PeonForHer
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I guess most of us have heard the line, attributed to Voltaire, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." One problem with it is that Voltaire wouldn't be able to defend anyone's right to say anything if somebody got to him first to kill him.
The liberal worldview in which debates like these take place presupposes a lot of things. In particular, it presupposes that the world has moved beyond the stage of the 'condition of the beasts', wherein, as Thomas Hobbes put it, " . . . there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
A precondition of this view that 'everyone has a right to be heard' is that everyone has a right to the conditions necessary to *say things that might be heard*. That is, they have to have certain 'baseline' conditions of society met. They'll need Maslow's baseline in his hierarchy of needs, for instance. In particular, in the context of Fred Phelps and gays, they'll need not to be fucked up in the head by the belief that God hates them; more generally, they'll need to know that there aren't thugs around who'll beat them up because Fred Phelps has, in effect, told them that they're legitimate targets - because God says so. (If God hates gays, what does that make gays - demons? It's actually horrific to follow that line of 'reasoning'.) Fred Phelps articulated a message in which gays, if that message were to be widely absorbed, would be living in horrible, miserable fear - just as Hobbes described.
Fred Phelps used the liberal world view - that which follows Voltaire's view that everyone has a right to free speech - to undermine the very foundations on which the value of free speech rests. At the same time he profited nicely by liberals' belief that, much though they might despise his views, he should still be left to speak them. I recall a Jew I knew at university, talking about Brit Student Unions' much-vexed policy of 'No platform for racists', saying: "Their words don't just make life more difficult for us, they lead to proper damage to us. For them it's just a religious or philosophical thing - for some of their listeners, it's about who it's OK to harm. No, you don't give them a platform. You just beat them up. They take the right to damage your life, so you take the right to damage theirs. Equal freedoms, eh? "
All of which is to say, in a roundabout way, if I were a gay florist, asked to provide wreathes for Phelps's funeral, there would be two options for me, both logically valid. One would be to say 'Yes, I'll provide those wreathes' - on the basis that this might show just how much more human I am than was Phelps. On the other hand I might think, 'Phelps was a shit who didn't respect the laws of decent society. I owe him nothing'. And that would also be valid. He and his supporters do not *get* to invoke the fundamental laws of liberal society because Phelps didn't abide by them.
< Message edited by PeonForHer -- 3/25/2014 3:44:11 PM >
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