Hate speech, freedom of speech

I am a gay man, I am openly gay and I am somewhat ‘post-pride’, I just want to live my life openly and that the fact of my homosexuality is not more important than my bald head or my eyes. blue.

On Facebook I have had recurring discussions with Christians who may believe that my sexual orientation can be changed and are sure that it is a terrible sin and a fucking lifestyle. Challenging.

There are gay Christians. After all, Jesus, when preaching to eunuchs (in Jesus’ time, eunuchs were more commonly homosexual, they had not yet been castrated as the norm), Jesus did not feel that his magical powers were necessary for healing, he did not suggest that he had a sin that should no longer be done. . Flirting with Christianity, I once had a dream about Jesus, who corrected my interpretation of the terrible law of Leviticus by demanding “have you slept with a woman?” knowing that the answer is ‘none’ and therefore how could I sleep with a man as with a woman? It is possible to be gay and Christian.

But not every Christian agrees. Locally, Ithaca NY is a liberal place, and Christian churches here that are not anti-gay post visible information outside their church to claim that is the case.

Understanding that means that the Churches themselves know one thing: if they accept homosexuals and do not believe that God demands that homosexuals be something else, they must promote that fact openly and publicly or they can simply be assumed as bastions of intolerance and hatred against homosexuals.

I just completed an online academic survey, which I rated for being a person who identifies as homosexual. What did they want to know? Some questions posed raised these kinds of things:

• Would you change your gender if you could?
• Do you feel like you’d be better off dead than gay?
• Do you feel that homosexuality is a sin?
• Are you worried that others perceive you as gay?

These are not all the questions that are presented. And I hope that hardly anyone answers positively to any of those questions.

The survey has a peculiar challenge; I would imagine that anyone who really would rather be dead than gay is unlikely to participate in this survey.

I know that most of the anti-gay baggage comes from and is legitimized by religion, in America, the Christian religion. And regardless of what the survey results suggest, that baggage justifies the harassment and violence that gay people kill or takes them to suicide.

So, would you want a law like the one Canada has? Ban hate speech? In Canada, there are chapters and verses of the Christian Bible where it is illegal to speak out loud, probably just Leviticus. Ask for the death of homosexuals, I just hate reading that, right?

The recent assassination attempt on Gabrielle Gifford has led to the condemnation of heated political rhetoric. And speaking as someone who only found Sarah Palin interesting because she would actually do things like imply death threats with her metaphors and get away with it, let me suggest that an attack on hate speech could be an attack on free speech if it were imagine the solution. to be executed by law.

In the United States we handle Hate correctly, avoiding. Racist people have a very small number of people they can be racist with, the point of view alone will make you lose your job, your friends …

It is a slow process, defeating prejudices with rejection. And I understand that it is possible to defend the prohibition of hate speech to protect the victims of that speech. Whether they are children perceived as homosexual by their peers, or a congresswoman fighting for her life after being shot in the head.

But America, we choose to experiment with freedom of expression. It’s a big problem because no other nation has freedom of speech like we do. The United States has public neo-Nazi marches: they are small marches and are almost always outnumbered by counter-protesters. While the Nazis preach racist hatred and death threats against Jews and African Americans, they are protected by the civil police, their right to say what they want is a constitutional right.

It is a noble experiment, freedom of expression. When speech is forbidden, it is empowered. Any topic that you cannot talk about cannot be challenged or contested.

Freedom of expression is a right for adults, it is not for children. In other words, the culture that allows freedom of expression must be very mature because we cannot count on all speakers to be mature. The villain who tried to kill Congresswoman Gifford had been told to see a psychiatrist. He didn’t, probably because he couldn’t afford it. Arizona had just cut mental health spending in half just a month earlier.

People can point the finger at Sarah Palin for distributing posters with Democratic representatives with crosshairs painted on them, but the reality is that whether in bad taste or not, she has the right to express herself however she pleases, no one should reasonably interpret it. . that as permission to kill anyone.

But you can’t make your speech a crazy test! Crazy people are sick, so maybe the problem is a health problem. If all people with mental illness had prescriptions for drugs to help them and they didn’t have a barrier like expenses that would get in the way of getting that help. Perhaps our culture would be mature enough to have freedom of expression and not enforce legal limits on hate speech?