yolland
Forum Moderator
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2004
- Messages
- 7,471
lol, well we were told that tons of times where I grew up, though it was usually a straightforward gleeful "All you Christ-killers are gonna burn in hell!" minus the polite offer of conversion. I can't remember a teacher ever intervening either, that was just the way it was.deep said:Should we/ would we tolerate these same people telling Jews they are damned and will not be saved
unless they reject their faith and accept Jesus Christ as their Savior?
In general though, I think most schools and workplaces would find themselves de facto needing to reintroduce bans on open and unprovoked defamation of gays, religious sects, racial minorities etc. even if they tried to lift them, if only because this would put their free-speech commitments on a collision course with with their need to maintain a civil/professional enough atmosphere to get their regular business done.
When I managed a bookstore back in college, I had an employee who was a neo-Nazi. There was no company ban on this (actually I've never heard of a company that bans it) and I didn't myself have a problem with her, honestly; she just seemed like a messed-up young woman with drug and domestic abuse problems to me. However, I did ultimately have to speak with both her and several other employees about not getting into confrontations over neo-Nazism while at work, and in the end two people--one of them her--wound up getting fired because of their inability to cooperate with my request. I suspect many workplaces and schools would wind up having similar fallout from the choice to be "tolerant" of chronically libelous groups. Probably colleges could afford to let more slide, but on the other hand, a student center is not a town hall and colleges have traditionally had a fair amount of leeway to define and regulate what they consider vulgar or defamatory (banning sales of porn on campus, etc.)--balanced out by an equally strong traditional commitment to permitting constructive expression of opposing points of view.
I'm not sure how applicable extending this to housing or hiring discrimination is though since those are not free speech issues, which is what the campaigns cited seem to be focusing on.
I had pretty much the same incredulous reaction to her suggestion that gays need to "knock off the political propaganda" if they want to be tolerated...knock off, knock knock.Irvine511 said:if we are going to argue that homosexuality is "behavior" and "choice," and therefore exempt from anti-discrimination laws, well then i'm damn well going to defend my right to discriminate on the basis of religion since religion is far, far, far more of a "behavior" and a "choice" than sexual orientation.
But then I've never really understood why the right to practice one's own faith, and to lead an observant lifestyle, would necessitate seeing people who don't as some kind of intrinsic threat to that.