Defending Your Right to Bigotry

One of the ongoing problems with life in these United States is that while our Constitution guarantees several of our most fundamental human rights – notably free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion – the right to be treated decently, the right to live your life as you see fit and not be constantly called unpleasant names by bigots, and the right to be left the heck alone by evangelicals who call themselves “Christians” are not guaranteed under the Constitution. As a result, an apparently increasing number of people who understand political power, financial power, religious conservatism and fundamental, and advertising – but apparently have no grasp whatsoever of the complex concept of tolerance – keep using their wealth, power, and First Amendment rights to free speech to spew hate about anyone of whom they don’t approve. I wrote about it last December , and I’ve also questioned whether religious speech that confers commercial advantages on the broadcaster should be considered protected on the Main blog , but there’s a situation going on in Florida these days that makes me question if our entire nation hasn’t started Racing to the Bottom…

I picked up the story off of the Wisconsin Gazette website, but you can find it in other places online, too. Basically, the idea is that every year LGBT community organizers pick a day in the spring to be “Gay Day” at Disney World in Orlando, and put out notice over various Internet channels. It’s part of the local Pride Week celebration, which draws an estimated 160,000 people to the Orlando area each year, and brings something on the order of $150 million to the local economy (not counting what the participants spend at Disney World). Unfortunately, this idea creates a full-blown panic in the local conservative “Christian” organizations, who appear to be convinced that seeing gay people and same-sex couples in public will turn children who witness the event gay, and similar brain-dead bigotry. Unfortunately, the event isn’t sponsored by (or even acknowledged by) Disney, which means there’s no one the “Christian” groups can lobby to prevent it. So instead, they’ve decided to hire airplanes to pull giant banners warning people in the area about the event…

Why, exactly, this is being tolerated in the first place is a bit unclear. Certainly, there is a right to free speech involved, but if anyone tried flying giant banners saying “There are Jews at Disney World Today!” or “Warning: Islamic Groups in the Area!” they’d be sued down to their underwear and shut down by the authorities before the first tow plane left the ground. Most of these groups defend behavior like this by claiming that homosexual behavior of any kind is against their religion, but the legal precedents on that are fairly clear: you have a right to practice whatever faith you like, but not to impose it on anyone else. And as I noted last year, if you actually do believe in Christian theology, spending this kind of money to attack people of whom you do not approve when there are millions of hungry people who need food, homeless people who need shelter, and sick people who need medical care – not even in the rest of the world, but just here in the U.S. – is about as anti-Christian as you can possibly get…

In the long run, I’m really not sure what is worse – if these so-called “Christians” believe the hate they are spewing, or if they’re just doing it for political, social or financial gain. The latter is despicable; a perversion not merely of the Christian faith they are aping for their own ends but of the social and religious freedoms of the only nation on Earth that would put up with this nonsense in the first place. But the former means that this is true hate speech – people who not only believe the most preposterous nonsense because of their own fear and hatred, but are willing to attack the rights (and presumably the lives) of innocent people because of that fear and hatred. Either way, it’s truly sad to see a religion dedicated to peace, love, and universal brotherhood becoming the Accelerator in our Race to the Bottom…

Point and Counterpoint

Over the past few years we’ve been hearing an increasing number of stories about atheist groups renting billboards claiming that there is no God and they’re all doing fine without one. A lot of religious people seem to take these as a direct attack against them, or at least against the institutions they belong to, while the atheists themselves see such messages as a counter-attack against all of the religious billboards, radio spots, television commercials, bus benches, movie trailers, and propaganda pamphlets (to call them by their right name) that most major religions spread around. Consequently, neither side seems to understand why the other side is mad at them – the atheists see their ads as nothing more than a demand for equal time (in the sense of publicly proclaiming their beliefs, just the way the religious advertising does), while the religious groups believe that the atheists are trying to destroy them (and in extreme cases, to turn the entire world over to the demonic forces of the Adversary) and everything they hold dear, and must be stopped at all costs. In at least one case, literally…

A story being reported by the Fox affiliate station in Dallas tells about how an anonymous group of “pastors and businessmen” has hired a number of mobile billboard trucks, equipped with Christian advertising messages, to follow the Dallas city busses that carry the atheist billboards around. I don’t know enough about advertising to say for certain if this campaign is likely to be effective; as a strategist, however, I can see at least three problems with the idea. First, the mobile billboard trucks are calling far more attention to the atheist billboards than they would ever have gotten on their own. Second, a lot of people don’t like mobile billboard trucks, religious advertising, or being proselytized in the first place; combining all of these things into a single event seems ill-advised. And third, who on Earth do they expect to influence with such a gesture? Anyone who is likely to convert to their particular brand of Christianity because of a proselytizing billboard has almost certainly already seen one, and the atheists already dislike efforts to convince them of the error of their ways, so directly attacking their advertising seems particularly useless. And that doesn’t even address the fact that this gesture directly contradicts mainstream Christian ethics in the first place…

Consider, for a moment, the huge amount of money that these billboard trucks are costing the consortium every hour they are on the road. Then ask yourself, how many poor people could be fed, clothed, sheltered, healed, medicated or educated with that amount of money? More to the point, perhaps, what is more likely to convince someone that your beliefs have meaning, the fact that you fed them when they were hungry and cared for them when they were sick because your faith demands that you treat all people as your brothers and sisters, or the fact that you hired a large diesel-powered billboard to shout down someone whose beliefs differ from yours?

Some years ago, the great American musician and folk singer Cheryl Wheeler wrote (of evangelical Christians of her acquaintance) “If the Lord is telling you what to do, that’s great. If the Lord is telling you to tell ME what to do, we’re going to have a problem!” To date, this remains the most sensible thing I have ever heard anyone say on the subject of religion in general and evangelicals in particular. For all you or I know, the Dallas consortium may be absolutely correct in both their beliefs and their interpretation of what their creator wants them to do; it might even be that renting those billboard trucks will get every one of them a free ticket to Heaven and ten free games of skeeball when they arrive. But in terms of civility, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, tolerance, or even the ethical structure of the very religion they claim to be champions of, this is nothing more or less than a diesel-powered entry in our Race to the Bottom…