It is unwise of him to assume I am naive to imagine that the cops in Kansas will enforce hate speech prohibition. I am writing by analogy with laws against racial hatred in a country where the police are starting to admit at the highest level that they are racist. Their record of investigating racist murders is very poor and even suggests collusion with covering up justice. In marxist terms the state still contains bodies of armed men which repress others (most importantly the working class).
But what Sean is effectively describing here are direct actions against the right to preach homophobia. What else is throwing missiles at a speaker? It is analogous therefore to campaigns for "No Platforms for Fascists".
Sean has described the economic and social conditions in Kansas which make it clear it is not going to be one of the more advanced sectors of the US on this question. The question is still valid on a national level though. And in an increasingly multi-ethnic and diverse world it is not acceptable even to capitalists, let alone working class democrats that people should be lynched for their sex preference. Therefore this democratic demand is progressive and quite attainable.
To be concrete when a businessman (person?) visits another from another country, the person from the other country has little knowledge of where Wyoming or Kansas is. The headlines have already gone round the world: the USA is a place that can't stop people being crucified (literally) for their sexuality.
Setting a normative standard by law is useful even if the repressive arm of the state is riddled with hypocrisy about implementing it.
Seth's question: "What's wrong with making a fetish out of rights?"
Because good brave progressive people get muddled between strategy and tactics if they do not get this right.
Marxists attach a lot of importance to the bourgeois revolution, to bourgeois democracy and to bourgeois democratic rights. But they do not absolutise them, which is what the bourgeoisie does.
It is impossible for any left winger to avoid the ideological onslaught in a bourgeois country. The USA is the land of the free. The constitution (highly progressive at the time, let me as an Englishman, repeat) is supposed to enshrine eternal values. They are supposed to set the standard for the world. For example on marxism-psych which I moderate, people have just circulated the International Declaration of Human Rights. It is a progressive bourgeois democratic document that defends the private ownership of the means of production, as an individual right.
The bourgeois concept of individual rights is the counterpart to the atomised nature of the commodity. The idealised fiction is that we are all equal and isolated and come with inherent rights attached to us as individuals. This mystifies relationships that are in reality highly dependent on social context.
Therefore we should fight for bourgeois democratic rights when they are progressive in a particular context, but we should contest if necessary with friends as well as enemies the idea that the are absolutes. If we accept that they are absolutes then Phelps has the individual right to express his views that he does not like gay practices and they corrupt and degrade. Therefore the student who throws a cabbage at him is guilty of violating his civil rights.
To take another example that has instructively flared up on this list, Pinochet. A progressive campaigner from an organisation called Physicians for Human Rights wrote last week to the Guardian (London) expressing reservations that Pinochet had been arrested while undergoing medical treatment. I know this author in the past tried to campaign progressively against apartheid, eg in connection with the doctors who connived in the death of Steve Biko. But his letter raised a real problem. If Castro came to London for medical treatment could he be arrested? I would prefer not.
Marx points out that between competing rights there is no way of resolving the matter except (ultimately) force. I and many others look at the context, remember the tortures, that Pinochet presided over, even if he did not directly know all the details. One clever one involved the injection into the bladder of medicines used against cancer, which caused intense irritation, the urge frequently to pass water, in due course fibrosis, and shrinking of the bladder, so that the person would have to pass urine repeatedly for the rest of their life. I remember this when I think of Pinochet lying with back pain, in a hospital bed not far from here, and I am prepared to say we should not abolutise his right to avoidsjustice for his bigger crimes because he himself is currently undergoing medical treatment.
Back in terms of gay bashing, even if Sean or Joseph do not themselves regard the right of freedom of speech to be an absolute sacred right that stands for eternity above all societies and all conditions, if they are campaigning against homophobia they will meet others who do. These ideological contradictions need to be talked out non-antagonistically to help build a united front, which may not have its vanguard in Kansas but will be helped by support from Kansas to make the promotion of homophobia illegal on a national level.
It is quite possible.
It is a valuable reform.
And if pursued with some marxist insight it will help shift the balance of power, by helping to unite the great majority of the people about the right way to handle this contradiction, and avoid people being fragmented and divided by periodic crimes perpetrated one on the other. If that allows US business persons to conduct their business with slightly less embarrassment in the world capitalist market, and in that sense makes capitalism more stable, I would argue that stability is temporary and will be challenged again.
Particularly by those who do not absolutise individual bourgeois democratic rights, escpecially the right to private ownership of the means of production, even while they join with others in campaigning for those bourgeois democratic rights that in the concrete context, and the overall strategic picture are at the time progressive.
It is just a question of approaching bourgeois democratic rights dialectically and not absolutely.
Chris Burford
London.
At 06:32 PM 10/21/98 -0500, you wrote:
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>I'm sure Joseph Noonan (no relation) can speak for himself. But i want to
>jump in and challenge Chris Burford's support for laws banning hate speech
>on my own.
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>Burford naively expects the cops in Kansas to enforce hate speech
>prohibition when it is those same cops that frequently bust gays, but
>rarely straights, for sex in public, sodomy or oral sex (which are still
>illegal here). If the actions that make queers queer are still prohibited
>by the state how can Burford expect that same state to defend what it
>views as criminal elements in the first place?
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>Here at Kansas State University, 40 miles from Phelps church in Topeka,
>people have fought Phelps by shouting him down, ridiculing him, hacking
>Ben Phelps web-page (a one-time student here), throwing water balloons and
>vegetables and physical assualt. In Topeka itself the Westborough baptist
>church has on occasion been pelted with buckshot.
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>None of this is sufficient to change real power relations as Joseph Noonan
>aptly put it. Kansas is an deeply reactionary state where mainstream
>politics is delimited by fundamentalist christian nutters, small farmers,
>rural towns and big business conservatives. Without much larger numbers
>of people willing to take direct action Phelps will continue his noxious
>preaching. Nevertheless, the limited direct action has been relatively
>successful in humiliating and ostracizing Phelps from what passes for
>legitimate politics in these parts.
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>Sean Noonan
>seanno at ksu.edu
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