Lawrence vs. Texas on Personal Animus as Basis for Legislation: Is this a Critique of Expressionism?

Lawerence v. Texas found that personal animus is not a sufficient reason to justify regulation of an activity; a personal (preferential?) or moral judgment of an activity does not render it subject to government legislation.  

This finding seems to recall, and may be equivalent to, the idea of mine that the expressive function of the law ought to be of a lower priority than other legal functions, especially policy outcome.  In general, this principle on which this case was decided seems to me to be similar to the derision for the expressive function of political action that I have often articulated.

Rape Jokes, Free Speech, and Inclusion

My train of thought on freedom of speech inspired by the unpleasant rape jokes in family Guy:

Dialogue:

A: rape jokes are wrong, you shouldn't make them. On top of that, they're not even funny.

B: sure, they're funny. Who are you to decide what's funny and what's not for everyone? And likewise, who are you to decide what's right and what's wrong (for everyone). I don't think they're wrong; I think they're fine.

A: fine, maybe I can't prove that they are wrong or not funny across the board, and maybe you're right that they are not wrong. But regardless of whether they are ultimately right or wrong, they still means that sexual assault survivors/victims and others sensitive to the issue will avoid your show. In essence then, the inclusion of rape jokes in your show is a method/means excluding sexual assault victims/survivors. That what you want?

Free and Public Speech and Value-Neutrality: Public Sex & Nudity, Body Image, Social Roles, Sexual Assault, Media and Other Representation, and General Activism

David Frum scoffs at efforts to remove or change a large public billboard advertisement for a fitness product that features a sexy, fit woman in a small bikini
as obviously wrong

But if we already have and accept laws against public/the public presentation of drug use (public drinking) and public nudity and public sex actions and even depictions, pictures or video, of nudity and sex acts, then surely we've already violated value-neutrality, and certainly have violated (freedom of speech's) content-neutrality of/for (regulation of) public speech and expression.  

So what's the problem then with further restricting public speech some degree tighter than it is now, even if just to include images and media that uphold/propagate social roles and impossible ideals, and lead to body negativity, body image health issues and psychological issues in high numbers, and sexual assault issues, and gender identity issues, and economic and educational and racial bias/racist prejudice,
given how bad we know these things are right now (and how bad the various ideas to address them are right now, and how bad the general politics of the issue is--not amenable to good solution/policy/practical conclusions/choices and very amenable to false accusations, bad arguments, etc.)

I oppose regulating all speech that is contained to those who positively consent to hearing it, but unless you want to be forced to allow public nudity and public sex acts and/or depictions of them, (etc)...


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dafd
My little reading on culture has shown how people pass down values and attitudes (culture) intergenerational and socially/in a socially diffuse way.
To the extent that the culture passed down can be the CoP
it may be inferred that people need positive role models, since they need "models for life"/examples of living, etc.
This is why gender and racial and queer representation is important, especially with regard to not only positive examples but much less negative stereotypical examples that reinforce negative stereotypes.

Does Speech Have a Regulable Effect on an Unconsenting Audience?

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))))))

Racism & Free Speech

I would have no problem in principle with hate speech laws and banning racist speech even over free speech arguments; after all, my primary argument for free speech is the Millian one that it allows us the chance to improve and progress/make progress.  

Thus, speech that only serves to advocate for/support policies/practices that are racist in their abridgment of individual rights and equality before the law can be banned without cost; we are not going to and shouldn’t make such change regardless.

(Of course, it could be objected that I am contravening Mill’s argument by saying that it’s settled at the outset that such change ought not be made, and that Mill’s argument that free speech promotes/enables progress is based on the idea of human fallibility.  This may be so/this is true, but I believe we can admit this as the only (or one of the few) exceptions to the Millian logic for a few reasons.  

The logical reason is that a sound deductive argument/proof cannot be refuted with more information and dialogue, so keeping questions open that have already been supplied with an argument of this standard for the sake of correction in case of error is pointless.

The constitutional reason is that these questions on equality are already settled at a constitutional level so deciding banning such speech to be permissible at the same constitutional level is not an issue; in order for the Millian argument to imply that racist speech should be constitutionally protected, it would have to be the case that the policy/practical changes such speech would enable would be constitutional possibilities, but they’re not.)

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So, no, I do not oppose criminalizing hate speech or racist speech for such high intellectual considerations on justice.  

I do oppose it for much more mundane reasons: that I don’t believe we can draw the lines delineating prohibited racist speech clearly and specifically enough, and fear that they would move and encroach more and more on speech I think ought to be legal.

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There is also the not negligible consideration that campus speech codes have punished more black people than white people and there is no reason to think that civil/criminal law would be any different—Henry Louis Gates Jr. found this in his analysis of speech codes on campus.

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I could definitely support regulating speech for hate speech and or racism is the letter of the law spelled it out specifically not categorically, such that there is no matter of interpretation and uncertainty of permissibility (which is a problem of course because it can be/lead to/become retroactive legislation, or at least is wrong/bad for the same reasons as retroactive legislation).  

Religious Liberty and Equal Treatment

Hoisted from the draft queue from 3/5/14:

Via this interesting write-up in The American Conservative of the foofaraw over American Atheists' attempt at diplomacy toward the conservative movement at the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference, here's the atheist group's political pamphlet that was distributed at CPAC, also hosted by The American Conservative.

There are apparently four items on their public agenda:

Tolerance, Intolerance, and Hypocrisy

In the wake of the Phil Robertson news, I'm hearing a lot of the conservative point that liberals preach tolerance and diversity, but they don't tolerate diversity that disagrees with them, particularly forms of Christianity with traditional views on homosexuality. It is argued that this makes these liberals the intolerant ones, and that their combination of these positions makes them hypocrites and implies an inconsistency that delegitimizes their view.

Of course, I disagree. There is some logical difficulty in extending tolerance to beliefs and practices that are themselves intolerant: too much to immediately jump to the conclusion that those liberals who don't apply their commitment to tolerance that far do so out of animus or consequently that they are hypocritical and their position untenably inconsistent. Liberals can quite comfortably oppose anti-gay views without having to jettison their general support for tolerance.