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0 pointsBlackFly6y ago0 comments

Historically, some of the most discriminated people have been people of a different religion. In principle you can "stop believing in your religion" as easily as you can stop believing that immigrants are destroying your country.

In practice, nobody cares to protect bigots and a lot of people want to protect gays, immigrants, women, etc. It is troubling that we only protect certain classes of people since maybe the next group that comes along after the current group of bigots will actually deserve protection but the arguments we built to allow the lack of protection for bigots will be used to deny protection to that group.

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snowwrestler6y ago

The end goal of bigotry is to distort legal structures to eliminate equality and preferentially harm certain people, often because of attributes they can't change, like their ethnicity or where they were born. If you're worried about protecting people of the future, you should be opposing bigotry.

Bigotry has cloaked itself in the mantle of victim and you've totally fallen for it.

javagram6y ago

Those same arguments were used against freedom of religion. English Catholics were popish spies who would try to blow up parliament and overthrow the government, etc. Therefore, they needed to be persecuted as heretics to protect the common good.

Roman Christians refused to worship the emperor, destabilizing the social order, and therefore needed to be thrown to the lions to protect society.

Atheists couldn’t be trusted because they didn’t believe in hell, and therefore would act immorally, and so should be banned from positions of power (this is actually in a couple of US state constitutions!)

(And of course, the same arguments were used in reverse later on as different groups got power)

I won’t shed any tears for 8chan who are a bunch of immoral scum, but I know these same arguments will be deployed to censor religious minorities and others in the future. Hopefully they are less appealing targets.

vgaldikas6y ago

Except these were lies.

These people are real, and actually causing harm. Or do you argue that it is not the case?

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BlackFlyOP6y ago

You're far too quick to paint me with the brush of "enemy" simply because I can understand why sensible people are worried. That I tangentially refer to 8chan as bigots should have been enough to tip you off. Maybe you should allow a little color into your world of black and white.

I suppose you don't find historical things like McCarthyism very worrying, given how easily you are to think your principle of discriminating by choice separates what you judge to be good from what you judge to be bad. But do you really trust every imaginable leader with such a power?

LocalH6y ago

This is what I worry about. As social mores change, we must resist efforts to carve out exceptions to fundamental rights, in order to prevent those exceptions from being wrongly used against people in a harmful way. I think the Founders understood this on some level, even if they couldn't know what the political and social landscape would look like today.

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