Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

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I think that this is a dangerous attitude that leads to more laws and the clawing away of rights.

The supreme court explicitly held that people have the constitutional right to hold an anti-gay rally outside of military members' funerals [1]. I think that the vast majority of people (including the overwhelming majority of people holding anti-gay views) would find this behavior atrocious and immoral. But it's protected free speech.

The problem though is that enough of this kind of stuff happens and laws begin to change. Sure, it's one crazy group in this case, but if this sort of behavior were prevalent enough, peoples' views on free speech would change. Sure, this is an extreme example, since something specifically mentioned in the constitution is very hard to change. But there are plenty of examples of laws that only exist in response to some idiot(s) who decided to ruin it for everyone else (as a very simple example, I no longer have the right to buy more than one pack of Sudafed at a time where I live... they didn't just dream that law up out of thin air).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._Phelps#Alito's_disse...

This would be a much more compelling argument if I believed that homophobic politicians, judges, and groups will defend the speech rights of gay people. Instead what I see is a pattern of right wing groups leveraging the courts to protect their own right to hate while also leveraging the courts to oppress groups they hate. Standing up for the Nazi's right to march in my town won't cause those Nazis to stand up for my right to march in my town.

Only one side cares about the rules, but the other side still uses it as a rhetorical weapon

When’s the last time the courts protected the right to hate in the form of preventing speech of gay people? This is just worrying about things that don’t happen. Right now socially LGBT people have a moral high ground and very little of their speech is ever prevented.

Legislation against the visibility of gay people is sweeping the south right now.

How does it infringe on their right to speak though? They’re speaking very loudly about the issue in fact. I hear them more than I ever have in the past. For being less than 1% of the population I think they’re one of the most overrepresented speech groups, from what I’ve seen anyway.

And this is precisely why I do not expect any defense from the right. When discussion of gay people in classrooms and in books is verboten and when tame drag shows draw crowds brandishing weapons and laws banning them entirely, I don't see people on the right leaping to defense.

You didn't answer my question. I don't understand how your reply is related to what I wrote.

These are threats to the basic speech rights of queer groups and "free speech absolutists" are not coming to protect queer groups.

They are speaking loudly about the issue, because their speech is being infringed. The law in Florida currently says that you're not allowed to talk to school children about sexuality in an inappropriate way, without specifying what this exactly means. I have not seen any conservatives deny that this is specifically set up to still allow talk about heterosexuality (e.g. a male teacher talking about how he went hiking with his wife) while disallowing any mention of homosexuality (e.g. a male teacher talking about how he went hiking with his husband).

The only defense I can see would be the same which was used to deny gay marriage - "we're not infringing on their rights, they can still marry straight people of the opposite sex!" - which I'm sure we can all agree is not in any way a good defense.

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