2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Cornel West and James Zogby do not represent the Mainstream Democratic Party [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)"deligitimizing".
(btw, with her campaign against the BDS movement, shira is trying to create a universal "safe space" for the viewpoint that Netanyahu should be given unquestioning public acquiescence in every act of oppression and immiseration inflicted by his government against the Palestinians, and she is pretty much against Palestinians in the West Bank even having the right to protest the Occupation nonviolently, so if I were you I would be wary about getting her support on the question of "free speech".)
"Free speech" does not include the right to call other people inferior because of their race or ethnicity(or to use dog-whistle phrases to incite violence against those people), or to whip up hatred against people over their religion, or to dehumanize women and gays by verbally raping them.
The sole purpose of the type of words you are defending is to delegitimize people, to say to the people they are used against "you are less than me, you are an outsider, you have no right to be here, and I have every right to try to intimidate you into either submitting to my dominance or leaving".
BTW, it wasn't the civil rights leaders using hurtful words 50 years ago(btw, Dr. King did say that freedom activists should be careful about using words like "cracker", or about sweeping demonizations of all white people-never mind that white people in that era were far more deserving of condemnation than anybody who is protected by "safe spaces" , it was the OPPONENTS of civil rights using them...the people whose grandchildren are still using false claims of job losses or false claims of denial of admission to a university as a pretext to fight to make the worlds of work and higher education as white(and male)as possible. You aren't defending free speech, you are defending speech as a method of annihilation, of destruction, of pure negativity and ugliness.
What I'm talking about here is verbal bullying, not expressions of opinion. Nobody has to use racial slurs to express their opinion about racial issues. Nobody has to make viciously judgmental comments about the appearance or sexual activity of women to make their points about gender. Nobody has to use the six letter "f" word or the four letter "d" word to make a coherent argument regarding how this country should deal with sexual orientation.
Do you oppose any restrictions in any and all situations on the use of obscenity? If you do, you're on shaky ground saying that bigots should be able to let fly whenever and wherever they want, because bigotry is no different than obscenity. It simply isn't a necessary part of discourse.
Free speech, yes...but freedom coupled with respect for everyone's dignity and the legitimacy of everyone's presence. That isn't asking too much. That's just being a grown-up.