Thoughts on cancel culture, and the freedom of religion and speech

There seems to be no letting up in the manic drive to change everything in the country. From vestiges of the country’s founding, to the War Between the States, to being dissatisfied with one’s gender, to millions of relatively tiny things that trigger somebody’s feelings, such as calling a toy potato “Mr. Potato Head.” A stunning amount of emotional energy is spent on trying to satisfy the myriad of hyper-sensitive displeasures that some Americans agonize over.

One recent change involves the Randolph Township Board of Education in Morris County, New Jersey, where the Board unanimously voted to remove the names of all holidays from the school calendar.

“If we don’t have anything on the calendar, we don’t have to have anyone [with] hurt feelings or anything like that,” board member Dorene Roche told Fox 5 NY.

The board unanimously voted to remove the names of all holidays from the school calendar earlier this month. This decision was prompted by protests of an earlier decision to change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day.

Some of the people who object to these changes, that are being made to protect the feelings of a few that are upset, are pursuing some cancellations of their own.

“Now they’ve cancelled our holidays,” wrote Laura Assante of Randolph Township, “how will students learn about the significance of these days if our board doesn’t even deem them important enough to keep on the calendar? Enough! It’s time now to cancel the BOE and get a new, honest administration in place who values our children and community.”

And now that “Juneteenth” has been officially declared a national holiday, it will just be a “Day Off” on the school calendar.

The School Board has decided to review the decision.

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Baker Jack Phillips is being punished by a Colorado court for refusing to design a cake that celebrates a person’s gender transition. His reason is that doing so violates his Christian beliefs.

So, if a person born a male believes he is a she, or a person born a female believes she is a he, the rest of us are expected to accept that, and in Phillips’ case, he must recognize it through his work. But a person’s religious preferences that do not recognize gender fluidity opens that person to legal action. Somehow, that doesn’t compute.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution begins: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” If Phillips is prohibited by a court order from acting according to his religious beliefs, isn’t that actually “prohibiting the free exercise” of his religion?

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Things get cancelled because some group — however large or small — dislikes them. Realistically, few things, perhaps nothing, can escape being disliked by someone. Thus, if we keep allowing this foolish cancelling of things, since nothing will be acceptable to everyone, therefore everything will be cancelled, and we will all just become dust in the wind.

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The concept of free speech is one of the hallmarks of the United States of America. It separates us from the tyrannically ruled countries across the globe. Humanity benefits from the free exchange of ideas, as demonstrated by the very existence of the United States.

When an idea is brought forth, it will be accepted by some and opposed by others. It just makes sense that in a free country the opposition’s ideas are available to be considered by anyone and everyone. That is how a free people become informed and able to make decisions that are based on a variety of opinions on important topics.

How ironic that huge and popular organizations such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, et al, operate under the protection of the First Amendment’s free speech protections, and then use that protection to arbitrarily deny free speech to expressing other ideas.

Yes, some ideas expressed may not be truthful, or might be harmful. That can occur in a new idea, or in the responses to it. Who gets to decide: the issuer of the new idea, which may be flawed, or a respondent, whose point of view may be flawed? That is why speech must remain free, in all but the most undeniably dangerous cases.

What we have today is a political faction that doesn’t want the concepts it supports to be measured against differing opinions that might lead many people to oppose its concepts. When you fear that your ideas will not win the day, what more effective way to ensure that those ideas will win than to make them the only ideas people can know about?

Such anti-American behavior is the gold standard of Marxism and Communism, among other venomous, malicious and oppressive ideologies. The difference between those regimes and the USA is that here it is not the government that is cheating to get its ideas accepted by controlling what people have access to, it is private companies.

Interestingly, it was the freedoms of America — the very ones they are working so desperately to subvert — that enabled them to become the successful entities that they are.

Do we still have freedom of speech? Well, yes; sometimes we do.

 

Thank goodness for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects what our Founders viewed as our God-given rights to free exercise of religion, free speech, freedom of the press, peaceable assembly, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

However, while efforts to infringe upon those and other rights are not unheard of, the attacks on them currently form a far more serious threat than perhaps at any other time, and certainly the most serious in many decades.

There has been ample news coverage of instances where Christian bakers and florists were forced to bake cakes or produce flower arrangements for gay weddings, contrary to their religious beliefs.

A decorated Army chaplain is facing what his attorneys are calling a “career-ending punishment” after he explained to a soldier that he could not conduct a marriage retreat that included same sex couples, but was willing to find someone else to do it.

Somehow, no matter how many people are available and willing to provide these services, those wanting a particular service view it as a horrible crime if a person refuses to perform it on religious grounds.

These days, certain “preferences” held by relatively small groups are thought to be of even greater importance than those rights set in stone by our Founders.

Some small efforts at balancing these breaches have occurred, but one’s ability to practice his or her religion in the customary fashion is only sometimes protected, these days.

These breaches of the First Amendment’s protections are serious enough, but what is happening on social media, on college campuses and elsewhere regarding free speech and free access to information is much worse, if for no other reason because of its broad swath of free speech encroachments that are being slashed through our culture.

Burgess Owens, a conservative African-American entrepreneur and 10-year veteran of the NFL, appeared at Hobart and William Smith Colleges recently. He told the audience, “I grew up in the Deep South during Jim Crow segregation laws. I can tell you how racism looks, how it feels, and what it means. You guys today can go anyplace you want to — any restaurant, any college.”

Well, that was too much for the audience. A female attendee asked him to repeat his first name, and after he did so, she said, “Oh, I thought it was ‘Tom,’” as in Uncle Tom. Cute.

Student activists at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, made good on their threat to disrupt an address by conservative Christina Hoff Sommers. What makes this one worse is that it was at the Law School. Yes, that’s right: students studying the law denied Sommers her free speech right.

The Leftist operators of Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube social media platforms think the way to persuade people to their ideas is to cheat them out of contrary opinions. 

The Media Research Center has produced a report titled “Censored” on how and to what extent popular social media are trying to “persuade” people to their way of thinking, not through the common sense of their ideas or the power of their argument, but by keeping people from seeing other points of view.

Authors Ashley Rae Goldenberg and Dan Gainor tell us that social media influences our worldview and can even influence elections. “Americans are seeing the results everywhere online. Conservative spokespeople, political candidates, even members of Congress, are falling victim to censors and the top tech firms are to blame.”

The article addresses claims of liberal bias and censorship against Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube individually, listing the claims and evaluating them, showing that the claims are supported by evidence.

These include such things as that Twitter censors conservative tweets pro-life ads, and censors content that governments find objectionable.

Liberal attitudes are at the core of Facebook and it censors pro-life advertising. Facebook’s algorithms filter what things its members can see, and it also blocked the “Diamond and Silk” girls’ posts, calling their content “dangerous.” Have you ever seen Diamond and Silk? Dangerous?

Google’s fact-checking system and algorithm contain an anti-conservative bias, and its News Lab partners with the radical Southern Poverty Law Center to identify “hate.”

Charges against YouTube mirror those previously mentioned for the other three media.

Is it that these folks have so little faith in their way of thinking that they don’t trust it to stand up against contrary ideas? Or do they not want to go to the trouble of actual debate and take a chance on losing in the marketplace of free ideas?

Whatever the motivation, using their ability to control what their customers or users see is truly otherworldly.

Liars, cheaters and cowards, oh my!

Faced with unpopular ideas, so many in our country are convinced that the appropriate reaction is to hold their breath, sob uncontrollably, stomp their feet, run to their safe space and demand that the speaker of these ideas shut up.

Private businesses or organizations can control what their Websites show. No argument there. The question, however, is not whether they can, but whether they should? Politics and business is a bad combination, and in these instances is quite dangerous.

When the rights of one person conflict with the rights of another

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” So reads, in part, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The amendment forbids government from acting to promote or establish any religion, and from acting to discourage or ban religious behavior. In essence, government should have a hands-off policy where the practice of religious activities, or abstinence from them is concerned.

No constitutionally guaranteed right is absolute, however, and practitioners of a religion who commit felonies – such as assault, robbery, homicide, rape, kidnapping, etc. – or misdemeanors because of their beliefs will suffer the same consequences as other law breakers.

When religious beliefs come up against other rights, however, problems may arise. One such issue is whether a religious person can be, or should be, forced to do something that is against his or her religious beliefs when not doing so would result in the violation of the rights of another person or other persons.

The United States Supreme Court is currently dealing with just such a case. The Court has before it the case of a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. The Court must decide how the religious rights of the baker stack up against the couple’s right to equal treatment under the law.

But should someone have his or her rights denied because they are in conflict with someone else’s rights? It is a sticky issue.

A gay couple that has previously been a customer of Mary’s Delights bakery asks her to bake a cake for their wedding, but Mary says that homosexuality goes against the beliefs of her religion and therefore she cannot participate in this wedding by baking the cake. Mary suggests they find another baker for the cake. Perhaps Bob’s bakery? Bob has baked cakes for gay weddings before, she said.

But the couple feels their rights have been violated. Gay marriage is legal and they believe that by refusing to participate in their marriage, Mary has discriminated against them, so they take action against Mary.

However, discrimination is a common and natural part of living; people discriminate against things and people everyday. They choose to buy an SUV instead of a pickup. Or vice versa. We order seafood instead of a steak. We decide to order a cake from Mary’s Delights instead of Joe’s Bakery.

Do we not occasionally see a sign on the entrance to a commercial establishment that reads: “No shirt. No shoes. No service?” Isn’t that discrimination against shirtless or unshod people?

All of these are matters of discrimination, which is merely a matter of making conscious choices of one thing over other things. It is a question of degree, and even then not every act constitutes actionable discrimination.

Years ago, businesses not infrequently had signs on their doors or windows reading: “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” The right of the proprietor to control their business was unquestioned. If they wanted to serve only black people, or only white people, or only Christians or Muslims or atheists, why is that wrong? Or if they want to not serve blue-eyed blondes, or short men, why is that wrong?

As long as services are available to everyone through some provider, why is it necessary that every provider be required to serve everyone?

Carried to its illogical extreme, the owner of a French restaurant could be accused of discrimination by people whose heritage is from another country because the restaurant doesn’t serve German, Scottish, Italian or Mexican food.

America is founded on principles of freedom and guaranteed rights. We have the right to vote for whomever we choose, and to not vote for other candidates. We have the right to associate with whomever we like and to not associate with those with whom we choose not to associate.

People have the right to invest thousands of dollars in their businesses, but if they are religious, they can be forced to violate the tenets of their religion, and their right to religious freedom can be denied, in this case only because someone wants to force them to acquiesce to their wishes rather than go find another baker.

It is no accident that the First Amendment guarantees the right to religion, free speech, a free press, to peaceably assemble, and to petition for a governmental redress of grievances. It is because these were thought to be most important of those basic rights by the Founders. And, it is no accident that first among those items in the first of the amendments is religion.

The American character has been such that when things don’t go the way we want or expect, we work around the problem, whenever possible. So when one service provider is unable or unwilling to accommodate our wishes, we simply find another one who will fill the order. A baker with a religious objection to supporting a gay wedding should not be a problem for anyone. And it should not be a matter to be decided by the United States Supreme Court. Or of any U.S. court.