Hey! Someone is criticizing ME!

Posted on June 18, 2007

This post crossposted from “Tongue Tied”

This blog is all about criticizing infractions of free speech and the only people who argue with me about what I write are normally my own readers. And they certainly don’t always agree with me. However, some fat guy in Michigan has put up a post on Science Blogs criticizing a post I put up both here and on STACLU.

His argument is fundamentally a legalistic one but maybe I should say a few words about it. He is talking about the case where some California Christians were forbidden from putting up on a noticeboard a flier containing such dreaded words as “natural family”, “marriage” and “family values”. I pointed out that forbidding these words seemed to be based on the view that they were hate speech directed at homosexuals.

My critic says that the court ruling supporting the ban has nothing to do with hate speech. He says: “The issue in the case was the application of Pickering, which requires judges to apply a balancing test between free speech rights and the administrative needs of the employer

So the administrative needs of the employer required them to ban use of “natural family,” “marriage” and “family values”! Pretty strange administrative needs! My post went to the heart of WHY the empoyer had such strange needs and I stand by my view that the need arose from a perception and treatment of the words as hate speech. The fact that the Christians were threatened with being fired over it certainly reinforces that impression.

P.S.
I called my critic a “fat guy in Michigan” just for a stir. “Stirring the possum” is something of a habit we Australians have. But he did accuse me of “singing an absurd song” so maybe an improvement in manners on his part might get him more favourable mention. He is at least an intelligent critic and has an argument — both of which are routinely missing from the emails I get from Leftists.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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2 Responses to “Hey! Someone is criticizing ME!”

camanintx on June 19th, 2007 11:47 am

My post went to the heart of WHY the empoyer had such strange needs and I stand by my view that the need arose from a perception and treatment of the words as hate speech. The fact that the Christians were threatened with being fired over it certainly reinforces that impression.

You have an interesting idea of what constitutes a fact since nobody in this case was ever threatened with being fired.
Chuck C on June 19th, 2007 1:58 pm

So the administrative needs of the employer required them to ban use of â€œnatural family,â€ â€œmarriageâ€ and
â€œfamily valuesâ€! blockquote>

The flyer also contains the words “if”, “you”, and “to”. Are you maintaining that
using those words is now banned as well? That would pose a bit of a communications challenge.

Perhaps you speak a different dialect of english down under, but I’m thinkin’ that even in Australia, demanding that a flier come down is a tad different than attempting to purge the words on it from speech.