Bullies are tired of being resented. After a hard day of bullying, they just want to relax
Those who resist social justice incorporate the language of social justice and claim equivalent injustice to themselves.
It goes like this: “Stop hitting my fist with your face.” Or, “Stop screaming while I punch you. Screaming constitutes verbal abuse.”
I fully expect to read in The Washington Post of some member of Congress introducing a bill to grant reparations to the descendants of all people throughout American history who have been offended by being called oppressors.
The Supreme Court has decided that states may deny guns to domestic violence offenders.
We foresee the day that disobedience to a husband will be claimed in court as an act of violence against the personhood of his authority.
An actual professor of economics at a real university in America said this: “... slavery wasn’t so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc. The only real problem was that this relationship was compulsory.” The idea being that the bad thing about slavery was that it undermined capitalism, not that it was unjust. Hey, and sex traffickers feed their slaves, so stop being so mean to them. The traffickers are just misguided in their application of capitalist principles.
The debate that used to be about prayer in schools is being recast as being about students’ religious rights to assert their religion-based discriminatory views. Some states already have or are near passing laws such as Tennessee’s new “Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act,” which requires school districts to grant students opportunities to speak to their classmates in classrooms and assemblies to promote their religious beliefs, explicitly including beliefs that others deserve to be discriminated against.
I would call these laws “Freedom to be a Teenage Fred Phelps” acts.
I’m all for the rights of students to affirm their religious beliefs. But they don’t need these laws to guarantee those rights, they already have them. The ruling prohibiting teacher-led school prayer didn’t prohibit voluntary student expressions of religion, a fact that always gets missed in all this.
A while ago a sixth-grade teacher in Louisiana made headlines when she stuck this fill-in-the-blank question into a quiz: “ISN’T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____________ HAS MADE” followed by 32 exclamation marks, and told a Buddhist student who failed to complete the sentence with “LORD” that he was stupid for not believing in God. The school district superintendent next told the parents that they had no business expecting anything else, and if they wanted an ungodly classroom they should move to a school district that has more Asians.
No “Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act” needed to be called upon to convince the judge presiding over the civil rights lawsuit brought against the teacher and the school district that they had violated the Buddhist student’s religious freedom. It was a slam dunk just based on the same old laws we already have.
The purpose of these acts therefore isn’t to establish rights but to assure the majority that just because we have to let the Buddhist student go on not believing in God, and the teacher can’t call him stupid for it, nevertheless the majority can still send their own children to tell the Buddhist kid he’s stupid, under the protection of religious freedom.
The Tennessee law makes it clear that if you say, “God hates fags” to your classmates, even if you point out examples among your classmates to illustrate your assertion, that has to be counted as a religious affirmation rather than hate speech and harassment. You can even lead a cheer at a football game based on your religiously motivated hatred. Just be sure that you include the word “God” because if you don’t it won’t be counted as religious speech. So the law discriminates against anti-gay atheists.
The “bully as victim” thinking is taking over. The existence of homeless people offends people with housing. It’s “unfair to decent [housed] people that there are homeless people in view wherever they go,” is the upshot of a typical comment on any Seattle Times story mentioning homelessness.
It’s a whole new era in civil rights.