wrote:
>I
>will assume that your are in favor of making "Aids cures fags"
>placards illegal. They most assuredly are offensive, but they are
>not, nor should they be, illegal.
I find this an odd argument. This placard sounds about as acceptable as one that might say "Jews make good lampshades". It is a flagrant psychological attack that legitimises humiliating an enemy even to the point of joking about his death. It is an invitation to physical assault, and with ideas like this in circulation 1 in 500 hundred confrontations will lead to assault.
The massacre of millions of Jews is presaged a few years earlier by their public humiliation making them clean streets with toothbrushes on their knees.
The use of bourgeois laws is of course bourgeois. But Joseph Noonan seems to show a false radicalism in arguing that such provocative and offensive verbal attacks should not be made illegal. This seems to make a fetish out of bourgeois democratic rights. But the right to make physically inflammatory remarks about a minority means there is no right for that minority to be free of inflammatory taunts.
The argument that follows misses the point. I am arguing not for a law to make killing of a gay person a super crime, worse than killing of a black. This is about a law that consciously restricts the right to completely abstract equal free speech. An equal bourgeois right typically isolated from the context is unequal because people are in unequal situations. Joseph's defense of homophobic provocative language is unequal because there is no concrete situation in which heterosexual are taunted with insults and threatened with attack.
>No real power relations are changed
That is not so. A platform should be denied to homophobia as it should be to racism. I have no doubt it is denied on this list.
What is this intense radical libertarianism that regards bourgeois democratic rights as some abstract higher value, that should prevail over the concrete social situation?
Chris Burford
London.