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Tolerance is Dead
Raunchy gay sex columnist (and sometimes political activist) Dan Savage has been caught up in a perfect storm of liberal identity politics. While speaking at the University of Chicago last week, Savage used the word “tranny” – a slang term for transgendered people – in the context of “reclaiming” words that might otherwise have a negative connotation.
In a perfectly ironic turn of events that followed, a self-identified transgendered student in the audience is now saying that he/she was deeply hurt by Savage’s use of the “reclaimed” slur.
The Illinois Review reports the details:
The incident occurred when, according to several sources, Savage and [the event hostess Ana Marie] Cox began discussing [Savage’s] personal history as a gay man. According to a first-year student and member of the LGBTQ community who asked to be identified as Hex, Savage used the slur t—– as an example in an anecdote about reclaiming words. Cox then added, “I used to make jokes about t—-ies,” audience members recounted.
“That was one of the most hurtful parts,” Hex said, explaining the perceived insult was that Cox used the slur to refer to the group of people she joked about. “In that context, it was like being applied to all transgender people,” it said. (“It” is Hex’s chosen pronoun.)
The offended students have even started up a petition on Change.org, demanding that U of Chicago’s Institute of Politics forever ban the use of offensive language at its events.
You see, those poor sensitive students just can’t handle it.
They just can’t.
Personally, I love the irony of this situation. Dan Savage, a hero of the radical left, General in the fight to mainstream radical sexual identities in this country, is now being eaten alive by his own kind.
In a related story, RuPaul, probably the nation’s most famous transvestite pop star, has been accused of transphobia because his television show uses the term “She-Mail” to describe messages from the host. Critics say they are offended because it’s a play on the term “shemale,” which, they say, is derogatory. RuPaul also has used the word “tranny” publicly.
According to Salon.com, RuPaul said “those offended by the use of the word “tranny” “are fringe people who are looking for story lines to strengthen their identity as victims.”
The tyranny of liberal identity politics has reached a tipping point. It has now become very dangerous for public figures to say anything controversial in public. And that’s bad news for all of us who care about freedom of speech and expression – even if it might be fun to watch liberals devouring themselves over such issues. In the long run, all of us are being negatively impacted by a climate of speech control, fueled by the manufactured outrage of various groups and individuals who will not tolerate an opposing view and will not permit others to express themselves in a way they dislike.
If you are a musician and you dare to wear an Indian headdress as part of an artistic photo shoot, you will be blasted for cultural “appropriation.” You will be forced to apologize or risk damaging your career.
If you have a TV show, but happen to hold a conservative, biblical view about homosexuality, your TV show will be cancelled. Or suspended. You will be silenced. You will be labeled a bigot. Your religious beliefs will be categorized as “hate.” There is an army of liberal speech-code enforcers out there monitoring the airwaves, searching the YouTube archives, Googling the opposition, looking to shut down every voice of which they disapprove.
If you want to keep your business, you will be forced to do things that violate your religious beliefs. In this Brave New World of liberal fascism, you can be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding, whether you wish to do so or not. You can be forced to undergo sensitivity training to keep your job.
Any belief system that is so threatened by dissenting voices that it must stamp them all out is a belief system that fears close examination. The desperate attempts of sexual progressives to silence all who disagree with them is a sure sign of their own insecurity – of their own moral self-doubt. They fight the voices of others in an effort to silence the lingering voices of their own seared consciences.
We are at the dawn of a new age of illiberality in the West. It is not enough, any longer, to simply tolerate the beliefs and lifestyles of others. You must agree to actively participate and even celebrate their lifestyles. Or else they’re coming for blood.
Our culture has become a minefield of linguistic taboos. At all times, someone, somewhere is waiting to be offended. And these taboos are enforced by increasingly frightened media companies who fear boycotts and lawsuits. Liberal activists, emboldened by their success at silencing opposing viewpoints, are growing ever more tyrannical, ever more intolerant, and ever more powerful.
Tolerance is dead in this country, or almost dead. We have allowed a small minority of oppressive victim hustlers to effectively neuter the First Amendment. As a result, freedom of speech is something we Americans, in truth, no longer effectively posses.
(This article was adapted from an essay originally published at The College Fix.)
Published in General
“Our culture has become a minefield of linguistic taboos. At all times, someone, somewhere is waiting to be offended. And these taboos are enforced by increasingly frightened media companies who fear boycotts and lawsuits. Liberal activists, emboldened by their success at silencing opposing viewpoints, are growing ever more tyrannical, ever more intolerant, and ever more powerful.”
Well-put. In progressive society, the worst offense is to offend.
Our culture has become a minefield of linguistic taboos. At all times, someone, somewhere is waiting to be offended. And these taboos are enforced by increasingly frightened media companies who fear boycotts and lawsuits. Liberal activists, emboldened by their success at silencing opposing viewpoints, are growing ever more tyrannical, ever more intolerant, and ever more powerful.
Indeed.
I have a friend who has a high-level position in a major bank with worldwide interests. Recently he and his collegues discovered that an e-mail blocker was put into place on their company-wide system. Apparently there are 62 words, along with their many derivatives which, when the bot “sees” them, sends the e-mail into a black hole with no noticifications to sending or receiving party. This was only discovered because important e-mails were getting lost. One example, the bank was trying to get contracts signed for amulti-million dollar international deal originating in Scandinavia where there is a government agency which has initials in Swedish which would spell out Brit slang for a cigarette, a three-letter word which is a common perjoritive for homosexuals, and the acronym from the actors union depicted in Parker and Stone’s Team America, Film Actors Guild.
Hey, when are we going to get that contract, it’s been a week!
We sent it 5 days ago.
We didn’t get it, can you send it again?
Sure
Still not getting it.
ETC.
My friend tells me that the company will not tell anyone what these 62 words are!
Madness!
This is like the French Revolution, thankfully without the lopped off heads. But it really can’t last. When they start eating their own, it’s about to collapse. The whole campus rape thing too. Nothing makes any sense any more. Let’s just hope it collapses sooner rather than later.
My chosen pronoun is “the Tranny”. I’m not into cross-dressing, I just like the way it sounds, because I’m a mechanic at Aamco.
I’ll call Hex “it” when Hex calls me “the Tranny”, and not before.
I don’t know about Tolerance, but the Grievance Industry looks like it’s about to take a nasty tailspin. Good riddance.
Liberalism is eating itself.
Well, not yet anyway.
Why does Hex feel compelled to let the world know that Hex was “deeply hurt”?
Do you want to know what I do when I see or hear something that offends me? For one thing, I can stop reading the article/change the channel/turn off the podcast/etc. Or, I can continue to read/watch/listen. Perhaps my blood pressure will rise. Perhaps I will discuss with friends or my wife how offended I was. Perhaps I will no longer read that magazine/watch that program/listen to that podcast. Here’s something I would never do: Contact the media.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend, disgust, and be stupid. Where is the harm from such speech? Hurt feelings? Buck up, wimps. If the conversation at the University of Chicago had revolved around “reclaiming” words such as cracker, honky, and redneck, and Cox had said, “I used to make jokes about those people,” I think it would have barely registered on my Offend-O-Meter. I seriously doubt that Ana Marie Cox is capable of “hurting my feelings.” But if she had, here’s something else I could have done:
Walked out. End of story.
I love how virtually everything these days is referred to as a “slur.” Fine by me. As long as we don’t start making slurs illegal… whoops… ok, that worries me.
Progressives need to chill-out and get back to important business like dis-inviting next years graduation speakers.
Like the Ouroboros!!! I hope they like the taste.
In fairness, this isn’t the first time Savage has run afoul of the forces of lefty-PC. I used to listen to him regularly, and he regularly gets in trouble with bisexuals and some kinds of feminists.
There’s a lot to dislike about Savage, but he’s a more interesting character than he’s often made out to be (and a pretty good advice columnist).
While reading about “Hex”, I couldn’t help think “Someone needs to grow a pair. Oh…yeah.”
LGBTQ community?
There’s a “Q” now?? Where does this end?
Its actualy LGBTQQ. One Q is for Queer and the other is questioning
I notice that Klavan hit on the same topic this week: http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2014/06/02/homofascism-should-be-crushed/
It’s even worse than that I’m afraid. I had a friend correct me once that it was actually LGBTQQIAAP (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, allies, and pansexual) now. I have responded by adding on additional letters that don’t mean anything, so something like LGBTQQIAAPSRLTFGN$DR. Or at least I would, if I wasn’t positive that it would offend someone and land me in a reeducation camp. I knew we were in trouble when I first started seeing a word that means “someone whose physical sex and gender identity match”, as if that is uncommon enough to warrant a special word for it.
Burn it down and piss on the ashes. A culture that refuses to stand up for itself and gives birth to such nonsense is not worth saving.
The left has been hoist by its own petard more frequently of late. That cute girl on MSNBC, Melissa Harris Perry, runs a show that I call “who’s racist today?” She will squeeze a little racist juice out of any topic no matter how far-fetched. Then she had that problem where she and her guests were laughing at Mitt Romney’s Christmas card with his black grandchild. She had to apologize.
Mitt missed a real opportunity I thought. He should have responded, “Apologize for what?” He could have made a point that the left has lowered the bar so much on what actually is “racist” that they are now walking into it themselves.
I’m tempted to start making up random variants of these naming conventions and try to get them added to the list. “ubersexual” “malsexual” “tri-gendered”
I am in full agreement with RuPaul on this.
Boy, there’s something I didn’t anticipate I’d say when I woke up today.
So Robespierre is getting the guillotine huh?
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving fella
How about Megasexual…or is that taken?
Frank:
We need to start a contest in which the winner is the one who comes up with the most “sexuals” and builds the longest list of initials. I’ll start:
Magna Cum Sexual (MCS)
Considering the Left’s obsession with sex, I’d say it’s more like the young man from Nantucket.
I hope you are right, but I do not see any evidence of things collapsing. All I see is the authoritarian impulse growing ever stronger, flush with success and emboldened with new tools to suppress speech.
I don’t agree with this but I hope I’m wrong.
Great piece, Nathan.
Ah, poor Dan – and he’s such a sweet guy
http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/anti-bullying-speaker-curses-mocks-christian-teens.html
http://www.mrc.org/articles/dan-savage-america-has-christianity-and-bible-problem
http://www.gaypatriot.net/2012/04/29/dan-savage-and-the-politics-of-hate/
Don’t forget this one:
Dan Savage suggests mandatory abortions for about 30 years.
At the risk of increasing the stress levels of the offended, I must say you have captured the truth of regret that is too painful to bear self-examination. The pain of regret lasts long after the sting of the offending word, long after the intolerant offender is gone.
A person’s lifestyle choices ought to stand up against views of others. That is a person who has reached maturity.
“The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” [Plato]
“Is it so bad then, to be misunderstood?” [Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance]