Book contents
4 - Speech/Hate Propaganda
A Comment on Harper v. Poway Unified School District
from Part II - Equality, Sexuality, and Expression
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The struggle to break the form is paramount. Because we are otherwise contained in forms that deny us the possibility of realizing a form (a technique) to escape the fire in which we are being consumed.
Julian Beck, The Life of the TheatreCruelty is an idea in practice.
Antonin Artaud, Collected WorksThe attempt to split bias from violence has been this society’s most enduring and fatal rationalization.
Patricia Williams, Spirit-Murdering the MessengerWithout words … not one Jew would have been gassed.
Andrea Dworkin, ScapegoatIt’s a simple message really,
these two words
fired bent
as a head hits cement,
followed by the slow awareness
of spreading pain.
They are mouthed so calmly
from a gun
loaded with only two words:“die faggot.”
Joseph Ross, Imagine the Shock (Poetic Voices Without Borders, vol. 2)
Discussion of campaigns to silence Gay voices and Gay identity, through, for example, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or through policies attempting to prevent Gay youth from organizing in schools, is fairly commonplace in the literature on Gays’ legal status. It is not difficult to see that Gays have been systematically prevented from speaking. In this chapter, I explore the underexplored and inverse problem of too much speech – specifically in the form of the cacophonous propaganda campaign to dehumanize Gays and dispirit our allies.
As with the Nazi propaganda campaign to dehumanize Jews by normalizing anti-Semitism, thus making violence against Jews easy (to which I analogize later), when Gay hating becomes the norm – is normalized through state-sponsored propaganda (called “free speech” or “free expression”) – then killing and other forms of abuse of Gays become easy. In response to the emergency of which such a system is an essential part, this chapter offers a substantive equality theory of freedom of speech. In doing so, it examines what I term “anti-identity” speech and its effects on its targets. Anti-identity speech, as a method of categorization, is broader and more appropriate than “hate speech.” Anti-identity speech does not require the use of individualized insults or epithets and can be delivered quite effectively and aggressively with a smile and a soft voice. To understand the nuance, one must think of James Dobson, not David Duke. Its targets are almost always minorities who are unpopular because of certain inescapable identifying traits. They are always traditionally marginalized and systematically disadvantaged peoples.
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- Information
- The End of Straight SupremacyRealizing Gay Liberation, pp. 111 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011