Some of my Friends With Wrong Ideas (FrieWIs) keep a very close watch on me. I don’t feel a need to respond to every post. Every once in a while, however, they do me a favor. Take this audio clip posted over at Equality Matters, for instance. Posted with a breathless headline, “NOM’s Morse: Hate Crimes Laws are Anti-American, Limit Free Speech.” This headline is designed to brand me, before you, the reader/listener, even hear what I have to say. This is from an hour long interview I did with a blog radio host called Stacy Swimp. Equality Matters went to the trouble of pulling out this 5 minutes and making it into its own little post.
I actually like this clip quite a bit. In the back of my mind, as I was talking, I was thinking about Eric Voegelin’s analysis of Gnostic movements. He was writing from the 1930’s through 1950’s, and was concerned about the modern ideologies, both left and right, Marxism and Fascism. He considered these movements to be Gnostic movements. (He had never heard of the modern sexual liberation movements, obviously, since they didn’t exist exactly when he was writing. But I think they fit his analysis very well.) Anyhow, he makes the point that since these movements are irrational and unsustainable, it is very important that people not look too closely at what is actually being advocated. Therefore, he observed that the ideologues must adopt strategies for keeping people from asking too many questions. *
In this little clip, which Equality Matters so helpfully put together, I am talking about “Hate Speech” laws that try to chill certain types of expression. (although I did use the term “hate crimes,” as if hate crimes and hate speech laws are interchangeable. they are not the same. I stand corrected on that.) I think most Americans agree with me, on “hate speech,” that prohibiting or penalizing certain kinds of non-inflammatory, non-defamatory speech is in fact Un-American.
I believe “hate speech” laws or “speech codes” are meant to keep people from asking certain questions. I think this is the point of Political Correctness. I also think this is what the nastiness in the blogosphere is meant to do: keep people from thinking too clearly. Get people upset. Keep the focus off the issue at hand. Redirect attention to the supposed moral failings of the person making the argument. That way, the conversation becomes all about me and how mean I am, rather than about the substance of the argument I am making.
I would encourage you to listen to this short clip. Then, keep your ear to the ground in the gay blogosphere. You will see beyond any shadow of a doubt that they practice these tactics. If you think I have correctly identified an important tactic of the Life Style Left, please spread this post around.
*Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (originally written in 1958) in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol 5, “Modernity Without Restraint” editted with an Introduction by Manfred Henningsen, (Columbia:University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 260-268
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