(A patriot, who wishes to remain anonymous, has posted the following to me. It is the product of deep thought and research, so I wanted to pass it on to all my readers as a think piece for our times.)
An end goal of political correctness is a world in which all lifestyle choices receive equal
validation and people are protected from encountering any expression of disapproval. It
is a world in which all disagreement is disapproval, all disapproval is discrimination,
and all discrimination is evil. And evil, of course, must be eradicated.
Current attitudes regarding discrimination appear to be focused on branding any and all
forms of discrimination as equally heinous and then declaring that such discrimination
must be eliminated by any means necessary, regardless of how repressive the means. But
discrimination is merely human conflict under a pejorative label. Conflict cannot be
eliminated from the human condition, but it can be controlled (Robert D. Kaplan, The
Humanists Dilemma and Asia’s Cauldron).
The First Amendment is an example of an effort to place boundaries around forms of
conflict/discrimination that satisfy the human demand for individual freedom while
maintaining some control regarding the consequences of actions based on those freedoms.
The First Amendment rejects the currently popular notion of “inclusiveness,” wherein
everyone is welcomed everywhere. Quite the opposite, the First Amendment concerns
itself with maintaining each individual’s fundamental right to be exclusive respecting
how he speaks, how he elects to form alliances with his fellow beings and how he
chooses to conform his behaviors with transcendent principles to which he feels he owes
allegiance. The First Amendment concerns itself with non-tangible, non-quantifiable,
non-material outcomes.
The result is not infrequently the rejection of another person’s beliefs, verbal expressions
and interpersonal interactions—in other words, disapproval. Rejection of another’s value
system is obviously a form of discrimination. Yet the First Amendment protects—and is
intended to protect—exactly those forms of rejection/discrimination respecting forms of
expression when the only offense is disapproval and the only injury a person can claim is
that their feelings were hurt.
The following formulation reflects the historically established approach to balancing the
competing interests of freedoms vs. feelings:
Unintentional emotional distress resulting from the exercise of First Amendment
freedoms is a necessary risk incurred in permitting those freedoms and such distress is an
acceptable consequence of the exercise of those freedoms because it is grounded on the
premise that the individuals involved are capable of taking responsibility for their own
emotional responses while the state is limited to ensuring that everyone has equal access
to those freedoms.
Offended individuals frequently claim to have been “demeaned,” “dehumanized,” or
“made” to feel like a “second-class citizen,” a “lesser person” or otherwise “caused” to
feel any number of negative emotions, as though they are merely helpless, artificial
agents who have no conscious control over their feelings and thus cannot be held
accountable for the management of those feelings. In their eyes, it is unreasonable to
expect them to seek to achieve emotional self-reliance or internal validation and, since
emotional self-reliance is an unattainable objective, it is the world that must be structured
to provide the validation they are entitled to. Hence the conflict distills between those
who believe freedoms must give way to feelings, and those who believe freedoms should
have priority over feelings.
Critical to acknowledge however, is that while feelings are experienced individually, and
thus can only be managed individually, freedoms are experienced only in the collective.
(There is no meaning to the “right to associate” if one is the only person on the planet).
This is also consistent with the historical reality that humans establish governing societies
for mutual physical protection—they do not establish governing societies for mutual
emotional validation. If emotional validation is sought, it can be obtained through the
First Amendment freedom of the right to associate.
Moreover, the republic was established in an era when self-reliance was an essential
survival skill including, obviously, emotional self-reliance. It was most famously stated
by Eleanor Roosevelt in this manner: “No one can make you feel inferior without your
consent.” This can be expanded indefinitely via the form “No one can make you
feel________without your consent.” This acknowledges a fundamental human truth, that
while feelings can be provoked they cannot be compelled. Granting that a first response
may be involuntary, it is also clear that a sustained response involves an element of
choice. This is implicit in the oft-advised response to unwanted speech attributed to
Voltaire: “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to
say it.”
All human interactions evoke some level of emotional reaction. The question then
becomes one of who shall be held responsible for another person’s emotional responses.
The core issue in the current debate then, as previously noted, is a disagreement over the
proper involvement of the state; that is, what should the state regard as more important:
the protection of one citizen’s freedoms, or the protection of another citizen’s feelings.
It is the opinion of this writer that protection of feelings must not become a state
responsibility, as it implies that the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness must now
be replaced with the presumption that happiness is now an entitlement. Rather than a
pursuit, happiness should be a guarantee—and the state is expected to bend its resources,
insofar as it can, to ensure that the desired level of happiness is obtained. Hence the
excessive focus on feelings.
This subject of feelings has represented a thorny problem when it comes to issues
regarding homosexuality given that aversion to sexual practices outside the male-female
model appears to be a human universal and likely has evolutionary roots as an adaptation
designed to maximize the biological potential of the human species. Rejection of
another’s behavior or ideas is frequently, albeit erroneously, interpreted as diminishing
that other person’s worth as a human being. In the minds of those offended, if you
disapprove of their behavior, that’s the same as saying that they themselves have no
worth. In the social science world, such disapproval is regarded as “psychologically
damaging” and “the worst thing you can do is to make people feel guilty or bad about
themselves.” (Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Dan Quayle was Right, Atlantic magazine,
April 1993).
An example of such an occurrence is the lawsuit tendered against the bakery “Sweetcakes
by Melissa” for declining to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple based on their
sexual orientation, declaring that their religion forbad them to do so. The bakery lost the
suit and was fined a combined total of $135,000 “in damages for emotional and mental
suffering resulting from the denial of service.”
To come to an understanding of why gays are so obsessed with their feelings, it is crucial
to recognize that the gay-rights movement is a mass-movement in the fashion described
by Eric Hoffer in his book “The True Believer.” That is, a movement offering its
adherents a “sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life.” Such movements
exhibit some universal characteristics:
From The True Believer:
“There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves.
Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around
us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like
to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for
all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the
product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on.”
From the Wikipedia article on Eric Hoffer:
“...mass movements and juvenile mindsets tend to go together, to the point that anyone,
no matter what age, who joins a mass movement immediately begins to exhibit juvenile
behavior.”
Examples of juvenile behavior within a mass-movement are numerous. For one, it is
evidenced in how juveniles view the world. To the juvenile mind, the entire world
revolves around their world, and their world revolves around their feelings. Another, as
any parent can tell you, is that juveniles are famously disinclined to accept any
responsibility for things they perceive to be wrong in their world and frequently react
negatively when they are told they cannot have something they want. They see
themselves as abused victims unjustly attacked. Frequently they also believe themselves
entitled to some form of reparation.
These instances in which a wedding vendor declines to lend their skills to the celebration
of a same-sex wedding exhibit a consistent pattern: an expectation by the offended party
that they should have everything their way, little or no regard for what might matter to
another, and temper tantrums when they are not given what they want, including
obstructive and manipulative behaviors—such as dragging people into court as a means
of punishing those who disagree with them. This dynamic is also called Spoiled Child
Syndrome (Bruce McIntosh, Pediatrics Magazine, January 1989) and, like the juvenile
mindset of Hoffer’s thesis, has no upper age limit. One author succinctly put it this way:
“inside every adult, sometimes not very far inside, is a bratty kid who wants everything
his own way.”
This pattern holds in every case where a wedding vendor has been dragged into court for
pointing out that the faith that they hold allegiance to does not permit them to associate
with something their religion warns may violate their scriptural injunction to “avoid the
very appearance of evil.” Like the getaway driver in a robbery, while not guilty of
committing the actual robbery, is yet complicit, by the assistance rendered, in sanctioning
the intent of the crime, the religious wedding vendor, by being compelled to play a
supporting role in the public sanctioning of what their religion declares to be a forbidden
sexual relationship, is in danger of being perceived by their God to be casual or even
indifferent to the covenants they have made with that God. For the believer, eternal
consequences follow.
Additionally, from The True Believer,
“All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for
united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they
project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them
are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of
them demand blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.”
The common outcome for wedding vendors who decline to provide forbidden services is
to be the focus of intense hatred and intolerance, sometimes very well organized with
protestors, calls for boycotts and even threats to suppliers who continue to support the
vendor’s business. There is no allowance given for what the faith of the vendor requires
of him. This fits perfectly with the definition of spoiled child syndrome, but it also fits
perfectly with the definition of the word bigot as “one who regards or treats the members
of a group ... with hatred and intolerance.” This is simply bigotry dressed up as righteous
indignation and we should call it for what it is: Gay bigotry. Gay bigotry it is one of the
most virulent and vengeful forms of bigotry currently on display in America today.
Other bigoted groups target primarily freedom of speech, but gay bigotry attacks the
entire first amendment as it applies to individuals—free exercise of religion, freedom of
speech and freedom to associate.
A consequence of the obsession with protecting feelings over freedoms that we are
currently seeing coming from those who champion (or so they say) “social justice”—
especially in these cases involving gay-straight conflicts—is that some justices are now
abandoning their oath of impartiality and are beginning to calibrate their verdicts based
on the anticipated emotional responses of the litigants—Sweet Cakes by Melissa being a
particularly egregious example. The gay couple involved suffered no tangible,
quantifiable or material harm. Their suffering was strictly emotional distress, for which
they refused to accept any responsibility. As they were perfectly capable of attenuating
their feelings had they chosen to do so, this can only be regarded as self-inflicted pain. Its
difficult to see how the Republic or any of its citizens can be held responsible for, or has
any obligation to mitigate, self-inflicted pain.
By justices abandoning their oath of impartiality in cases involving emotional distress
and religious freedom they are effectively claiming for themselves the right to interpret
whether or not a particular practice or religious policy actually violates what the
believer’s religion requires of him. Thus, they interpose themselves between the believer
and his God regarding what constitutes acceptable worship of, and service rendered to,
that God. This undermines the very idea of the free exercise of religion, for the First
Amendment free-exercise clause is predicated on the premise that the believer, and the
believer alone is empowered to determine what his god requires of him and, therefore,
the state must accept the believers interpretation when no substantive injury to another
can be attributed to the actions of that believer.
In a short while, the Supreme Court will be dealing with many of these issues when it
takes up the case of Jack Phillips, a baker from Colorado who declined to make a
wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Should the court find against Mr. Phillips, the court
will be establishing the precedent that the republic values the feelings of one citizen over
the freedoms of another. This is a complete rejection of the fundamental reason America
was founded in the first place—the establishment and protection of liberty— and leads to
a harrowing conclusion: The gay-rights movement stands as one of the most lethal
attacks on our republic that has ever occurred because it seeks total—totalitarian—
control over the First Amendment. This is not a movement in search of fairness, it is a
demand for power and control—the power to dictate to the rest of the world how the
world will see them, and the power to control what people can and cannot say about them.
A pertinent exercise to make clear to the court what the real issue is in the case of Mr.
Phillips might be to conduct the following thought experiment:
Suppose we conduct a survey in a state which has voter initiative. The question is:
“Which is more important, to protect people’s freedoms, or to protect people’s feelings?”
Should the result of the survey indicate that the people believe that freedoms are more
important to protect than feelings, let’s then assume that the citizens of that state use their
initiative process to place the following amendment or statute into their state constitution
or legal code:
Unintentional emotional distress resulting from the exercise of First Amendment
freedoms shall not constitute a basis for conferring protected status, creating protective
legislation or instigating punitive litigation.
This amendment is very narrowly defined, as it is limited to the consequence of
emotional distress only and does not extend to any tangible, material or quantifiable loss,
and is further confined by the limitation that such distress be unintentional (no bullying
allowed) as well as be limited to actions that can be placed under the umbrella of the First
Amendment.
Would the Supreme Court find such a state amendment or statute unconstitutional? By
what stretch of anyone’s imagination could they do so? The bakers, photographers,
florists and other wedding professionals affected by so-called public accommodation
laws are in no way intending to cause harm of any kind by merely seeking to ensure that
their actions conform to their beliefs.
That the First Amendment protects this form of behavior—which is technically
discrimination—is known already, as the court has previously stated with reference to the
Boy Scouts, that the right to associate includes, of necessity, the right to not associate.
Would the Supreme Court declare that churches have the same right to not associate if
they chose to deny their worship services to homosexuals? Wouldn’t that also constitute
a denial of service? Why should an offer of money alter the terms of first amendment
freedoms?
The question to direct to the judges, therefore, is whether these public accommodation
laws that are claimed to be violated are themselves being unconstitutionally applied when
they conflict with the freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment.
A judgment in favor of Mr. Phillips would not “enshrine discrimination” in the
constitution. The outcome would merely be an end to bigoted, hate-driven lawsuits
against people of faith as a means to exact vengeance upon them for holding to a moral
standard that regards homosexuality as sinful and a violation of divine, if not secular, law.
It would simply reaffirm the long-established, traditional understanding that the state is
responsible for protecting people’s freedoms, and the people are responsible for
managing their feelings. And it would be achieved by merely requiring that the state act
as it should in remaining impartial with respect to people’s feelings and leaving it up to
the contestants to solve their own emotional problems. In other words, responsibility
would be allocated where it belongs.
Such a reaffirmation is reasonable, rational, logical and perfectly fair. The playing field
is leveled; everyone shares the same First Amendment protections as well as
responsibilities. There is no favored treatment. And with the First Amendment, there
must not be. While actions constituting rejection/discrimination in alignment with First
Amendment freedoms may occasionally vex some as evidencing bad manners, they must
never be illegal.
In a sense, the contest over freedoms vs. feelings is a simple maturity issue. Adults don’t
go around blaming everybody else for their unpleasant feelings, but juveniles do. Those
members of the gay community possessed of a juvenile mindset seek a world where their
lifestyle is unconditionally accepted everywhere, something no one else can claim any
entitlement to. Their dream is universal approval, something no one else has ever had
access to, for it is outside the reality of history as well as of human nature—a reality
history supplies ample evidence for. It is a fundamental conflict as old as humans have
walked the earth. It is the clash between dreams and reality. But when dreams and
reality clash, adults go in search of a different dream while juveniles demand a different
reality.
Adults will acknowledge and accept this; people afflicted with a juvenile mindset who
believe their feelings to be the hinge on which the universe is supposed to turn as well as
the foundation of America’s public policies—in short, those who believe that their
feelings are more important that anyone else’s freedoms—will rage against it, as we have
plainly seen and, no doubt, will continue to see.
An alternate version of the proposed initiative:
Neither unintentional emotional distress—nor incidental hardship experienced as a byproduct
of such distress—that may result from the exercise of First Amendment freedoms
shall constitute a basis for conferring protected status, creating protective legislation or
instigating punitive litigation.
