I’m sitting here trying to think of times when I have come up with a term to refer to a group of people sharing some single characteristic in order to express my admiration or respect for the entire group, or the individual representative of the group. Hippie? No, not really. I don’t think it has the historic weight of nigger, or faggot, for instance. But even when I use it (and I almost was a hippie) I mean it as a familiar, but mildly insulting observation on the lack of rigor in someone’s application of peace and love as a life style.
When I want to express approbation for someone, I don’t have to include them in a group. I just tell them I admire them for the thing they did, or the life they have led. The only time I need to create a label for them (and include them in a class) is when they do something, or say something, or have something I don’t like. I can denigrate a group more easily, based on popular perception of the group. I praise people one at a time. I show my contempt for them in job lots.
Fundie is an insult. It is almost universally intended to be an insult, and when it isn’t, it will be perceived as one by most of the audience, whatever the intent of the speaker might be. How much the insult hurts, how long the class of person the insult describes has existed, and how intense the hatred some feel for the class are significant matters in many respects. But an insult is an insult, and if you insult a group, you are engaged in prejudgment of each member of the group.
If you make a rule, you have to decide what behavior you are trying to limit. If the intent is to protect a specific class of persons, because the prejudices against them are less acceptable than prejudices against some other class of persons, that decision is prejudiced. It is also judgmental, and condescending toward the protected class of individuals. Protect the faggots and the fundies if you must. Or let public opinion judge those who use such labels on the basis of their own words.
Of the two, public opinion has just a tiny bit better chance of changing the attitude of those expressing their hatreds. Rules against saying them has no chance at all.
Tris
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi ~
Yep, they are both stealing. I think that it would be a safe bet that everyone would agree that they are stealing.
That’s the difference.
If you shoplift, you take something that is not yours. If you commit grand theft auto, you take something that is not yours.
There is no such consensus with the term “fundie” as it relates to hate speech. I’ve already pointed out how it could be used in different contexts with benign intentions.
Unless someone wants to point out how the lynchings and bashings that have happened to “niggers” and “faggots” have occurred to people who are being attacked as “fundie,” then I’m still waiting to see what other criteria you (or Liberal would use. Miller, just because you don’t feel offended as a gay man by the word “faggot,” it doesn’t mean that it isn’t hate speech. Your feelings are not the criteria by which to judge its harm.
Upon preview…
Really! If “leftie” is gonna be considered hate speech, then I’ll just throw my hands up in the air and give up. And “jackass?” There is a line. I was just hoping that, as reasonable people, at some point we all knew where to draw it.
Honestly, I think that explains quite a lot. You have a gift for clarity and facilitation. It is quite possibly the cultural mis-en-scene where I, and possibly some other Southern Dopers, live that supplies the baggage for the term “fundie”. There are lots of fundamentalists around here. I suppose in the views of some, it would be a sort of semi-rural fundie ghetto. My aforemention sister is a fundamentalist, for example, as is her husband. Lots of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances are too.
I can see how a Minneapolitan might go, “Fundie? What’s the big deal? There’s no fundies around here, and I’m not emotionally attached to any, so flame on!” And likely, there are some people in my area who wouldn’t care either because maybe they have their own subculture, or possibly have been offended by fundamentalists and so don’t care.
Quite so, Miller. You often say (or at least offer as a possible explanation) the same things I’m trying to say, only with about one tenth of the words. More than once I’ve told myself I need to take a lesson from your posts.
Zhen’ka, I’m sorry for misspelling your name in the instance you protested. My left hand is slowly going, and the pinky especially is a problem. Not an excuse, just a reason. You’re right that if I had read more carefully on preview, I would have seen the mistake.
I think Tris makes an interesting point. It really is hard to compliment a group without pissing off an opposing group or being condescending to the group. Hispanics are very musical people? Blacks have excellent rhythm? Indians are noble? These all paint the speaker just about the same as if he had used forbidden words.
I agree. This is why intelligence, reason, judgement and context is more important when hearing certain words than the mere fact that a certain word is used. (Hence my disdain for the PC crowd and their “forbidden” words.)
I think it would be awfully tough to make a distinction without clouding the whole issue with a layer of subjectivity, which is where Liberal and others (like me) have a problem. Based on arguments I’ve seen in this thread, determining whether the use of a particular word constitutes hate speech has largely to do with highly subjective characteristics of the usage, including:
[list=a]
[li]Whether or not the word carries some sort of “emotional baggage”[/li][li]Whether or not the word applies to every member of the group being described[/li][li]How the group being described perceives the word’s usage[/li][/list]
Here’s where I’d use the rolleyes smiley if I hadn’t given it up for Lent.
It’s sort of tough to follow rules governing “hate speech” if the very definition of the term is so subjective as to be almost meaningless. Am I to take it that “fundie” is somehow different from other, more established instances of hate speech because of any of the reasons above?
I think Liberal is the only one who has been able to provide a non-subjective common characteristic of “fundie” and the N-word (and others), and that’s that they’re all pejoratives that apply to a group. I’m not saying that another common characteristic doesn’t exist, but I can’t think of one and I haven’t seen anyone else in this thread come up with one that doesn’t call for a high degree of subjectivity. In light of that, how can one reliably claim that the N-word is hate speech and “fundie” isn’t? Does it take a certain number of fundamentalists to be offended by the term before it can be considered hate speech?
Heading out to go skeet shooting for a couple hours in a few minutes. I’ll check in with this thread a bit later, as I’m very interested in how it develops.
So, perhaps every time I find, on preview that I have referred to a group, however innocuous my label for that group is, I should rewrite my post. Instead of labeling a group, I can substitute a description of the behavior, or opinion I object to, rather than just categorizing people. That way I am actually objecting to the thing that I find objectionable.
“Homosexuals are flaunting their sexuality all the time.” Then becomes “I really don’t think sexual choices and actions are appropriate for general public display.” Women always want whatever they can’t have." Has to be rewritten as “Complaining about things that can’t be altered bothers me a lot.” “Why do blacks get to play the race card every time?” becomes “It seems to me that being the object of prejudice isn’t a justification for replying with prejudice.” “These geeks just don’t understand that technobabble doesn’t impress anyone any more.” Gets altered into “Whatever truth or information might have been exchanged was lost in the jargon.”
The point being, the label, and the denigration of any group does not convey any logical, or useful point of debate. The honest description of a behavior is objective, and can be refuted, or supported without the assumption of the applicability of the label. So, it isn’t just one label, or whether the particular label rises to the level of legally actionable hate speech that is real problem. The real problem here, in this forum is that we aren’t supposed to be recycling old group labels, we are supposed to be fighting ignorance. So, let us each resolve to avoid the simplification of group labels entirely, and deal with behaviors, and opinions themselves.
It would be effective. It would be honest. And it would be really classy.
Tris
“The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.” ~ Bertrand Russell ~
I don’t know about Minneapolis, but there are definitely fundamentalist Christians around here, or at least people with the type of faith that appears more or less in line with what I know of fundamentalism. I’m not theologically-aware enough to know which ones the true fundamentalists are and which aren’t.
I feel like you’re putting me in the uncomfortable position of defending insults here, Liberal, and I feel like you must not be reading what I’ve written. Are you? Should I stop putting time and effort into writing this? Would you at least care to explain why you don’t feel my posts are worth reading? I’ve put a lot of effort into this, and it’s really insulting for you to blow past my posts as though there’s nothing there.
Do you understand why a word that’s closely associated with violence - like “faggot”, “nigger”, “kike”, and in some cases “bitch” - is different then an insult? No one likes to be insulted, but when I refer to words like “faggot” as weapons, is it that you don’t understand what it means to be called a faggot, or that you don’t care? It’s not insulting - it’s frightening. My heart truly goes out to people who are oppressed for being Christian - or for any other religion, or ethnicity, or cultural status. But do shouts of “Hey, Fundie!” make fundamentalist Christians fear for their lives?
There’s a real, substantial difference between an insult and a word that operates as a weapon. I’m glad that some of you don’t have the luxury of understanding first-hand that difference, because I don’t think anyone should have to. But try to empathize enough to see the difference.
It has already been used as hate speech during my life time, so it is difficult for me to shake the connotations. (Remember, I said that it is a personal bug-a-boo.) I would be opposed to any rules censoring its usage. People who are Leftists aren’t ostracized as they were fifty years ago.
Notice that in my statement about the use of jackass, I added that the choice is always yours. Isn’t that a good place to draw the line when prejudice and group hatred is not involved – personal choice?
My own choices of invective are usually much worse than jackass. I don’t believe that words are “bad” or “dirty.” But when they are used to demean others, something else is going on. In this particular instance, the sender of the message (Lib) and I may share some common concerns. That’s all I was addressing.
Please don’t take this to mean that I am a reasonable person by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, obviously there’s no consensus. Hence this thread. That does not rebut the analogy.
And I don’t accept your argument about benign uses for the word fundie, laregly for the excellent reasons set out by Tris above, with the additional caveat that being able to think of hypothetically non-insulting uses for a word does not change the real-world applications of that word. I can think of benign ways to use the word “nigger,” but that doesn’t make the word any more acceptable.
I think it’s already been clearly established as “words that are used to denigrate a group of people as a fungible whole.” This is without regard to how succesfully that group has been discriminated against. If it’s wrong to denigrate homosexuals as a group, then it is equally wrong to denigrate fundamentalists as a group, even though historically fundamentalists as a group have not been the target of violence and discrimination.
This is essentially a legalistic argument, though, and I think you and Excalibre are making an emotional argument. I agree that calling a gay person “faggot” is almost certainly going to evoke a stronger negative response than calling a Christian “fundie.” On an inter-personal level, I would have far more ire and lack of respect for someone who used the former than someone who used the latter. But as a matter of board regulations or real-world law, I don’t think the emotional response of the person targetted by the slur should be taken into account when determining the legality of using a particular phrase, precisely because there is no way to objectively compare emotional responses, and because those emotional responses do not hold true across all members of any given subclass of people.
Agreed. And neither are anyone else’s.
If we all knew where to draw the line, we wouldn’t be having this debate, would we?
Starving Artist, Liberal, thanks for the kind words. It’s odd to be on the same side of a debate as both of you. I am both confused and frightened by the experience.
Okay, okay. Since it’s not a pile-up on me this time (a lot of people are helping me out here), I’ll stop and respond. It’s really not that I single you out as someone to avoid. It’s just that you [Stevie voice] Say… So… Much…[/Stevie Voice]. You enjoy getting into these copy-paste interlinear phrase-by-phrase thrust and rebut exchanges, and I enjoy that only when the topic is something philosophically interesting or when there’s reason for me to slice a post to pieces.
Yes, I do understand that some words are more hateful than others, and that some words can be downright threatening, or at least have a history of association with everything from violence to mass murder. That’s why when I was asked whether I thought nigger is to black as fundie is to Christian, I answered “No”. There’s no comparison in terms of the sheer weight that the term carries. It is not at all inconceivable that a man might follow the outcry of “Nigger!” with a knife, a fist, or a rope. On the other hand, an outcry of “Fundie!” is most likely to be followed by a snide look, a derisive finger motion, or at worst, a head rap on a playground. That makes them fundamentally different.
However…
As many people have said, context is everything. Miller really turned on a light in my head by causing me to realize that what constitutes so-called hate-speech might well be more contingent on cultural bias than I had suspected. It’s one thing to know intellectually that there are fundamentalists vaguely somewhere around you, but it’s another to know that they are family or good friends. There is not a human being on earth more loving than my sister. She gives without regard to race or sexual orientation. She believes that homosexuality is a sin, but she believes that her own sins are no better. She wouldn’t dream of using a term like faggot, and things like the Matthew Shepard tragedy make her cry. I don’t think she would be comfortable with a gay couple staying overnight at her house having sex, but then she wouldn’t be comfortable with a straight couple doing that either, unless they were married. But she wouldn’t condemn either one because she believes that her condemnation of others condemns herself. Because of my circumstance, when I hear fundie, I think of her. I cringe. She deserves no derision from anyone.
And that brings me to Straight Dope. To me, what sets this community apart is its diversity. It leans left politically, sure, but it has everything from conservative attorneys to transvestite dancers. There is no reason preemptively to drown out the alternate opinions of fundamentalists just because they have some nasty representatives anymore than there is a reason to drown out gays just because of Act Up or blacks just because of the Nation of Islam. Again, faith is not a choice for people who hold an abiding faith (as opposed to people who just go to church to socialize or politicize). Their faith is a result of their life experience. It’s not something they can discard.
Now, all that said, I would prefer that there be no hate-speech rule at all, because I believe that the members can take care of calling out anyone who uses inappropriate language. But if you can’t call my black friend, Jamie, a nigger — with or without the intent of violence — then you shouldn’t be able to call my sister a fundie, not if your intention is to lump Jamie with lazy people or my sister with judgmental people.
Besides, it’s just not smart. Fundamentalists are a powerful force to be reckoned with on a political level, and what is happening is that their judgmental leaders are being nice to them while you are being mean to them. These are human beings, and like other human beings, they are likely to respond better to “I’m on your side” than “You’re an ignorant fundie.” If gays want to effect change, then it would behoove them to out-smart the leadership. Why should a gay man care what a fundamentalist thinks is sin? If I were in that position and encountered such a person, I would just say, “I respect that you believe I’m a sinner, and even more than that, I respect your belief that only God can judge me.” Every fundamentalist I know would be so impressed that he would on his own initiative question the wisdom of the leadership when it demonizes people who talk that way. The real danger is that their leadership will influence Congress to enact legislation that oppresses gays, and in fact, that is happening. But it is happening, at least in part, because the rank-and-file fundamentalists see very little to contradict the caricatures that their leaders have painted of gays as hateful and demonic when they are routinely blasted as non-thinking Neanderthals who aren’t worth so much as a kind word.
Anyway, I honestly don’t think we disagree at a… pardon me… fundamental level about all this. Neither one of us wants to hurt people just to hurt people. It’s just that each of us wants to press upon the other the nuance of our particular point. I really do understand yours, and I hope that now you understand mine. Thanks for listening.
It’s funny how these things work out sometimes. I’ve found myself siding with atheists against theists on, believe it or not, matters of theology. I think we’re all making good points here, and somewhere in all of it is something that we all can live with. I hope we find it. I found a lot of wisdom in Tris’s how-to-replace examples. I intend to do my best to use them no matter what other people here decide. I think it would be best for me regardless. If TVeblen, of all people, thinks I’m oblique, then I’ve done something terribly wrong.
Now that the hate speech debate is more or less settled (oh wait, this is the Pit?!?), I wanted to add something about the “Ask the Muslim” thread where as Liberal and gobear point out, the OP was treated with far greater gentleness than a Christian fundamentalist (oopps…came very close to writing fundie :D)… and I think this is also all about bias. Even if the message is the same but if it is brought in by somebody new, it is human nature to stop and pay attention. The only reason bigoted Christian fundamentalists may get attacked faster is because their beliefs/rants/fears on homosexuality are being heard everyday and have become common knowledge. When someone new comes in and says the same thing, we all want to know why she says so before we go after her
I think we can cut ourselves some slack on giving the OP a gentler treatment, at least initially.
I know this is a bit late, but this is where I disagree. I always assumed hate speech dealt with epithets that had to do with aspects that were unchangeable - race, sexual orientation, etc. To say that people are incapable of changing their faith seems absurd to me. Hell, plenty of people have changed their faiths - my own mother (as well as my dad’s ex-roommate) was an outspoken atheist who became Born Again, and one of my childhood friends was a hardcore Catholic who is now an atheist. Even I, as an avowed atheist, wouldn’t say that I could never change my faith - if I had an experience or acquired some evidence that contradicted my beliefs, it would be psychitc not to adjust them. People of color, however, cannot change their race. To say that what we believe is not a choice is disingenuous. People may claim that their experience or environment prevent them from changing their beliefs are not stating facts; they’re stating their unwillingness to accept other possibilities - in short, their own closed-mindedness. Which is not, as far as I can tell, a factor of genetics.
This doesn’t mean “fundie” couldn’t be considered hate speech, I guess; only whether religious belief is not the same as more immutable factors such as sexual orientation or race, an idea everybody else seemed to back off on before coming up with more vague ideas about regional cultural differences and so forth. Sorry, but I thought this particular argument was pretty weak.
That’s the exact point I made. To ask a man who holds a faith born of experience to change it is to ask him to be psychotic. It is an absurd demand. Races change too over time, based on experience and circumstance. We all come from Africa.
I’m not talking about asking a man (or woman) who holds a certain faith to change it - I’m saying that it is capable of being changed, unlike, say, a black person’s skin/race. I’m ignoring your weird red herring of a logical turn at the end for two reasons:
Presumably, if I call my African-American co-worker a nigger I’m talking about him specifically as he exists at that particular time (and as he personally has always existed and will continue to exist for the rest of his life, as far as his skin color/racial identification is concerned), not what the species may theoretically evolve into at some far distant point in the future; and
“We all come from Africa” doesn’t address “hate speech” (as I’ve defined it) any more than “We’re all human beings” does: sure, it’s a great message and it would be great if everybody could see things that way, but in reality they don’t, which is one reason racial epithets hurt so much.
Don’t get me wrong - I understand your point wasn’t so much about seeing a common link between all people as it was about what can or can’t be changed. But it’s an absurd argument when you’re relating evolution to religious beliefs in an argument about hate speech. My brother and I had the same experiences as far as childhood and upbringing, and he chose a belief system in direct contradiction to the one I chose. Neither of us had any choice in our biological makeup.
I don’t see what difference it makes if something can be changed anyway. The only reason I can see that it would matter is because a fundamentalist Christian (in this case, but insert just about any other religious group, depending on time and place) can give up their faith if they’re being persecuted (note that I don’t particularly think fundamentalist Christians are persecuted in this country. It’s the example at hand, however.) Are you saying that religious people shouldn’t kvetch about persecution but just change their faith? I don’t agree with this viewpoint. That’s the only sense I can make out of your distinction, though. Personally, I think people’s religious faith ought to be protected from persecution as much as any other characteristic.
When it comes to gay issues, I think the focus on whether or not it’s changeable is harmful, since I don’t think people’s sexual orientation is a valid reason to discriminate against them, whether changeable or not. Are bisexual people unworthy of protection, since they could simply pursue only straight relationships? I’m gay, but I could just remain celibate in order to avoid being persecuted for being gay. Is that fair? It certainly has been common enough, historically - and there’s still the ex-gay groups pushing that today.
I just don’t see why it makes a lick of difference whether a person’s faith is changeable or not, since it’s worthy of protection either way. We have the freedom to make a lot of choices in our society, but that freedom doesn’t mean much if persecution as a result becomes so intense as to make minority choices impossible.
