reasons, saying that Chicago police asked him to. If that’s the fault of “progressives”, then I’m not sure what we *can’t* blame progressives for.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
I wonder if (LOL at the improbability) Stephen is going to get around to condemning the “Illiberal Conservatives” who are trying to silence Trump supporters.
It has gotten so bad on the right that the clear Republican front runner has to meet with Republican leaders in secret, lest the Republican leaders be blackballed.
posted by Clayton on
If Westboro Baptist Church has the right to stage anti-gay protests at military funerals (a right I support, even as I find such protests distasteful), then it follows that people who oppose Trump have the right to stage protests at his speaking venues.