Against the Stream

What Is a "Nuanced" Stance on Abortion Anyway?

Yesterday I posted about Tom Groome's New York Times article arguing that the Democrats need to stop being the "abortion party," and noted the two Religion Dispatches articles criticizing Groome. After the article posted, Charlie Camosy chimed in on Twitter to argue:

 

It is pro-lifers (of mutiple parties) who have nuanced policy positions. Democratic party has utter lack of nuance. https://t.co/1CvFcQz78N https://t.co/Sl6SRGLDFa

— Charlie Camosy (@CCamosy) March 30, 2017

This led me to respond that I'd never found the pro-life position particularly nuanced, and that Groome's article reinforced that opinion. To which Camosy responded:

 

@ScottPaeth 20 week ban with exceptions vs #shoutyourabortion as a social good paid for by pro-lifers. which is more nuanced?

— Charlie Camosy (@CCamosy) March 30, 2017

And then it was on. You can go read the whole exchange on Twitter, but since it's very difficult to carry on a ... well nuanced conversation 140 characters at a time, I thought it would be worth thinking at a bit more length about the subject here.

As I read Camosy's defense of the "nuance" of a 20-week ban on abortion, I kept thinking I needed Inigo Montoya to show up and chime in "You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means." And this, it seems to me, was indeed part of the problem. We both understood by the word "nuance" something very different than the other did, though I have to say that, re-reading the thread this morning, I still don't think the word means what Camosy thinks it means, and it's certainly not very nuanced to portray "Shout Your Abortion" as representative of the default position of most pro-choice folks.

First of all, it seems to me that Camosy was repeatedly misrepresenting the current Democratic party platform on the issue, and Hillary Clinton's own words on the matter. To be clear, I was defending what for me has always been the best liberal approach to the question of abortion, as encapsulated by Bill Clinton back in the 1990s, that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." Camosy, citing himself, kept referring to an LA Times article in which he asserted that the Democratic Party platform "betrayed millions of party faithful." But that article is hardly an example of nuance. It criticizes the platform for insisting on the removal of state restrictions on abortion, and insisting on it as a core element of reproductive health, while eliding all of the ... well nuance of the reason why those provisions were included in the first place: Repeated conservative attempts to throw up insurmountable roadblocks to abortion under any circumstances.

Even a passing familiarity with the ways in which Republican state legislatures have sought to do end runs around the Supreme Court rulings on abortion by, for example, requiring doctors working in abortion clinics to have residency at a local hospital, and then refusing them that residency, or creating expensive and unnecessary zoning and construction requirements for abortion clinics. These tactics have sought to create circumstances in which abortion, even if technically legal, became impossible to actually procure in some states. Ignoring those particular circumstances is not very nuanced.

But more generally, it's worth noting that the Democratic platform actually did a pretty good job of accomplishing the goal of ensuring that abortion was both safe and legal on the one hand, and rare on the other. The planks insisting on the right to access to abortion, and its importance for a general policy of reproductive health serve to ensure the first two criteria. The third is accomplished through platform language that ties the right to abortion to the right to health care generally and, most particularly to the right to have a child. Here is the particular language:

We will address the discrimination and barriers that inhibit meaningful access to reproductive health care services, including those based on gender, sexuality, race, income, disability, and other factors. We recognize that quality, affordable comprehensive health care, evidence-based sex education and a full range of family planning services help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions.

And we strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child, including by ensuring a safe and healthy pregnancy and childbirth, and by providing services during pregnancy and after the birth of a child, including adoption and social support services, as well as protections for women against pregnancy discrimination. We are committed to creating a society where children are safe and can thrive physically, emotionally, educationally, and spiritually. We recognize and support the importance of civil structures that are essential to creating this for every child.

And indeed there is ample evidence to demonstrate that, if your goal is to reduce abortions, these are the policies that you should be advocating. So when Camosy complains that the platform kept the "safe and legal" while abandoning the "rare," it seems to me at least that he didn't read the platform with sufficient ... nuance.

There is also evidence that, in terms of implementation of these policies, abortion rates decline under Democratic administrations. When I made that case to him, Camosy responded by linking to a Snopes article that he claimed labeled the assertion "False." However, a more ... nuanced ... reading of the Snopes article shows that what was false was something that I wasn't arguing, and what wasn't false was what I was claiming. The Snopes article addresses the question of whether abortions both go up during Republican administrations and decline during Democratic administrations. And, since Roe v. Wade, it is apparent that abortion rates do not in fact increase under Republican administrations, but they do decline (and decline more) under Democratic ones. This chart illustrates the point:

Charlie contended that a "Stats 101" analysis of the data would show something else, though he didn't elaborate. But while the trend line seems to either hold stead or decline only slightly during the Reagan and Bush years, it drops precipitously under both Clinton and Obama. So perhaps Charlie will get around to elaborating on his point in some other venue, but it still seems to me that the evidence does demonstrate that if your goal is to make abortion rarer, Democratic policies do the job better than Republican ones, though of course it's always worth remembering that correlation does not equal causation.

OK, so then, is a 20-week ban, as Camosy advocates, "nuanced"? Well it's certainly far more nuanced than the position taken by the Republican party, but a getting hit in the face by a brick in a gym sock would be more nuanced than anything in the Republican party these days. However, what the 20-week ban fails to account for is the situation of woman who, late in pregnancy, discovers a fatal defect in the gestating fetus, and the emotional and moral turmoil that women in that situation face. I suppose the response is that such instances are fairly rare, but then, late pregnancy abortions are rare to begin with. Camosy does of course note that the ban would come "with exceptions," but there the devil is in the details, and if the exceptions were sufficiently broad, it would basically make the ban worthless as policy anyway. A 20 week ban would almost certainly not make most abortions more rare in any respect, while increasing the suffering of families in genuinely tragic circumstances. Whether or not you think that abortion should be available in those cases, it remains the case that at the ban Camosy proposes once again fails the nuance test.

In the end, both Groome's and Camosy's complaints seem to amount to the same thing: They want the Democratic party to move closer to their position on abortion. That is of course a totally fair position for them to take. But to argue that the current Democratic Party policy isn't precisely what I said above -- to make abortion safe, legal, and rare -- suggests at a minimum a lack of charity in how the democratic position is understood and interpreted. And it certainly represents a failure of nuance.

For a Universal Basic Income

At The New Republic Jonathan Masalic makes the case for one, while also illuminating a similar proposal, that for the universal guarantee of a job. The universal employment proposal, which was suggested by Jeff Spross, would work like this:

Spross argues in the current issue of the journal Democracy, they ought to counter President Donald Trump’s rhetoric with a concrete offer to every American who wants dignity and a decent living: a federally funded job. Spross, an economics and business writer for The Week, makes a thorough case for a universal job guarantee, writing that “a job is not merely a delivery mechanism for income that can be replaced by an alternative source. It’s a fundamental way that people assert their dignity, stake their claim in society, and understand their mutual obligations to one another.” ...

Spross proposes that someone with a full-time job in the federal program would work on infrastructure and community development projects and be paid $25,000, plus full benefits. The proposal has precedent, not only in the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, but in Argentina within the past decade. With jobs of last resort paying well above the current federal minimum wage, unemployment would drop to nothing and workers higher up the income ladder would gain tremendous bargaining power. The “dignity deficit” would disappear immediately.

Masalic, by contrast, proposes a Universal Basic Income:

But because basic income is the more inclusive program—encompassing children, the disabled, and everyone else who cannot work—it promotes a kind of justice that a make-work program cannot. Moreover, in an economy that can substitute machines for human labor, a job guarantee could transform into a de facto basic income guarantee anyway. As Avent notes, the more expensive human labor is, the more appealing machine labor becomes. With a high wage floor and no slack in the labor market, it would make economic sense to automate jobs that humans currently do for low wages, like customer service, transportation, and sales. This would push even more people to take the guaranteed jobs. At some point, there might not be enough productive work to go around. Once people find themselves doing pointless make-work just to keep busy and qualify for a paycheck—in other words, once guaranteed jobs become bullshit jobs—we may as well call it art.

I've been persuaded for a long time that we need to find a workable mechanism to establish a Universal Basic Income in the United States. As Masalic notes, it would provide support for parents who want to stay home with their children, it would give workers the same kind of leverage that Spross's universal jobs program would, and it would allow those whose understanding of "work" does not correspond to the demands of post-industrial capitalist society. It could allow for a new well-spring of creative activity, from artists and musicians who are willing to live at the modest level a universal income would allow, while also allowing those who wish to strive to make more.

Here's the fundamental problem, which I think Masalic identifies well: When did we ever agree as a society that our lives should depend on our willingness to take crappy, dead-end jobs, and whittle our lives away on meaningless work? Why is it better to do that than to detach the need to survive from the need to "work" in the capitalist/acquisitive sense of the word? And, fundamentally, who benefits from the existing system? Not the lowest paid workers. Not even those in the middle class. This is a system which is set up to perpetuate itself by convincing anyone who isn't willing to take literally any job they're offered because they alternative is starvation that they are immoral, lazy bums.

The dignity of work is found finally in its meaningfulness. I'd ultimately be happy if we implemented a program like Spross's. But it ultimately needs to be a gateway to the far more radical, and far more necessary, guarantee of a basic income.

 

Complexity and Nuance in Arguments About Abortion

Two articles in today's Religion Dispatches address Tom Groome's New York Times editorial urging Democrats to back away from their strong official support for abortion rights. Groom argues, as the title of his post asserts: "To Win Again, Democrats Need to Stop Being the Abortion Party." In the editorial he writes :

If Democrats want to regain the Catholic vote, they must treat abortion as a moral issue, work for its continued reduction and articulate a more nuanced message than, “We support Roe v. Wade.”

Both Patricia Miller and Myiram Renaud take issue with Groome's (or as Miller repeatedly, and I assume unintentionally refers to him, "Broome's") argument. Both note that Democratic politicians have repeatedly over the years sought to nuance their support for abortion rights with various qualifications, perhaps the most of famous of which was Bill Clinton's affirmation that abortion should be "Safe, Legal, and Rare." As Renaud states:

But for those with ears to listen, prominent Democrats like Obama and Clinton do articulate a more nuanced message than “We support Roe v. Wade.” They treat abortion as a moral issue because, for them, it is one.

The truth of the matter is that, no matter how much nuance any pro-choice candidate puts into their position, it will be unsatisfactory to those who are inveterately anti-abortion. If the only answer to the question of what to do about abortion is "prevent it entirely" then there is no pro-choice position that has a chance of succeeding in that argument. At the same time, as Miller notes, there is no evidence that a more "nuanced" position would have won Clinton the votes of that many Catholics, and that in fact the loss she suffered among white Catholics in the Rust Belt states had little to do with her stance on abortion to begin with. What's more, if the goal is to create a winning strategy, it's virtually guaranteed that Clinton would have lost more support among pro-choice voters than she would have gained among Catholics if she had altered her fundamental support for Roe v. Wade.

That said, the Democratic position on abortion is already plenty nuanced. As Miller notes:

The Democratic Party signed on wholeheartedly to so-called common ground efforts to find ways to decrease the need for abortion and promote adoption in the mid-2000s. The “Reducing the Need for Abortions and Supporting Parents Act” was introduced in 2006 and included increased funding for family planning programs, improved insurance coverage for pregnant women, and tax incentives for adoption. It was supported by NARAL, Catholics for Choice and the Christian Coalition. It was Republicans who walked away from these efforts when they realized they could make political hay by opposing Planned Parenthood and insurance coverage for contraception.

At the same time, the allegedly "pro-life" position is belied by the utter lack of genuine support for the care of infants once they are born on behalf of conservatives, which was revealed nowhere more clearly than in the debacle of the Trump/Ryan American Health Care Act. Again, Miller notes:

Political restrictions on women’s access to abortion aren’t about protecting life or realizing the “moral complexity” of abortion. Nowhere was this more obvious than the fight over the ill-fated AHCA, which would have banned coverage for abortion, and if the “Freedom Caucus” had their way or Republicans had a shot at a clean bill, also would have stripped maternity coverage and newborn care as essential health benefits. That’s right. The “pro-life” party would have made it impossible to terminate your pregnancy and impossible to get medical coverage for that pregnancy or your newborn. That sure is some moral complexity.

There are lot of reasons Clinton lost in November. And Trump's support among evangelicals is one of them, and certainly tied to his support for abortion restrictions. But Groome's analysis, as Miller and Renaud each show, radically misplaces the role abortion politics played in the outcome, at at least as it relates to Catholics.

Why Go Niebuhr?

Last January I did a live streamed "webinar" with Tripp Fuller at Home-brewed Christianity. As always with Tripp, I had a blast, and if you missed it, you can now check it out at the link below!

Why Go Niebuhr?

Meanwhile, in other Niebuhr news, last night DePaul University hosted a showing of the new documentary about Reinhold Niebuhr, An American Conscience. The director, Martin Dobelmeier was on hand to speak about the movie, and I was on a panel with Reggie Williams from McCormick Theological Seminary. The movie great and I highly recommend you check it out. Here is the trailer.

Trailer: An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story from Jen Quintana on Vimeo.

Tying these two events together, last night after the panel discussion, Jeremy Sabella, who wrote the excellent companion book for An American Conscience, reminded me of something I said in the January podcast that I had completely forgotten about, but which clearly remains relevant as we reckon with the continuing disaster of the Trump presidency: We don't need a new Niebuhr, we need a thousand Niebuhrs!

And Then The World Fell Apart

Looking back over my blog, I realize that I've been remiss in addressing the absolute disaster that has befallen the United States in the last several months. My last post, from October, addressed the way in which the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was appropriated by a mad Trump supporter in order to justify his advocacy for a candidate who stood diametrically against everything Bonhoeffer stood for. Of course, that was written a few weeks before the election, when I had every expectation that Donald Trump would go down in ignominious flames on November 8th.

But ... here we are. As of January 20th, Donald Trump is the President of the United States. Frankly, it's taken me this long to begin fully grappling with the reality of that circumstance. Now is the time to begin using this blog to publicize the theological and ethical dimensions of this administration's policies, and I hope to begin doing that much more regularly in the months to come.

As many people have noted, the worst thing that progressives can do in the wake of Trump's victory is to huddle in a defensive crouch. We need to be organizing. We need to be out in the streets. And we need to be engaged in reflection on the moral and religious dimensions of what is, with absolutely no exaggeration intended, a national crisis. So, stay tuned to this space for more information on what will be happening in the days and weeks to come. Meanwhile, here is William Butler Yeats, who was speaking of a different authoritarian demagogue when he wrote "The Second Coming," but whose words feel quite apropos to the world we live in now.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep 

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Eric Metaxas, Your Bonhoeffer Privileges Are Revoked!

 

Bonhoeffer can't even with Eric Metaxas

 

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about Eric Metaxas's egregious misuse of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology in order to condemn liberal, pro-gay and lesbian Christians, arguing that these Christians, rather than the anti-gay conservative evangelicals that are Metaxas's gravy train, were akin to Nazis. At the time, I ended my post with these words: "So now, let us finally be done with Eric Metaxas. May I never have to hear his name or discuss his "work" ever again."

Alas, this was not to be. As Metaxas has spent the last few years capitalizing on his absolutely abysmal, morally bankrupt, and historically inaccurate biography of Bonhoeffer in order to cement his place as a conservative Christian public intellectual. It would be bad enough if he had simply written a poor biography and then moved on. But having positioned himself now as a go-to "Bonhoeffer scholar," he sees fit to invoke Bonhoeffer's legacy in the name of whatever ax he happens to be grinding at the particular moment (as in the above case of Christianity and homosexuality).

And now, it's come to this: Metaxas has now decided to thoroughly sully both his own, barely salvageable to begin with, reputation, and the legacy of a genuinely great Christian theologian and moral exemplar by arguing that Bonhoeffer's theology should lead Christians to support Donald Trump. No really. This was his argument.

In The Wall Street Journal he recently wrote the following:

The anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer also did things most Christians of his day were disgusted by. He most infamously joined a plot to kill the head of his government. He was horrified by it, but he did it nonetheless because he knew that to stay "morally pure" would allow the murder of millions to continue. Doing nothing or merely "praying" was not an option. He understood that God was merciful, and that even if his actions were wrong, God saw his heart and could forgive him. But he knew he must act. 

Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer knew it was an audience of One to whom they would ultimately answer. And He asks, "What did you do to the least of these?" 

It's a fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, the country's chance to have a Supreme Court that values the Constitution -- and the genuine liberty and self-government for which millions have died -- is gone. Not for four years, or eight, but forever. Many say Mr. Trump can't be trusted to deliver on this score, but Mrs. Clinton certainly can be trusted in the opposite direction. For our kids and grandkids, are we not obliged to take our best shot at this? Shall we sit on our hands and refuse to choose? 

If imperiously flouting the rules by having a private server endangered American lives and secrets and may lead to more deaths, if she cynically deleted thousands of emails, and if her foreign-policy judgment led to the rise of Islamic State, won't refusing to vote make me responsible for those suffering as a result of these things? How do I squirm out of this horrific conundrum? It's unavoidable: We who can vote must answer to God for these people, whom He loves. We are indeed our brothers' and sisters' keepers. 

We would be responsible for passively electing someone who champions the abomination of partial-birth abortion, someone who is celebrated by an organization that sells baby parts. We already live in a country where judges force bakers, florists and photographers to violate their consciences and faith -- and Mrs. Clinton has zealously ratified this. If we believe this ends with bakers and photographers, we are horribly mistaken. No matter your faith or lack of faith, this statist view of America will dramatically affect you and your children. 

For many of us, this is very painful, pulling the lever for someone many think odious. But please consider this: A vote for Donald Trump is not necessarily a vote for Donald Trump himself. It is a vote for those who will be affected by the results of this election. Not to vote is to vote. God will not hold us guiltless.

It is hard to underestimate how genuinely horrific this argument is. Leaving aside the rehashing of numerous distortions of Hillary's record, the argument boils down to: Hillary is wrong on abortion and gays, so Bonhoeffer would have us vote for a crypto-fascist, racist, misogynist, islamophobic buffoon with no impulse control, no knowledge of anything regarding public policy, ominous ties to Russia, and a demonstrated penchant to lie constantly without any provocation whatsoever.

It's worth nothing that Metaxas mentions abortion only in passing (and, in the process, bears false witness against Planned Parenthood by accusing them of "selling baby parts" -- a widely debunked lie), and then proceeds to his real agenda: Fear of TEH GAY.  This is all couched in the language of "genuine liberty and self-government" which he claims will be "gone forever" if Hillary Clinton has a chance to ... what? Appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court? Really? Or more judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Really? The Notorious RBG is the greatest threat to our democracy? Somehow Metaxas has convinced himself that if Hillary Clinton gets to appoint one or more Supreme Court justices this will be, despite every rational indication otherwise, the complete and utter end of the American experiment. Having to give equal treatment in public accommodation to gay couples will lead to the gas chambers, apparently.

And, lest you think that Metaxas doesn't really make that kind of equivalency. Here is what he tweeted* mere hours ago:

The fascistic globalism of HRC/Obama is similar to the threat that German fascist nationalism was in Bonhoeffer's day. Both are anti-God.

— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) October 19, 2016

As an alternative, he not only proposes Trump, but indeed argues that Bonhoeffer would support Trump. And Bonhoeffer, he argues, would support Trump because Bonhoeffer knew that we all ultimately are answerable to God. Never mind that Bonhoeffer spoke out against the Nazis early precisely because of the kind of racist rhetoric that Trump uses toward Mexicans and Muslims. Never mind that Trump's authoritarianism and disdain for democratic processes, even to the point of threatening to jail his political opponents, would have reminded Bonhoeffer chillingly of Germany in the 1930s. Never mind that Trump's desire to control and punish the press would look a lot, if he got away with it, like similar events with which Bonhoeffer was directly familiar. Never mind Trump's connections to the alt-right movement which explicitly connects itself to Nazism. Never mind that Donald Trump embodies quite literally the opposite of everything Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood for. Leave all of that aside. Metaxas is appropriating Bonhoeffer in order to further argue that God wants us to vote for Donald Trump!

Bad enough as it is to see Metaxas continue to stain the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it's even worse to see him do so in order to argue for a privileged Metaxas-only pipeline into the mind of God. Bonhoeffer was never, never so arrogant as to claim he knew what God demanded of him. On the contrary, much of his personal struggle was precisely about the moral ambiguity of determining what he should do as an individual of conscience in the absence of such knowledge. He participated in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler not because he thought that God was demanding it of him, but in spite of the fact that everything he knew about the Christian tradition impelled him in the opposite direction. He did so because he felt the burden of responsibility in the face of God's silence and his own knowledge of just how bad the Nazis were. He was determined to stand before God, not with clean hands, but with the knowledge that he could face God's judgement knowing he had acted responsibly on behalf of those who could not act for themselves, unwilling to hide his dirty hands.

Clearly Metaxas has elevated the perceived threat of a Hillary Clinton presidency to such a level in his own mind that he believes the struggle to elect Donald Trump is equivalent to the struggle of the Confessing Church against the Nazis. But that's a transparently ridiculous claim. And making it requires a complete distortion of Bonhoeffer's legacy. On the other hand, if Hillary isn't Hitler, neither really is Trump -- Despite his authoritarianism, despite his racism, despite his xenophobia, despite the violence of his followers. He is, at worst, a down market Silvio Berlusconi, more of a fool and a travesty than an actual threat. Nevertheless, to attempt to deploy Bonhoeffer in order to argue that God is commanding us to support such a clod, despite the fact that he stands in opposition to everything we know Bonhoeffer stood for, it's more than simply a shame. It's an insult, and it demands action.

Therefore, Eric Metaxas, in the name of all who value the theology and the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I hereby revoke your Bonhoeffer privileges! And may God have mercy on your soul.

*Interestingly, it turns out that Eric Metaxas has blocked me on Twitter, which I find terribly amusing, since I don't think I ever tagged him in anything, and didn't even follow him on Twitter. I guess it was a preemptive blocking, just in case I ever decided to call him again on his total nonsense and horrible misuse of Bonhoeffer.

Fear of the Stranger

This is quite relevant to recent events. My DePaul Religious Studies colleague Laith Saud's recent TED talk.

 

The Online Troll M.O.

This story is very familiar.

 

Can We Infer the Intent to Offend?

Building on my piece from yesterday, a great deal of my objection to the idea of having certain speakers on university campuses was rooted in the idea that, given the university's mission as a place where ideas can be debated and discussed, and where those ideas can advance intellectual inquiry, a speaker whose sole motivation was to offend others was not appropriate for a university setting. The response I got, initially on Twitter, but also in other contexts as well, was "well, who are you to judge whether it was intended to offend?" Or "Isn't offense in the eye of the beholder?" To which I have typically responded: "I believe it is possible to infer the intent to offend based on the record of the speaker." In other words, from what was known about Milo, and what was known about his rhetoric, and the substance-free nature of the writing in which that rhetoric was typically contained, it was possible to infer that his sole motivation was to offend a substantial portion of the student population. I would extend that argument to the group that invited him: I think we can infer from their invitation to Milo that their entire motivation was to offend the progressive student groups that they knew would show up to protest the event.

Certainly the fact that Milo's events had been protested in a similar way at other venues suggests that everyone involved knew what the likely outcome was going to be. I'd suggest it was exactly what they were hoping for. But I want to expand the conversation beyond this particular speaker on this particular occasion and ask whether or not we can be permitted to infer the intent to offend, generally speaking.

My point here is not whether we can know that people are, as a matter of fact, likely to be offended by a particular speaker. I'm not suggesting that the mere fact that people could be offended is a reason to bar a particular speaker. On the contrary, as I noted before, I think that speakers of all positions on the left-right spectrum, whose views may happen to offend some portion of the student population, certainly have a place as speakers in a university setting. For example, I believe that a pro-choice speaker should be permitted to speak at a Catholic university, even though many Catholic would be offended by them, because the argument about abortion itself has merit, and having that argument in the midst of university life is part of the mission of the university. Similarly, I believe that a speaker advocating building a Trump-style border wall on the American-Mexican border should be permitted to speak, as that argument is part of the larger debate about immigration reform in the United States. I think in either case, it should be unsurprising if protestors showed up, and as in the case of Milo's event, I think it would be ill-advised if those protestors disrupted the event, but protest is certainly an appropriate response.

My question runs to a more difficult issue: To what degree are we permitted to infer that, when someone says something offensive, they are saying solely to offend, versus saying something for the purpose of advancing an important conversation which just happens to offend? The person advocating for abortion rights may indeed offend pro-life Catholics, but that would be in the context of advocating a point of view about the rights of women over their own bodies. Compare that to a speaker who was invited to a Catholic university for the purpose of trampling on a consecrated communion wafer. The later speaker would clearly have no goal except to offend Catholics, and I think it would be well within the purview of the university to exclude them.

Similarly, in the case of the advocate of the border wall, while their viewpoint would be offensive to many, and certainly to me, as long as it was not couched in an argument that Mexicans are in some way innately inferior human beings, but in say economic terms, then offensive as it would be, it wouldn't be solely offensive. On the other hand, inviting a member of the Aryan Nations to campus would clearly have no other purpose but to inflame anger and cause offense to people of color around campus.

Again, if you know what someone's record of speech and action is, I believe it is entirely possible to infer intent from action, and to infer future intent from past action. We do it all the time. A substantial part of human interaction in every context involves the inference of internal states from external actions. Much of human language is about negotiating the differences between what people say and what they intend. And of course, as imperfect creatures, we often get that wrong. But I would suggest that we get these things wrong most in ambiguous, marginal cases where what is being communicated is unclear, or the connection between external act and internal state appears to conflict. But again, to use the communion wafer example: Someone who came to campus for the express purpose of doing that would leave no ambiguity with regard to their goal of offending.

But then the rejoinder would no doubt be: Well shouldn't people have the right to act in an explicitly offensive manner? On the one hand, in your own home, I suppose you can act as offensively as you want. If you can find people who are willing to pay for you to be offensive, you can take the show on the road. If you set up your soap box in a public park, you can be as offensive as you please as long as you obey park rules. But that's not what a university exists to promote. If you are offensive because you are presenting controversial ideas that are otherwise of worth in advancing the intellectual mission of the school, then a university can and should permit that to take place. But no one has a right to be offensive in the context of a university setting, even when presenting controversial ideas. To put it another way: If someone is presenting an idea I disagree with, then it is not a refutation of their idea for me simply to say that I find it offensive. However, if a person is acting in such a way that they are advancing no real idea, but simply trying to get a rise out of me, then to respond by saying "You are simply being offensive" is indeed a refutation. It's saying, effectively, "You are not advocating an idea that is capable of response or rejoinder, but simply trying to be offensive for offensiveness's sake."

Take the communion wafer example again. Let's give the example some detail. Suppose I were to invite a member of the Church of Satan to campus to advocate for the idea that religion was false, that would be an acceptable speaker for a university setting, even a Catholic university setting. But if, as an illustration of his contempt for religion, he pulled out a communion wafer and trampled on it, that would cross the line to pure offense. It is entirely possible to make the anti-religion argument without the offensive act. And making that argument may indeed offend some people. The simple fact that the speaker is from the Church of Satan may offend some people. But those things are offensive in the context of advancing a conversation that is part of the university's mission. The trampling of the communion wafer, on the other hand, is not.

To push it a step further. If we knew that the particular speaker was in the habit of coming to campuses in order to trample communion wafers, then I would argue that it would be perfectly acceptable to say that the speaker was not welcome, because we, once more, can infer his intent to offend based upon what we know he had done in the past.

Next question: suppose our communion-trampler somehow bypassed the university administration and got invited anyway. When word got out, a group of Catholic students decided to protest the speaker, and what's more, some of them decided that they were going to interfere with the speakers act of wafer-trampling. What would we say about their actions? I honestly am not 100% sure. Would the university president have apologized to the member of the Church of Satan if those students succeeded in shutting down the event? I don't know. What I do know is that the problem started when the decision was made to invite the speaker who was known for committing such an act.

As I've argued elsewhere, given the substance-free nature of Milo's offensive rhetoric, and given the demonstrated tendency of his followers to respond to his opponents via intimidation, I believe that the original sin in this entire drama was the decision to allow him to speak at DePaul in the first place. I think it was entirely possible to infer his intent to offend based upon his past actions, and that those actions gave a good indication of what was likely to happen.

What university policies should exist to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future? I admit I am not sure. Where should the precise boundary be between acceptable and unacceptable speakers? I'm not sure about that either. I'm not even 100% sure that Milo fell on the wrong side of that line, though as I've argued, I have a strong suspicion that he does. But I do think that ultimately we should recognize that not every speaker is acceptable in the context of a university, and determining which are, and which aren't, is part of the university's mission.

Free Speech, Offense, and Academic Discourse

For the past several days DePaul University has been dealing with the aftermath of a visit by alleged journalist and noted provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos writes for alleged news site Brietbart.com, and everything that I've seen suggests that they are perfect for each other, in that both the writer and the website are far more interested in stirring the pot then in actually engaging in journalism or seeking to enhance or promote democratic discourse. Zach Beauchamp at Vox.com has described the ideology that Yiannopoulos represents quite well:

Once you understand that Yiannopoulos thinks norms against offensive speech and action are themselves a terrible form of authoritarianism, then the rest of his persona starts to make a lot more sense. He sees himself as a hybrid journalist-activist, leading a movement he calls "cultural libertarianism" to protect "free speech" from the egalitarian bullies.

What "cultural libertarianism" is, in practice, is a lot of people on the internet saying intentionally offensive stuff. What better way to end the left's taboo on being sexist than by actually being sexist and getting away with it? ...

All of this, basically, reduces to high-profile trolling — a term that, if you aren't familiar with it, means posting stuff online that's deliberately designed to offend people, often purely because you think irritating other people is funny.

That's intentional. Yiannopoulos is, self-consciously, weaponizing trolling: taking tools invented by internet pranksters and deploying them in his self-declared war on the cultural left. His stunts are designed to appeal to a warped sense of humor as much as they are to help batter down liberal taboos. He thinks things like pretending to be a BuzzFeed editor and tweeting stuff like "#FeminismIsCancer" is a "hilarious" way to stick it to stodgy liberal elites.

Yiannopoulos was invited to campus by the DePaul Republicans. This provoked a reaction among many of the DePaul students who, as it turns out, finds making intentionally racist and sexist comments far less hilarious than Yiannopoulos and his fans. A student group organized protests outside the event, and some students opted to disrupt the event, blowing whistles and shouting Yiannopoulos down. Things escalated from there, as Yiannopoulos decided he was unhappy with the security response and took to the streets. The DePaul Student Center was shut down and eventually Yiannopoulos left and the protestors dispersed. The next day, President Dennis Holtschneider wrote an email to the campus community condemning the disruption and apologizing to Yiannopoulos and the College Republicans. This letter was the first I knew about either the event or the protests.

The apology, it seems, satisfied nobody. The Yiannopoulites found it insufficiently groveling, while many students and faculty at DePaul found it outrageously conciliatory, given the content of Yiannopoulos' words.  Meanwhile, things continued to escalate at DePaul, as anti-Mexican graffiti was found on campus, and then a noose was discovered in a student dorm. Several of my faculty colleagues were subject to some fairly severe harassment on Twitter. I posted a tweet in support of one colleague, and then turned in.

I woke up Thursday morning thinking about the question of how it was that someone like Yiannopoulos, who did not really have anything of genuine intellectual worth to add to the discourse of a university, had gotten invited to speak. Of course, people get invited to do a lot of things at universities. Some are invited to give academic lectures, some are invited because they represent a controversial point of view, or because they are public figures. Some are comedians. But whatever the purpose for which someone is invited to speak at a university, it occurred to me that what they offer ought to be consistent with the academic mission of the school. It needn't agree with any particular political position, or even, I would argue, in the case of DePaul, be consistent with Catholic teaching, in order to be worth of a hearing. But it should rise to some minimal threshold of intellectual worth in order to be worthy of inclusion in university programming.

With this in mind, I took to Twitter once again, and posted the following series of tweets.

If one comes to a college to say something that has no intellectual worth can interrupting them be a violation of their right to speak?

— Scott Paeth (@ScottPaeth) May 26, 2016

If a student group brings a speaker to campus for the express purpose of offending others, does that person have any genuine right to speak?

— Scott Paeth (@ScottPaeth) May 26, 2016

If a student group wanted to bring a speaker to defend the Rwandan genocide, would they have a right to do so? Where is the boundary here?

— Scott Paeth (@ScottPaeth) May 26, 2016

Some things are clearly on one side of the protected speech boundary, some things are clearly on the other, but how do find the line?

— Scott Paeth (@ScottPaeth) May 26, 2016

These comments were intended to raise precisely the question I noted above: What is the purpose for which any particular speaker is brought to campus? And what are the limits to what kinds of discourse are permissible.

Given that I have a very small community of Twitter followers, and that I hadn't used any hashtags to draw attention to the tweets, I figured it would promote some mild discussion among my followers -- if that -- and that would be the end of it. I'd continue to ruminate on the topic, and probably no more would come of it. Oh, how wrong I was!

Apparently, I eventually got retweeted by Yiannopoulos himself, or at least one of his more prominent hangers-on, and the tweets went viral. Before I knew it, I had well over half a million impressions on Twitter. That in itself was surprising, but what was even more surprising was the degree of vitriol, as well as the complete lack of comprehension, represented by the response to my words. My initial reaction was amusement, as most of the responses weren't actually interested in engaging me, but insulting me. Again, based upon everything I know about Yiannopoulos and his minions, this is pretty much the sum and substance of their MO. They never engage in thought when they can engage in purile name-calling. So, I responded with snark. Eventually though, real life called, and I realized that continuing to engage these folks was a classic case of feeding the trolls, so I moved on.

What I did not expect was the next round of attacks, which consisted of harassing emails and phone calls to my office. I came to find out that I was far from the only faculty member so targeted, and, like the racist graffiti and the noose, this all seemed to be grounded in the hostility of the Yiannopoulites. What's more, it occurred to me that, apart from the childishness and vulgarity of the response, it had a very specific intent, which was to intimidate Yiannopoulos' opponents into silence. The great irony of Yiannopoulos' whole routine is that under the guise of the defense of absolute free speech, it's real agenda is silencing those who would speak out against overtly sexist and racist commentary.

To be clear: There are plenty of people who would be perfectly welcome to speak at DePaul, regardless of the odious opinions that they held. But I return to what I suggested above: A person whose entire goal is quite literally nothing other than to be intentionally offensive is not worthy of an invitation to speak at an academic institution. Many of my respondents on Twitter seemed to be of the opinion that I was taking a stand against free speech in general, or that I was saying something that was contrary to the First Amendment, though this only demonstrated both that they hadn't read what I wrote and that they didn't understand the First Amendment. If Yiannopoulos got hold of a soap box and chose to stand on it in the park, I would have no objection to him being allowed to say whatever he wanted. If the College Republicans wanted to rent a private space off campus to hear him rant, I would have no objection. If he stood in the street off campus and said what he wanted, I would have no objection. My objection was to the use of university space and resources for the purpose of giving him a forum. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, it has to do with he mission of the university.

Of course, then there is the matter of what should have been done once he was there. I was exceptionally proud of DePaul's students for organizing a peaceful protest in opposition to him. And I am sympathetic to the students who chose to disrupt the event. There may indeed by times and places where disruption is an appropriate tactic in opposition to genuinely vile speech. For example, I see no reason why a neo-Nazi should be given a hearing, and shouting one down seems to me to be a perfectly appropriate response. However, in the final analysis I think that the disruption of Yiannopoulos' event was a miscalculation, primarily because it gave Yiannopoulos and his minions exactly what they wanted. Once the event was interrupted, the story was no longer, as it should have been, how awful Yiannopoulos was and how outrageous it was to give him a forum at DePaul, and became about how he wasn't permitted to speak. Yiannopoulos was thus able to claim the moral high ground in spite of his vile rhetoric, even though it was undeserved, because the interruption seemed to run contrary to the commitment to free discourse in a university setting.

But again, to be clear, nothing that Yiannopoulos had to say was worth a hearing in a university setting. Explicit racism and misogyny don't have any place in democratic discourse. The idea that literally all voices deserve a hearing at all times and places is not an expression of free speech, rather it is a means of thwarting free speech by continuing to relitigate arguments that should be considered settled issues. Again, the goal is silence those who would speak out against entrenched privilege and systemic racism and sexism.

Returning to Zach Beauchamp's article in Vox, he makes an important point about the idea that Yiannopoulos and his followers are not actually racist or sexist, but only say these things for the purpose of being intentionally provocative, for the sake of the freest possible speech:

Even if he doesn't actually agree with these ideas and is just trying to be provocative. He's mainstreaming bigotry.

Beauchamp then goes on to discuss Yiannopoulos' relation to the "alt-right" community:

The alt-right is a group of online dissidents from mainstream conservatism. While they have a diverse set of beliefs and interests, they share one core belief: Mainstream conservatism is full of politically correct sellouts.

The alt-right encompasses a range of views. It includes among its ranks people who’d traditionally be just called white supremacists or white nationalists, people like Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute (who coined the term "alt-right") or American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor. But it also includes people who reject bigotry, at least in its overt forms, but whose views are still too reactionary for the conservative mainstream.

Regardless, racism and sexism are essential elements of the alt-right movement; it could not exist in its current form without them. Alt-righters tend to oppose mass immigration on grounds that Latin Americans and Muslims dilute the excellence of white culture. They support what they call "white identity politics" — the idea that white Americans should organize and stick up for their own interests because minority groups do the same thing.

Hot arguments on the alt-right include the idea that African Americans are intrinsically dumber than white Americans, that society would be better off if women had fewer opportunities outside of the home, and that Nazism maybe wasn't all bad.

Yiannopoulos loves these guys.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether Yiannopoulos or the alt-right are "sincere" in their racism and sexism. The point at which you incorporate racist and sexist rhetoric into your worldview, and advocate it as a matter of course in your speaking and writing, you are a racist and a sexist. The difference between someone like Yiannopoulos and a character like Borat is that Borat makes bigots the butt of the joke, Yiannopoulos makes women and people of color the butt of the joke. And to excuse that by saying it was "only" a joke, or that it's satire, or that it's insincere simply doesn't wash.

And so that brings me back to my main point: If Yiannopoulos chose to rave in the streets of Chicago about women or African Americans, I'd gingerly walk past him on my way to something that was actually important to do, and shake my head that there weren't better services for someone so obviously disturbed. But to have him at DePaul University elevates him and diminishes the school. The fact that there were students who chose to be provoked by him in exactly the way he wanted to provoke them is unfortunate for DePaul's reputation, but for my part I'm far more worried about the idea that there are DePaul students who would hear or read anything he has to say and conclude "this is a guy we should have on campus." That is a far bigger indictment of DePaul University than anything else.