Years ago, when the drive for “hate crime” legislation first started taking off, I noticed the rising confluence of speech codes, radical “diversity”-mongering and nascent hate-speech codes, and said “one of the logical consequences of this could be classifying Christianity – or at least the “wrong” kind of Christianity –\u00a0as a hate crime”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The audience – mostly liberals, mostly smug about it – scoffed.\u00a0 “Poor white WASP, complaining about oppression”, responded the middle-class white anglo-saxons of indeterminate religious interest.<\/p>\n
As George Will points out, I was,\u00a0of course, right<\/a>:<\/p>\n Marriage<\/em> is the foundation of the natural family<\/em> and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.<\/p>\n At least it is in Oakland<\/a>, Calif.<\/a> That city’s government says those words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and can be proscribed from the government’s open e-mail system and employee bulletin board.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0It’s within government, of course:<\/p>\n Some African American Christian women working for Oakland’s government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which they announced with a flier describing their group as “a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The flier was distributed after<\/em> other employees’ groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city’s e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it “homophobic” and disruptive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The city government said the flier was “determined” to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier and communications like it could result in disciplinary action “up to and including termination.”<\/p>\n Effectively, the city has proscribed any speech that even one person might say questioned the gay rights agenda and therefore created what that person felt was a “hostile” environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n This, even though gay rights advocates used the city’s communication system to advertise “Happy Coming Out Day.” Yet the terms “natural family,” “marriage” and “family values” are considered intolerably inflammatory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, “protected classes” are official protected from any sort of offense at all.<\/p>\n The flier supposedly violated the city regulation prohibiting “discrimination and\/or harassment based on sexual orientation.” The only cited disruption was one lesbian’s complaint that the flier made her feel “targeted” and “excluded.” So anyone has the power to be a censor just by saying someone’s speech has hurt his or her feelings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Unless the speech is “progressive.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The GNEA should look at the bright side; pretty soon, they’ll be able to drown their sorrows in a moslem foot bath.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Years ago, when the drive for “hate crime” legislation first started taking off, I noticed the rising confluence of speech codes, radical “diversity”-mongering and nascent hate-speech codes, and said “one of the logical consequences of this could be classifying Christianity – or at least the “wrong” kind of Christianity –\u00a0as a hate crime”.\u00a0 The audience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}