Distingusing Between Types of Censorship
A post over at Personal Responsibility links to an article talking about how some children in London are not being taught all of history to protect minority students from harm when learning about past historical events. To which Darwin quips:
Well, the administration clearly felt that this policy was working so well for sex education that they should try expanding it to other subjects. Makes sense.
You failed. Those against sex education in the public schools don’t oppose it as a way to avoid hurting children but because they believe it’s not the place of public schools to teach such topics.
The appropriate analogy is the story in which that student’s free speech rights were denied because his anti-homosexuality shirt could potentially psychologically harm a gay teenager. You will recall, in this American case, the majority ruling argued that minorities enjoy extra protection rights simply because their minority status makes them more vulnerable to psychological harm. Thus a Christian majority does not have the free speech right to express their anti homosexuality view since it could do extra harm to minority homosexuals. Sacrificing free speech rights to protect minority groups has recently become the stock and trade of liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s such a shame since during the sixties they nobly stood for free speech to insure minorities received that right.
Darwin, it makes sense to me that you didn’t immediately see the connection between the two stories. To see the relationship would require seeing the glaring contradiction in your position. I presume you are against censoring certain parts of history class to protect minority children from psychological harm while at the same time support preventing the peaceful expression of certain views when those views could cause psychological harm for minority children. It’s unclear on what dimension you discriminate between the two types of censorship. One can’t help but think you distinguish not as a function of some lofty appeal to an ideal, like free speech, but rather you discriminate merely as a function of the political group you most closely associate yourself with. Liberals are more sympathetic to homosexuality than conservatives and therefore your inclined to protect them more so than Christians.
Personally, I naïvely embrace the lofty ideal of free speech. The minority gothic lesbian who defiantly wears the shirt that quotes Nietzsche’s bold proclamation that Christians have killed their God, enjoys just as much right as the majority wholesome Christian proudly wearing a shirt that quotes the bible’s denunciation of homosexuality. But then again, I’m old fashion. I interpret the constitutional right to free speech to mean every single citizen is free to speak.
April 2nd, 2007 at 9:58 am
also, you can dislike bush’s decision and this decision at the same time can’t you? Why is darwin’s point relevant at all?
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:02 am
Im sorry but i dont follow you, boose.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:18 am
Again, and with most all of your posts, and issues, and discussions, I get the impression that things are being overcomplicated, overrated by what you make out of them or how you look at them. Reading the article, I did not get the impression that historical facts are not being taught at all, but rather that “discussion”, emotional discourse, is not actively sought for by the teachers. This is not to say that sensitive parts of history are not being taught, it is just to say that they are not being discussed, and the reason for this is also stated in the article, namely, that teachers are not at all knowldegeable to discuss certain topics. If there is a point - THAT should be the point, namely that teachers are not knowledgeable enough, and for this reason they feel incompetent and insecure to bring up certain controversial questions. A topic is not at all a sensitive topic, once you know how to deal with it.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:20 am
….. I could bring in “sex ed” now, and make a BAD BAD joke, but I won’t. I’m not knowledgeable enough to get into that discussion…
April 2nd, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Taken from the original story . Please note the use of the expression ‘is also’.
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:46 pm
my point was just that darwin doesn’t have a point. Bush’s push to ‘censor’ sex-ed doesn’t have anything to do with britain’s current insanity. I can oppose bush’s push and britain’s push at the same time. You can oppose britain’s censoship and not bush’s. They’re so thoroughly separate that i don’t see why darwin brought it up at all. As for bettina, the refers to dropping the holocaust and the crusades so as not to “challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.”
Hmmmmmm, i wonder which places of worship are putting forth charged versions of the holocaust and crusades?
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:27 am
boose- I’m making fun of steve and diatribe for supportingthe Bush administration but being outraged at a policy in Britain which is very similar to a policy the Bush administration has put into affect right here, which they’ve totally ignored. I agree you can be against both (I am); they are for (or at least not speaking out against) one and louldly against the other, which is what I’m making fun of.
steve- Just to start with, because it’s an old point we keep coming back to:
“But then again, I’m old fashion. I interpret the constitutional right to free speech to mean every single citizen is free to speak.”
Man come on, every time we talk about a free speech issue, you say you’re for free speech always for everyone, then I bring up a lot of situations where you’re aginst free speech (ie, where it hurts or endangers somebody), then you say ‘well yeah, I don’t mean free speech always for everyone’, then I say ok, then a few weeks later you say ‘I’m for free speech always for everyone.’ Seriously it’s getting old.
You’re against free speech when it actively endangers someone (yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, giving away military secrets), and if there was no reason to think that T-shirt wasn’t actively endangering gay students at the school, I would be against having it removed. But gay students get beat up all the time, if I remember correctly there had been violence at that school previously over gay issues, and we all remember a gay student who was tied to a fence and beaten to death with stones. You can pretend all you want that this is about someone’s feelings getting hurt, but it just means you’re ducking the issue- what was at stake was the threat of real, plausible, physical violence and harm. That being the case, there’s no connection between the T-shirt thing and this current situation.
“Those against sex education in the public schools don’t oppose it as a way to avoid hurting children but because they believe it’s not the place of public schools to teach such topics.”
You really think that? You honesly believe that the christian coalitions who try to get Sex-Ed removed from schools also distribute packets to parents with advice on how to demonstrate proper condom use to their children at home? Get real.
But your relevant point here is that people aren’t banning sex-ed because it makes the students uncomfortable, which is true. However, I’m surprised if you actually care about the motivation behind this government intervention more than about it’s effects.
The effects in both cases are the same- students are not being taught a certain piece of factual information. To me, this is miles away from censoring some teenager who puts their opinion on a T-shirt.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:41 am
I stand corrected; you fully support freedom of speech even when it causes psychological harm. Thus you were outraged, like me, when that federal court ruled that teenagers can’t wear shirts that might cause psychological harm for minority students. And just like me, you are furthermore angered at the London educators depriving children of some historical events to protect them from psychological harm.
It’s my fault. When you were defending the court’s ruling that preventing psychological harm justifies censorship I wrongly took that to mean you believe censorship is okay if it prevents psychological harm. Though you defended that position, you apparently didn’t believe it, which is fine as you were just playing devil’s advocate.
We agree people should be able to express speech that might be psychological harmful to other people.
As for this matter of the Bush administration and sexual education, I don’t know what you are talking about. If I had to guess, I suspect John Steward said something about Bush attempting to get sex education courses to teach abstinence as the only means of safe sex. A potential rationale for wanting abstinence only is because teenage sex could be psychologically harmful. To avoid such psychological harm schools should not teach young teenagers about sex.
The problem with this variant is that nobody on the right makes this argument. I sure as fuck don’t make this argument which is why your jab at me failed so miserably. Conservative reluctance towards sexual education is predicated on determining who gets to teach sexual mores to children. Teaching a child how to use a condom seems, from an educational value perspective, dramatically different than teaching the same child how to solve for x. This debate is not about psychological harm to children, but who gets the authority to teach sexual mores.
The story Diatribe linked to was all about psychological harm. Historical events were not being removed to insure that the proper authority was teaching sexual, or other types of mores, but rather to prevent psychological harm to minority children. Crucial to my analogy is understanding that in both either citizen rights or education curriculum were modified merely to protect a ‘minority’ group from ‘psychological harm’. I oppose compromising my rights or education in the name of protecting some minority group’s psychological well being, and apparently so do you Darwin.
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:21 am
seeing as we’re oh so secretly talking about muslims, why can’t you argue (unlike the article’s arguement) that teaching the crusades might somehow spark violence against these muslims. Therefore, for the protection of the minority, information should be kept from the majority to ensure their safety. just playing devil’s advocate. Ya know.
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:15 am
Steve: regarding psychological harm and the T-shirt thing- read my entire post before responding please.
Also, the ‘minority group’ being done ‘psychological harm’ by teaching sex-ed is a few religious extremist parents. And the Bush administration has ‘modified the curriculum’ to make them feel better. This, however, is not the point of my original jab.
You’re still being disengenuous (unless you truly believe this, in which case you’re just wrong) when you say that right-wing oponents of sex ed think that parents should teach their children the facts about sex ans safety rather than schools. The oponents of sex ed think that children shouldn’t get any (factual)sexual education at all. Furthermore, I think they would say that such an education is ‘psychologically damaging’ to their kids.
The point of my original jab is that right wingers have modified school curriculums to remove certain facts that they don’t want anyone’s kids to be exposed to, and you made no comment. Now left-wingers have modified school curriculums to remove certain facts they don’t want minority kids exposed to, and you’re outraged.
boose: ?? I wasn’t atlking secretly about muslims… I don’t know anything about the crusades, I thought the changes in the article were mostly to circumvent the holocaust to protect germans and jewish kids. But yeah, if you had clear evidence of recent events where teaching about the crusades led to physical violence against muslims, I’d say we should look into not teaching that stuff in public schools for awhile.
In the case of the t-shirt, we certainly have ample evidence of homophopbic speech and slogans leading to violence against gay students. So I’m not sure in what way you’re being a devil’s advocate; your example works perfectly as a thought experiment, it just isn’t empirically true.
April 4th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
so, in order to get information removed from public schools, all i have to do is get me and a bunch of people to act really pissed off and hurt people? So what would happen if christians decided to start getting pissy whenever anything bad is said about christianity? At what point does it become an issue that the school should face instead of back away from?
April 9th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Yeah, that’s like, my whole point. I wish schools were stadning up against this stuff, but unfortunately the system is set up so schools desperately need federal funding, and federal government is currently very dependant on the extremists and agitators for political support. This doesn’t hurt some things, but schools are traditionally a political hot-topic, so alot of this kind of stuff ends up getting worked out there.
April 9th, 2007 at 8:58 am
LOL:
1. Schools are setup to ‘desperately need’ federal funding.
2. Federal goverenment are ‘dependent’ on extremist and agitators.