All this time, I have/we've been arguing that homosexuality is OK and should be treated the same as heterosexuality, and so should not be criminally punished or criminal he singled out/prohibited, even in a purely expressive way, at all, because it doesn't affect anyone other than the willing consenters:
But arguing this implies that receiving into one's mind/mental experience information/sights/sounds/accounts of it don't count as affecting.
Now, some parts of the left want to argue that sights and sounds and words and ideas can count as affecting. So which is it?
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Next step in the homosexuality dialectic discourse:
I rely on my argument about if you don’t/didn't know about it, then it doesn't/couldn't have been affecting you.
And nobody is suggesting legalizing it in a way that you would receive experiential information about it: like in public.
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The response, I imagine, the only one possible:
Even just knowing about it, without experiencing/seeing or hearing it, it affects me, it's mere existence of affects me.
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And we who were pro gay rights, remember we were arguing over its mere legality/legal existence less than 15 years ago during Lawrence movie Texas, and who must continue to advocate for gay rights and freedom of homosexuality in the US and--importantly--internationally, must/must have rejected all these concerns of social conservatives, and rejected the idea that not only sight and sound button mere knowledge of X/homosexuality affects unconsenting participants.
((Sight and sound versus knowledge of X, homosexuality in this case, comes into play in both/all the free speech cases/scenarios because the organizers of the controversial speech/presentation on campus are confining their speech to a single location a single time and publicizing the nature of its content and those facts about setting, and thereby allowing people to choose/control/determine whether they admit this controversial content into their mental experience, and attempting to restrict the scope/reach of their content/speech to only those who affirmatively choose to experience it/opt in--this means making sure the audience/recipients of your speech/content have consented to do so and not only that people who have affirmatively rejected/refused to consent to receiving/experiencing it, but also that people who have not consented or refuse/projected receiving/experiencing it are prevented from receiving/experiencing it; no one can receive/experience it accidentally, Without their knowledge or explicit consent--(doing this by restricting their speech to a certain place and time, and publicizing it)
((publicizing the speech deserves some consideration, because if the warning of the events content includes any of the controversial content itself, then it does no good and compounds the problem. This is exactly the problem with
(((At least part of peoples problems with sights and sounds and ideas and information and speech about it, it is for the effect this will have on kids slash their kids/teach them about it/ruin their ignorance on the existence of this.)))
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So student activists/protesters can and do argue that: we are still not satisfied that the speech is confined to a single space and a single time that is announced in advance in a way that does not include/communicate/express any of the controversial content, and actually purely safe trigger warning ((Im imagining if the term trigger warning were explicitly attached, and perhaps looks like they were agreed to reluctantly by the controversial speaker and the controversial organization that invited them to use the term trigger warning, then confining the speech to one place and time and announcing those facts in advance would probably suffice)). In other words, we are not satisfied that the speech is regulated enough such that only people who affirmatively consent to receive/hear/experience/see it in fact do so.
Just knowing that that speech is going on on this campus, and maybe additionally that there are people who wanted to go hear it, and agree with and like it, on this campus is enough. It's enough to make me not feel safe knowing the mere existence of it.
Are we sure we want to set this standard/principle about what speech may be regulated legitimately/justifiably?
(((especially because the speech on campus does not cause those views in the people on campus who chose to go to it and or agree with hand or like it; preventing the speech will not do anything about those views that may be/may have been said to be part of the reason for opposing the speech/wanting to prevent the speech from happening. But maybe the speech happening will foment those forces/the people with those views, and connect them with one another and lead to an increase in it, either in their intensity and possible action derived from it, and or the growth of it through the conversion of undecideds/New believers. If that's what they're trying to prevent, send that might be legitimate/has a prima facie case for legitimacy/being right, but we would need empirical information that this causal relationship occurs. To the contrary, I think my views on persuasion--how to do it and what does it in people--all right, and they are incompatible with this possibility.
… In general, at the most basic level, I just want to argue for value neutrality/content neutral free-speech/speech regulation policy.
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Why do I want it so badly? Because we need something in common, if we're going to have a polity together at all with people we disagree with, and that's the only candidate for a possible compromise for policy here on this issue.
If the center doesn't hold, there will just be war/majority/force/numbers.
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(((((((oh my God, all of the schools having all of these slightly different but largely similar protest movements/student activism/demands provides me a great/perfect opportunity/the perfect opportunity to illustrate all the iterations in thought experiments on free speech questions, and are perfect examples for many of the theoretical ideas ideas I've previously analyze only theoretically and because it makes them easier to see for others and makes it easier to communicate them with others))))))
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