jlabrasca
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2016
- Messages
- 1,429
- Reaction score
- 476
Someone posted earlier that a he would not allow a skinhead to be a club member. This says to me, then, that there are acceptable forms of discrimination. If ANYONE is not allowed membership, then you have discriminated.
Yes. This is Karl Popper's Paradox of Freedom. Toleration of the intolerant leads, ultimately, to intolerance.
Can you extend to those who profess hatred and exclusion as a matter of creed latitude of action in a space you want to be free for the use of all types and creeds?
Suppose the majority of the members of a particular club are Christian, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish. One day a transvestite shows up to launch rockets. The majority of the club membership complains to the board that they don't want their kids exposed to a transvestite. Does the club have the right to exclude the transvestite from membership?
You are presuming that there are no religiously observant transvestites? Or that a religiously observant person would necessarily be offended by a woman wearing a man's trousers and work shirt to a launch? (as charmed as I am by the image of some of the guys with whom I fly tottering on stiletto heels as they head through the sage brush after a rocket, I think most of us prefer to dress in private)
What if a confederate-flag-loving club bans the United States flag? Cool?
It is a false equivalency, I think. The folks who fly the confederate flag as a political statement now do not, typically, align with the Confederacy against the Union. It is less often the flag of the "Lost Cause" than it is the flag of a nativist, or white nationalist who is likely to display the battle flag NEXT to the US flag.
Context matters. A Confederate flag is handy because -- however disingenuously -- it might be argued that it is NOT the same thing as a sonnenrad or a Kek. But it would be still be immediately discouraging and exclusionary for people of color (and religious minorities, and sexual minorities, and gender-nonconforming people, and political progressives, etc.) at an event attended by an all-white crowd.
Be very careful when assuming that banning ANYONE or ANYTHING will not come back to bite you in the @$$. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of opinion are imperative for all, whether you agree with them or not.
As said upthread, Freedom of Speech is not the same thing as consequence-free speech. We live at each others sufferance. We support each other's right to advocate for that which we might find abhorrent, but when we join together how do we distinguish the group from the individual?
You invite your coworker, who is something other than a straight, white, middle aged, man, to their first launch. As they pull into the parking area, they see a LOT of white men and a few white families. They spot the Confederate flag, or the bumper sticker about which georgegassaway commented (and it need not be on every car). How welcome would they feel?
The goal, as Steve Shannon and others have said, is to make everyone feel welcome at the event. Is it enough to say that you do not exclude or discriminate on the basis of anything (apart from unsafe behavior)? Might it not mean doing something deliberate so that the event does not appear unwelcoming?