Sure. That’s why it isn’t hate speech. But it doesn’t make it more useful to go the broad brush route. And you are perfectly entitled to think less of them for going after an entire group when the problem is a certain specific subset.
I know people who hate Catholics. I don’t hang around with them, even though I’m not Catholic. Catholics have actually faced persecution in the past, especially here in the US (and definitely the UK). Just because they won’t try to kill you now doesn’t make it okay. It just means it’s not quite as bad as it is for other groups.
Well put. (And you may be calling “justified hatred” what I’d call “condemnation and censure” but that seems more a matter of the way we each define terms.)
Right. Expanding the notion of “hate speech” to encompass so much that anything that can be claimed to be disparaging to any defined group, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined, gets called “hate speech”, is just a way to render the concept pointless.
The “oppressed class” thing is, IMHO bullshit, just a way to justify hate speech. Or are we gonna have a rating system, grading each religion, race. etc on how much it is oppressed?
Some people are targeting Catholic Justices with threats of violence, including an attempted assassination. Catholic churches are being vandalized, including an alleged arson where the church was burned to the ground.
This is a real issue, in this time, not 100 years ago.
Nobody’s targeting Catholic justices because they’re Catholic. Catholics are over a fifth of the country; of course a significant number of violent events are going to involve us.
And stealing is stealing, but if you can’t see the difference between stealing a candy bar and stealing a car I can see where you might have trouble understanding the difference between “punching up” and “punching down”.
I am glad we agree. Bigotry is bigotry. Stealing is stealing. Punching is punching. We probably ought not to do any of these without sufficient reflection and purpose.
Religions are a belief, they are not an innate identity. Beliefs are made up of a collection of ideas and practices, ideas and practices should always be subject to critique. I frankly do not think this phrase is hate speech at all:
evil Papist ring kissing Mary worshipers
I think it is mean, inflammatory and rude, and I’m fine with it not being allowed, but there is no legitimacy to the idea that you shouldn’t be able to criticize Catholics for the simple fact of their belief system.
Now, critique and verbal aggression are far different from some other activities which affect public policy (outside of this board), to make society functional and fair, people should not be subject to workplace harassment / job discrimination based on religion, the government should not discriminate against them based on their religion etc.
In a private venue like this that can set its own rules, it is my opinion that insults based on someone’s innate traits, like gender, race etc should be considered hate speech–and personal insults shouldn’t be permitted at all when directed at other posters, but I really don’t think attacking the belief system of a religious person should be seen as hate speech. Functionally, I think it is rare that such attacks would avoid running afoul of other rules like rules against direct insults, and mod instructions against excessively inflammatory posts, but I do think it important to say finding Catholics odious because of their veneration of Mary is an entirely legitimate point of view, not bigotry (or any other part of Catholicism you care to take issue with.)
It is. Like up thread people said Hate vs the Irish would be wrong, as they were Oppressed in America. So were the Italians. Why? The main reason is that they were Catholics. They believed the Irish would impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land.
Of course we can. But promoting either sort of theft is against the rules here on the SDMB. Go ahead, open a thread on "How best to steal candy bars from stores". And here I’d expect the sentence here would range from a Note, to a Warning, To Suspension , etc. , just like thefts IRL.
Yeah, so just like IRL, we should apply appropriate sanctions. Bigotry is Bigotry, hate speech is hate speech. But the mods have wide discretion.
Sarcasm and snark are rarely helpful in ATMB. Instead, snarky comments are more likely to throw the thread off of the rails. Let’s try to keep this one on the rails, please.
Meanwhile the government has spent the last couple of decades actively surveilling mosques, and Americans have been murdered because they’re Muslim.
The question isn’t whether there’s any anti-Catholic violence at all in the US. The question is whether historical/social context makes them exactly the same. It doesn’t.
