freedom and reason

After announcing that she converted to Islam, and changing her name to Shuhada Davitt, Sinead O’Connor told her Twitter followers that she never wants to spend time with white people ever again: “I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “What I’m about to say is something so racist I never thought my soul could ever feel it. But truly I never wanna spend time with white people again (if that’s what non-muslims are called). Not for one moment, for any reason. They are disgusting.”

It was disappointing to read O’Connor words in light of the wonderful thing she did in 1992 calling out the Catholic Church on Saturday Night Live by condemning child abuse and ripping up a picture of the Pope. She was way ahead of the curve in condemning that global child sexual abuse ring and I was angered by how much grief she got for being brave and truthful. This courageous act in defense of children almost feels negated by an act of not merely rationalizing of a patriarchal and misogynistic ideology in Islam, but converting to it. In 2013, O’Connor said to Miley Cyrus, “Women are to be valued for so much more than their sexuality. We aren’t merely objects of desire.” Now she is a hijab-wearing Muslim.

Then there is this business of conflating religion and race. For one thing, in the West, most Muslims are white. For another, not wanting to be around non-Muslims is no more racist than not wanting to be around Muslims. Islam is a religion, a hateful and backwards ideology. Not wanting to be around Islam isn’t the same as not wanting to be around people of difference races. Indeed, not wanting to be around Muslims is analogous to not wanting to be around racists; no matter how well they are behaving, you know what they are thinking and what the world would look like if they were in charge. Let’s put it this way: a Muslim is not analogous to a race; Islam is analogous to racism. 

There is an important historical parallel here. Rational Protestants were suspicious of Catholics not because Protestants were racist, but because Catholics were papists who threatened secularism and liberalism. To be sure, there has been, as with the Islamophobia project, a successful effort to present anti-Catholic sentiment as a form of bigotry analogous to ethnic or race bias, typically called “nativism,” a charge Catholics have used to secure powerful positions in the nation-state apparatus (they now control the Supreme Court, for example), but this conflation is entirely fallacious. Opposition to Catholic immigration was out of concern for preserving the superior values of the republic’s founding, not out of something analogous to racial hatred.

Likewise, later opposition to southern and eastern European immigration was about the impact of boatloads of low skilled, uneducated workers pouring into American cities and only peripherally about worries that could be described as ethicist or racism. There were eugenicists who made fine distinctions about sub-populations, but that wasn’t the masses. These groups were considered white. A myth has grown up about that, but the truth was that the conflict was over nationality not race—about different languages, traditions, etc. Moreover, the American working class was opposed to the importation of cheap labor to undermine wages, disorganize politics, and destabilize the republic. Once immigration was restricted, the country enjoyed a cultural homogenization that led to great victories in civil, human, political, and social rights.

Sinead O’Connor’s babble is emblematic of the anti-proletarian dreck of identity politics. Whiteness studies is an ideological hammer elites use to pound down working class politics and this is the rot that has colonized O’Connor’s worldview. It opens up an avenue for anti-secular and illiberal Islam to present itself as antiracist and opposition to it as racism. Muslims were quick to condemn O’Connor’s tweet, to frame it as a stumble, because O’Connor’s naïveté revealed the truth of the project to bring westerners to Islam—to drive a wedge between working people and secular government. This is what explains the Islamophilia of O’Connor and many other  is about. And, sure, she may be damaged, but I know a lot of women who sound like her. I don’t assume they’re all damaged.

As Variety points out: “Mortensen spoke about cyclical and generational use of hate speech…. He used the N-word specifically as an example of speech that’s no longer common in conversation.” It was on a panel discussing interracial progress surrounding his work in a movie about slavery, Green Book, that Mortensen used the word. “I have no right to even imagine the hurt that is caused by hearing that word in any context,” Mortensen’s apology read, “especially from a white man.”

He should not have apologized, nor should anybody have pressured him to. He did not use the word in a derogatory or directed way. He has nothing to apologize for. The cultural intimidation that is compelling people to self-censor when it comes to frank discussion about the history of race relations has reached alarming levels. This is the same force pushing Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird and Mark Twin’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn off the shelves of school libraries and excessively beeping out words in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. 

Only a few years ago this word could be used the way Mortensen used it (and many other ways). What changed? The character of the civil right struggle. The struggle has shifted away from fighting racism to advancing a racial economy of identity, in which the common project to dismantle oppressive structures and systems has given group to work that reifies racial categories as essential types with exclusive entitlements (typically excluding whites on the basis of a rhetoric of power). Blacks are “taking that word back,” Ice Cube told Bill Marr on his long-running HBO show Real Time after Marr use the word in playful conversation.

In the era of identity politics, a lot of energy is expended in manufacturing sacral words that only members identified with some groups can use. Self-appointed leaders—typically academicians and celebrities—determine the boundaries and usages. It’s a form of social control—in this case,  control based on skin color designation—by claiming racially and ethnically exclusive entitlement to words and shaming those from other groups who use those words in unapproved ways. Or at all, as we see in the Mortensen and Marr cases. White people are given permission to say “the N-word,” but not “nigger,” infantilizing those designated as white, a sort of payback for historic paternalism?

Where it is not about controlling people through language, it’s a problem of the accuser not grasping the difference between using a word as a slur intended to hurt a person’s feelings and using a word in a discussion about words. (We saw this in reflections of discussions in the Asian community about “yellow fever.” Whites commenting on the discussion were told that under no circumstance were they to use that term.)

This racial economy has progressed so far that it is problematic to even discuss what’s going on here—we’re not allowed to bracket for the sake of discussion. There are layers to analytical disempowerment. But racially-selective political correctness is (to a large extent probably unconsciously, I believe) a strategy to limit participation of some people in conversations about the cultural and social reality of which they are also a part (but for which they are not responsible merely) on the basis of their skin color in order to flip power rather than achieve equality. What is more, it’s a way of recruiting white people, in the absence of racist motive/action, in the project to affirm the claim that all white people are racist by default. This is why it was so important for Mortensen’s statement to read: “especially from a white man.” That confession is ritual truth is as true today as it was in medieval  times—and just as religious-like—and so Mortensen participates in the act of admitting and thereby assigning collective guilt.

The authors of this project are moral entrepreneurs within a demographic who presume to speak for all other members of that demographic, thus assigning to themselves exclusive intragroup permission to wield linguistic power in particular ways. It’s not unlike the Muslims who think they can forbid the publishing of depictions of Muhammad, forcing their aniconism on everybody else. Are they really the authorities here? To be sure, if they can bring consequences, then there’s power present. But is it legitimate power? No. It is illiberal and censorious.

Some will object that there is no law that can punish Mortensen for what he said and so my objection is overblown. Mortensen is just a sensitive and charitable guy who stepped up to be an ally. But informal social control can be as powerful as formal control, especially when careers can be made to suffer (Roseanne Barr losing the TV show she created for a Twitter comment is a case in point). It forced Mortensen to perform a rational calculation: How much will asserting my human right to think out loud cost me in the long run? Knowing the knee-jerk forces arrayed against free thought in contemporary western society, Mortensen did what a lot many celebrities do: beg forgiveness. And there is law in Europe that can bring a person before a court for using words—yes, the return of blasphemy to the realm of enlightenment—and given the flagging support for free speech in the US, as well as growing proprietary control over everything under capitalism, one wonders how long before blasphemy laws come here? 

I don’t need to be told that words are offensive to people. But there is a massive difference between using a slur intended to hurt a person’s feelings and using a word during a discussion about the history and uses of words—in a conversation about interracial progress. Indeed, being told that we cannot use that word in that context is indicative of how ineffectual identity politics has been in overcoming racism (if that’s even its goal). Instead, it has produced a generation of people who can’t tolerate adult conversation.

Last night, Facebook censored a work of art I shared on the social media site in the context of a political argument. I may be leaving Facebook on account of this; it is bad enough that I allow the platform to use my data for profit, but censoring political speech is very troubling for a service that functions more like a public utility than a private corporation. I am in the process of curating my profile. It will be difficult to leave, if I decide to, given the importance of Facebook as a virtual town square, and the fact that nearly everybody with whom I would care to interact is on it. Moreover, I am administrator to several pages and groups of importance and popularity. However, my personal experience with censorship is relevant to our ongoing struggle against censorship.

Here are the circumstances: I shared Al Brandtner’s “Patriot Act” in an attempt to defend political art. When I first saw Brandtner’s piece, it struck me as a visual manifestation of the dilemma conjured by horror writer Stephen King in The Dead Zone, where the main character, Johnny Smith, clairvoyant with the power of precognition by accident, shakes the hand of Greg Stillson, a local politician with an impulse problem and a penchant for violence and treachery, and sees an awful future wherein Stillson, now president, launches global thermonuclear war. The central question becomes: if you could go back in time and kill Hitler and save lives, would you? Smith answers yes and plots to assassinate Stillson. I won’t spoil the ending of the story; the premise should suffice to convey the connection I am making here and the point of the Brandtner’s piece. 

Ironically, it was the other side in the Facebook argument (I am leaving all the participants unnamed, as it is the principle I am interested in here, not the particulars) who first shared a controversial image, that of comedian Kathy Griffin with a mock-up of Trump’s severed head. Griffin was aggressively assailed by conservatives for her performance piece and, in response, she lost work. Under siege, she made a tearful apology, which she later retracted when she saw, as many of us did, the way she was being used by the forces of reaction to silence dissent on the left. The person sharing the image in the Facebook argument compared her piece to the work of ISIS, the Muslim terrorist organization known for the dramatic staging of beheadings as a threat to the West. As if Griffin represented a threat to Donald Trump and his family… 

The Griffin image flew on Facebook no problem, although the point of why the image was used was lost on the room, except for what appeared to be three brothers, some or all of whom were marines. A band of brothers sort of affair it seemed. Not that I had to go to any lengths to find out their military status (or cared to); rightwing marine types let you know upfront they’re marines because they believe it makes their arguments right and true however wrong or irrelevant are their arguments. At any rate, they knew what was going on. One of the brothers claimed to have shared an image depicting a horrible image allegedly threatening to the other side that was censored because, while Facebook allows the horrific Griffin image to appear, any image where an Obama or Clinton is the graphic target of heinous political attack is censored. Implication: Facebook, like the rest of the corporate media, has a liberal bias.

Yet Facebook censored my Brandtner contribution almost immediately and kicked me off the platform. It made for a fine point about how Facebook works to defend the establishment regardless of party (the Bush family is well liked by establishment power); there is no double standard. However, without the audience knowing what the image was, and some among them unable to piece together what should have been obvious in the unfolding context, I was left to explain it (I was still cleaning that up this morning). That is, after I was allowed to return to Facebook. I first had to verify my account. Then I was subjected to a lecture from the social media platform about “community standards.” Maybe I just didn’t know the rules, they charitably excused my first offense. Then they wanted me to tell them how much I enjoyed the experience of being censored and ejected. So I did. 

Some background: Brandtner’s work is from the 2005 exhibit “Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin.” It features mock stamps designed by several dozen artists addressing such issues as the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal, racism, and the Iraq War (all contemporary issues). Back in 2005, the exhibit was on a college tour and the Secret Service (alerted by a patriotic citizen) started harassing artists and venues. They even got to the chancellor of my institution, Bruce Shepard, and persuaded him to censor the piece in question when it came to the Lawton Gallery. His pathetic compromise to civil libertarians was to allow the book version collection to be on display in a corner of the exhibition. I was part of the protest against this act of censorship. The protest included a panel at the exhibit in which one of our art professors openly wept while speaking about the assault on free speech and expression censorship represents. I was deeply moved by this expression of love for freedom.

(The protest was personally difficult for me because it came not long after a lengthy period of harassment to which I was subjected by right-wing goons over my opposition to the Iraq War. The campaign was a clear attempt to deny me tenure by smearing me as un-American. Chancellor Shepard piled on and it wasn’t until the faculty rallied around me that I had hope I would pull through it with my career intact. But this is another story that perhaps I will tell one day.)

The 2005 episode portended a troubling and renewed tendency in America to censor political speech and expression, building on the political correctness movement that had emerged the previous decade. My first academic publication was a book review of John K. Wilson’s The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education, published in Nature, Society, and Thought, in 1996. In that work, Wilson’s documents the aggressive suppression of speech and expression critical of rightwing politics and ideology. Since then, political correctness has spread to cover the left and the right, suppressing speech critical of identity politics. The movement represents the return of the norms of a value-free education and an alleged necessity for political centrism, with those engaged in critical and politically conscious speech on either side of the spectrum forced to the margins, the effect of which is to legitimize establishment politics (which explains why the campaigns of the recent midterm elections had so little to say about the fact and the costs of perpetual war).

Facebook reflects this trend, cowing to the censors for fear of being regulated, bringing on board the Atlantic Council to ferret out objectionable political opinion and expression. I recently wrote about this for Project Censored: “Defending the Digital Commons.” The political censorship is not really a left-right thing, but runs in favor of establishment politics. That this happened to me when I used the very image of the 2005 controversy, with all that history and emotion, plus the chest thumping of marines—it all combined to really piss me off.  

There are few things I loathe more than censorship and jingoistic reflex. Last night was like spending time with Juan “Johnny” Rico and Mobile Infantry gang in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. One of the brothers actually said to me, “You didn’t have to tell us you didn’t serve.” You know: You’re not a citizen ’cause you never suited up. I’m just a civilian. Virtual spaces can feel quite real. For the record, patriots of secular republicanism defend freedom. And most of them don’t wear uniforms.

Many cultures around the world are patriarchal. In these cultures, women suffer sexist oppression. If multiculturalism represents the demand to accept, even promote multiple cultural traditions within a single jurisdiction, then enshrining multiculturalism in law and policy will almost always in some way limit the freedom of women (and others). In this way, multiculturalism runs counter to the humanist values of democracy, individual liberty, and personal sovereignty.

It is one thing to appreciate the food, music, art, and literature of other cultures. Indeed, life in a cultural plural society through which different tradition streams flow is highly desirable. Diversity can enrich our collective experiences. But freedom and democracy cannot thrive in a society segmented by religion and ethnicity; when the state permits cultural traditions to determine law and policy, then the state is sacrificing the individual on the altar of multiculturalism. This is unacceptable in a free society based on human rights and personal sovereignty.

Ted Rall, a fine cartoonist, and usually a pretty perceptive guy, can’t understand why immigration is the most important issue for Republican voters. Why not the economy? he wondered in a recent Facebook post. Here’s what Rall doesn’t understand: immigration is fundamentally about economics. Rall is not alone in his ignorance of these basic facts: Most people coming to or seeking to come to the United States are not persecuted. They’re not refugees. They’re economic migrants who want to make money. And the effect of their presence in the United States is substantially economic and harmful to the working class.

There is the popular desire for immigration – the humanitarian impulse and the need to virtue signal. Then there is the profit motive. This is the fundamental motive. Like the immigrant, the capitalist seeks to make money. He invites immigrant labor to the United States because it is cheaper, cheapens the labor of non-immigrants, and politically disorganizes the laboring masses.

Long ago, Karl Marx observed, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.” It is only by developing an alternative intellectual force that labor can fight back against the design of the capitalist class. A good rule of thumb is this: if capitalists insist on it, it is probably not in labor’s interest. That may not always be true. But it’s always worth looking into. 

Those in the working class who have been convinced that immigrants are refugees fleeing group persecution are unwittingly doing the bidding of forces that aim to undermine the living standards and the political power of the working class. When progressives, such as Jeremy Scahill (as he did on a recent and otherwise quite informative Intercept podcast about Donald Trump’s authoritarianism), claim that workers who oppose immigration are not actually victims – that fascism works because it is able to convince winners that they are really losers – they are denying the fact that nonimmigrants are in fact harmed by immigration. Nonimmigrants see lower wages, compromised social services, greater relative tax burden, and residential overcrowding and neighborhood disorder. Characterizing their pain as racism and xenophobia only drives them into the arms of those who purport to feel their pain. And those are not the arms of their salvation.

That conservatives are far more likely to support corporal punishment and other forms of violent and coercive control is a fact borne out in the scholarly literature (See Ellison, Hoffman et al., Conservative Protestantism and attitudes toward corporal punishment, 1986-2014, Social Science Research, March 2017). The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey find that 80% of evangelical Christians support physical punishment. We know this to be true from experience. How many memes do we have to see from that conservative friend extolling the values of his violent upbringing? It did him good, he insists. Well, obviously it did something…

Why conservatives are more likely to beat their children is also well understood: coercive control and interpersonal violence issues from the hierarchical and authoritarian worldview that underpins conservative thought and practice. Erich Fromm, in his landmark 1941 work Escape from Freedom, identifies authoritarianism, conformity, and destructiveness as traits emerging from Protestantism, an ideology that calls on people to constantly prove their value and worth to God through disciplined labor. Fromm’s essay “The Authoritarian Personality,” published in Deutsche Universitätszeitung, Band 12 (Nr. 9, 1957), identifies a type of person who is unable to endure freedom and thus seeks control over others. Because of this person’s belief in submission to authority, he himself submits to authority. In 1950, Theodor Adorno and associates operationalized the authoritarian personality in The Authoritarian Personality. The authoritarian loathes intellectual and artistic pursuits, instead focusing on domestic virtue and practical matters; homosexuality is seen as deviant and worthy of suppression; human nature is violence-prone and thus necessarily coercively controlled; masculinity is properly expressed without showing any signs of weakness, which means women are weak and emotional; insults to honor should never go unpunished. These are also traits of conservatism. 

Since ideology motivates and shapes action, attitude and belief have consequences; they explain behavior. The research is unambiguous on this point: routine physical punishment damages children. After reviewing decades of research, Gershoff published the Report on Physical Punishment in the United States: What Research Tells Us About Its Effects on Children, published in 2008, calling on parents and caregivers to avoid physical punishment and calls for the banning of physical discipline in all US schools (something European countries have done). The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and numerous other professional associations have endorsed the report.

In family relations, conservatism instinctively appeals to the principle of pater familias, or “father of the family,” which rests on patria postestas, or intrinsic “father power,” a system of beliefs that (to their mind) legitimates physical control over those believed to be under the command of the dominus (or master). Conservatives seek obedience and see others as objects on which to manifest their control fantasies and take out their frustrations. This principle extends not only to animals under their control, but to workers; before workplace rules forbade the beating of workers, businessmen used physical violence to extract from workers submission and surplus value. 

This same attitude makes conservatives more likely to despise and discriminate those they perceive as different from themselves. Conservatives have little tolerance for beliefs and practices they do not understand or share, and they are unwilling to tolerate deviation—what they define as disobedience—from what they assert is correct behavior. Deep down, many conservatives they could beat every “deviant” in the same way they beats their own children. When they demand respect, they do so not as a human being, but as an authority figure.

This set of attitudes and beliefs is the source of the contradiction apparent in the rhetoric opposing big government yet obsessed with police and prisons and the military state apparatus. The conservative woman crosses the airport concourse to thank a uniformed solider for his sacrifice because his image arouses in her the authoritarian desire. She also apologizes for the misogynistic locker room talk of the men in her life. Conservatives hate government programs that assist and nurture those in need, those whom they view as inferior and immoral. They love government action that excludes, controls, and punishes. They excuse bullying, police brutality, and war crimes. They seek to control the womb.

The obsession with authority and conformity is what lies at the core of conservative family values. It legitimates physical violence in the family, coded as discipline. But it legitimizes much more than that. The authoritarian impulse sets up conservatives to be fellow travelers to fascistic movements. We all know this to be true, as well.

Note: Support for physical punishment is also very high among African Americans—higher even than among evangelical Christians. Studies show that that African American child rearing practices tend to favor authoritarian and disciplinarian approaches. Moreover, the prevalence of child abuse and maltreatment are higher in this demographic. The African American demographic is disproportionately associated with violence crime—aggravated assault, robbery, and homicide, particularly among young male. Domestic violence is also greater among blacks, with violence resulting from death a particular problem. Poverty associated with inequality is a strong predictor of physical coercion and violence. Given the overrepresentation of blacks among the poor, it is likely that inequality is one of the more powerful predictors of these phenomena. However, it is also true that African Americans are strongly Protestant. I will revisit this issue in a later essay, but it will suffice to say that the link between violence against children is likely one of the main reason for much higher rates of violence among black Americans. Why blacks do not lean politically authoritarian is because of the disadvantaged social location they find themselves in and the need of a strong social welfare system, which is supported by liberal Democrats.

The US population as of October 23, 2018 is 328,863,150 persons. This is probably not an exact number, but it’s close enough. Based on the percentage of adults in 2014, a figure I assume has not changed that much, there are 256,513,257 adults in the US. For the week ending October 28, 2018, the Gallup survey Trump’s weekly job approval found that 40% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing. The tracking polls is based on interviews of approximately 1,500 national adults (±3% error margin). Extrapolating from this poll, this means that 102,605,303 adults in the United States approve of Trump’s job performance as president. That’s a lot of people. 

Going after Trump with anger and ridicule, however cathartic one finds such activities (I confess to having a go at him quite a bit), is not going to fix the problem of more than 100 million Americans who, in some sense, want a president like Trump—especially a president who would do the things Donald Trump does. Indeed, I suspect that there well more than 100 million Americans who would support a politician pushing Trump’s agenda who wasn’t himself Donald Trump.

A recent poll finds that 6 percent of US adults describe their politics as “far right,” which translates to approximately 15,390,795 adults. That’s not a small number of hardcore nationalists who spill racist and xenophobic ideas into Trump’s base, which are then taken up by popular activists and mainstreamed. Many million more are sympathetic to far right ideas even if they don’t explicitly identify with them in polls.

Because rightwing sentiment is a mass phenomenon and thus not easily marginalized, careful thought needs to be put into the images and messages projected from the side that seeks to defends the values of a free, open, and democratic society—that is, the values of secularism, liberalism, humanism, and feminism.

It will not do to counter Islamophobia with Islamophilia. There are good reasons to fear the Islamization of the West, the spread of an ideology that weakens the values that support the traditions of secularism, feminism, homosexual rights, and myriad of other things that are important to a free people. When leftwingers show up at airports and cheer arriving Muslims or don the hijab out of “solidarity” with Muslim women or hypocritically elevate individuals like Linda Sarsour, they alienate working Americas who are concerned about the future of the West, not out of racism, but out of rational devotion to western culture.

The notion of “Islamophobia” is very troubling to people who know that criticism of their religion would never be characterized as something like “racism” with a term like “Christophobia.” As if defense of western values is “crazy” in the first place. It will not do to counter nativism, which is a very real problem, with rhetoric suggesting open borders.

Denying support for open borders while decrying every move to control immigration as “nativist,” “racist,” and “xenophobic” looks a lot like giving the game away. There are good reasons to support immigration rules and controls that have nothing to do with nativism, racism, and xenophobia. It will not do to reduce all nationalism to ethnic nationalism and frame patriotism as “chauvinism” and “bigotry.” The foundation of western society is civic nationalism and republican forms of government that operate in the context of a nation-state.

The reasons so many US adults approve of Trump’s job performance are many, but certainly a common piece is the frustration working class Americans feel with their falling living standard and the deteriorating social situation. Stagnant wages, shrinking benefits, disappearing retirement, overcrowded housing conditions, neighborhood disorganization—all of these are felt most acutely by working Americas.

Their frustration is exacerbated by what feels like a constant attack on American culture, its values depicted as racist, sexist, and xenophobic. White men especially are portrayed as the source of the world’s problems. For example, the left counterposes to the very real problem of Islamic terrorism the alleged problem of white male violence—not ultranationist or racist violence, which is the problem, but white violence, as if demographic categories express political and religious fanaticism.

Instead of a politics that speaks to their concerns, working class Americans see immigrants and corporate human resource strategies of diversity pushing them out of work; they see everywhere the politics of identity,  multiculturalism, and political correctness. They see their concerns for the preservation of their values and their culture depicted as racist, nativist, and xenophobic. They don’t feel at home in their own country (polls show that this is the experience of many native-born Europeans). They don’t feel that the institutions that ask for their support represent their interests. So when somebody like Trump comes alone, they have a vehicle through which to express their frustration. Trump is their catharsis. 

Until the left returns to defending and advancing the interests of the working class, I fear ultranationalism will continue to gain ground. We see the rise of rightwing politics not only in the United States, but throughout the West. The left would therefore do well by the working masses—who come in all races and religions—to abandon identity politics and return to class politics.

Class is the material reality we share independent of all social constructions. The left must cease reifying the categories that divide the working class, that fractures socialist consciousness, and forge a politics that brings working class Americans together around the two things they share: their common humanity and their exploitation at the hands of the capitalist class and its functionaries.

While criticism of people’s race or sex is likely out of order, criticism of ideologies and proponents of those ideologies is not only fair game but very often necessary to make social progress.

Religion is an ideology. Religion is not analogous to race or sex. While one can change their race and sex, it is impossible to be raceless and sexless in a racist patriarchy. However, one can be religionless (atheist) and this is thanks to the western value of secularism, which has provided the opportunity for individuals to be emancipated from religion. The United States is the paradigm of progress in this area, actually forming as its basis a godless constitution that explicitly walls off government from religious rule. It is not time to take this for granted. We have to step up to the challenge secularism is facing from the parties of God and their apologists.

I watched Life of Brian last night. It is one of the most important films ever made. What makes it so important is that shows how absolutely absurd religious belief is. While watching it it occurred to me that an attempt to make a similar movie about the absurdity of Islam would likely be met with hate crime charges (as well as vigilante violence). As we have seen this past week, a European court upheld the conviction of a woman for talking about Muhammad’s sex life (to put it charitably).

That it is okay to mock Christianity but not Islam is an obvious double standard – and not one that I suspect is without ulterior motive. One of the ways Christians Christianized societies was to forbid criticism of Jehovah, Jesus, and the faith. It took use hundreds of years—and we’re still fighting—to get out from under that disaster. However, we are seeing the project of Islamization take a similar trajectory, with western states, nominally Christian, bizarrely taking the lead in protecting Islam from criticism and satire, and in so doing thwarting the emancipation of women, homosexuals, and free thinkers from this irrational system of regressive ideas.

Irreligious criticism and satire is neither racist nor bigoted. Stop characterizing anti-Islamic criticism as such. You are no friend of freedom and reason when you do.

It’s a good moment to remind people that while criticism of people’s race or sex is likely out of order (Rachel Dolezal notwithstanding), criticism of ideologies and proponents of those ideologies is not only fair game but very often necessary for social progress.

Religion is an ideology. Religion is not analogous to race or sex. One cannot be raceless or sexless. However, one can be religionless (atheist), and this is thanks to the western value of secularism, which has provided the opportunity for individuals to be emancipated from religion.

The United States is the zenith of progress in this area (at least ideally), having actually formed as its basis a godless constitution that explicitly walls off government from religious rule.

It is not time to take this for granted. We have to step up to the challenge secularism is facing from the parties of God and their apologists.

The family watched Monty Python’s The Life of Brian last night. It’s one of the most important films ever made. What makes it so important is that shows how absolutely absurd religious belief is.

Just a bit of the way in, it occurred to me that an attempt to make a similar movie about the absurdity of Islam would likely be met with hate crime charges—perhaps even vigilante violence. As we have seen this past week, a European court upheld the conviction of a woman for talking about Muhammad’s sex life (to put it charitably).

That is is okay to mock Christianity but not Islam is an obvious double standard, and not one that I suspect is without ulterior motive. One of the ways Christians Christianized societies was to forbid criticism of Jehovah, Jesus, and the faith. It took us centuries—and we’re still struggling—to get out from under that oppression.

We are seeing the project of Islamization take a similar trajectory, with western states, nominally Christian, unreflectively taking the lead in protecting Islam from criticism and satire, and in so doing thwarting the emancipation of women, homosexuals, and free thinkers from this irrational system of regressive ideas.

Irreligious criticism and satire is neither racist nor bigoted. Stop characterizing anti-Islamic criticism as such. You’re no friend of freedom and reason when you do.

I just returned from the Mid-South Sociological Association meetings, held this year in Birmingham, Alabama, where I presented on the Nordic model of corrections (“Approaching the Rehabilitative Ideal: The Structure of Crime Control in Sweden and Norway”). Before my session, there was a plenary session on the role of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in advancing civil rights in the south. Heidi Birch, Intelligence Project Director, was the speaker. She focused on hate groups and the methods the SPLC uses to shut down hate speech. SPLC sues hate groups hoping to put them out of business. They have succeeded in obtaining through legal action the assets of hate groups and then distributing the proceeds to the victims. Because of the emergence of the Internet and social media, they have shifted their attention to shrinking the electronic footprint of hate groups and limiting online hate speech.

An attendee rose to challenge Birch on the SPLC’s inclusion of black nationalists groups in the listing of hate groups. She did not understand why, given the power dynamic, black nationalism should be a subject of SPLC work. Birch said she was sympathetic to the woman’s complaint, and agreed about the power dynamic, but, since black nationalist groups advocate racial separatism, antisemitism, and anti-white bigotry, the SPLC has to be consistent. However, the appeal to power in the attendee’s objection is illustrative of the problem of postmodern thinking in sociology, where the truth of hate, prejudice, and discrimination are not determined by form and content but on identity. The implication is that race prejudice and discrimination and ethnic and other hatreds are entirely on the majority; a black person advocating anti-white sentiment is not engaged in hate speech because a black person is a member of a minority group. The postmodern reduction of truth to identity and power harms sociology’s legitimacy. It runs counter to sociology’s claims to be both scientific and humanist. 

I appreciate the consistency in the case of black nationalism, however the SPLC’s work is deeply problematic. The tactic of robbing people of their First Amendment right by depriving them forums in which to share their ideas runs counter to Enlightenment values of maintaining a free and open society where the dialectic is most rational form of persuasion. While I agree that the SPLC accurately identifies some hate groups, leaders, and speech, they are wrong about others, and their opposition to First Amendment protections of the speech they do not agree with means that they seek to censor ideas that are not only not hate speech, but that are necessary for the progress of humanity. They seek to use authoritarian means to impose their worldview on the rest of us. This is quite unbecoming to an organization that claims to fight authoritarianism.

One sees this very obviously in their practice of labeling criticism of Islam—including even Muslims and ex-Muslims—”anti-Muslim extremism.” As the Abrahamic traditions are responsible for centuries of pain and suffering, and as Islam, especially as currently practiced throughout the world, limits and oppresses women, gays, and free thinkers, critics of Islam and religion are desperately needed for the advancement of human rights. Such voices of freedom and reason as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz should be supported, not smeared, by organizations claiming to represent the struggle against hateful and divisive ideologies. (The SPLC finally relented and removed Ali and Nawaz from the list, but it continues to smear critics of Islam as extremists.)

Harassing people with legal action for their speech and misrepresenting those who put their lives on the line for human dignity and freedom as engaging in extremism undermines the legitimacy of the SPLC as an organization that claims to speak for the victims of oppressive and irrational ideas and actions. If groups like the SPLC were consistent, they would join the secular humanists engaged in irreligious criticism and properly identify extremism.