WOKE IDEAS, DRAG QUEENS AND
ACADEMIC FREEDOM
A man is convicted in a
court of law for the crime of murder. He is sentenced to life in
prison. Another man in ancient times named Socrates is convicted of
corrupting the youth of Athens by teaching them to think critically, and for
not believing in the official gods of Athens. Socrates receives the
penalty of death by poison. Four hundred years later, a man named
Jesus of Nazareth is nailed to a cross and killed for the crime of
heresy. Two thousand years after the death of Jesus, a young man in Montana
is robbed, pistol-whipped and tortured by three other men when they learn that
he is gay. A Muslim woman in England is shunned by the Muslim community
for marrying a man who is of a different religion. A woman in New York is
verbally bullied on social media for her appearance. She commits suicide.
1. Prohibiting speech and offensive behavior
We are now well
into the 21st century and social and legal restrictions on speech and offensive
behavior are being proposed by Republican-dominated legislatures in the states at
a rate that hasn’t been seen since the Salem Witch trials in the Massachusetts
colony.
In
2022 the legislature of the state of Florida passed the stop Woke Act. It
is legislation designed to prohibit schools and companies from teaching or
discussing social issues that might make students and employees feel guilt or shame
because of their race or sex. The act makes it illegal for teacher and
counselors to persuade, endorse, or make any attempt to convince students that
the following ideas or opinions are true: (1) Some ethnic groups are inherently
racist, (2) A person’s status as privileged or oppressed is determined by their
race or gender, and (3) discrimination is an acceptable way to achieve diversity
in education and business.
Governor Ron DeSantis
named the new law the “stop WOKE act” because he believes that (1),
(2) and (3) are part of a false political ideology that is mainly spread by liberals
or far-left members of the Democratic Party. According to DeSantis, a woke
ideology means "an ideology of liberals and the far
left." Promotion or discussion of such ideologies make students and
public employees “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological
distress” because of their race, color, sex or national origin.
At this writing (April, 2023), more speech-suppressing legislation is pending
in Florida that will affect all public universities within the state by
eliminating or heavily restricting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)
programs (for example, affirmative action). Certain college majors relating to
DEI would be eliminated or heavily restricted.[2] The
bill would also prohibit state universities from including DEI and political
identity filters within higher education hiring processes, and bans the usage
of critical race theory in hiring. (Wikipedia)
In a
recent case, the legislature of the state of Tennessee has attempted to make it
illegal to perform “drag” performances on public property and in places where
they could be watched by minors. The law limits “adult cabaret” performances
that feature “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male
or female impersonators.” Those who violate the new law will be charged with a
misdemeanor, or a felony for subsequent offenses.
The
difference between these restrictions and the Florida laws is that the
Tennessee law is about behavior, not speech.
Legislators argue that public drag or adult cabaret performances might
be seen by children. Such performances (they say) are harmful to children, and
for that reason, these performances should be suppressed. Second, the restrictions and punishments are
aimed at the performers, not at the parents who bring their children to see the
performances.
2. Justifiable limits of liberty
Questions about the limits of
liberty are about moral justification. What are the justifiable limits
to the exercise of civil and social power over the individual? When ought
society use civil and social power to intervene and when ought it not
intervene? Or, from the perspective of the individual: What are the
justifiable limits of my liberty? How much liberty should I be
allowed to have in a civil society?
2.1 Civil and social power
The topic of John Stuart Mill’s 19th
century book On Liberty is “Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and
limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual”
(p. 1).
Society has two ways
of exercising its power over the individual: Civil Power
(“physical force in the form of legal penalties”) and Social Power (“the
moral coercion of public opinion”). The man who given a life sentence for
murder and the man who is executed for the crime of not believing in the
official gods have both been subjected to civil power. The gay man
who is tortured, the woman who is shunned, the young woman who is bullied, and the university
teacher who is prevented from discussing Critical Race Theory with his students
are the victims of social power.
The questions posed by
Mill are as important and relevant now as they were when Mill wrote On
Liberty. In all countries it is justifiable to use physical force in
the form of legal penalties for the crime of murder and assault. But there are
some countries who believe it is justifiable to use civil power against those
who refuse to conform to a official state religion and the practices that are
commanded by that religion. Although there are many countries in the Western
world that pride themselves on their social toleration of gays, lesbians and
others in the LGBTQ communities, there are still many instances of intolerance
of non-conforming attitudes, appearances and lifestyles. The intolerance
is expressed not only in shunning (which often leads to depression and
suicide), but sometimes in physical force. The rise of social media in
the 21st century has also brought with it an alarming rise in hateful remarks,
bullying and social shaming, fueled by anonymity.
Mill begins his
argument for individual liberty by giving a brief outline of the kind of
conduct that he insists must be protected from intervention. He divides
them into three spheres:
a. Liberty of conscience, comprising
“liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on
all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral or theological, and
the liberty of expressing and publishing opinions…” (11).
b. Liberty of tastes and pursuits,
comprising “framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing
what we like…C.” (12)
c. Liberty of combination among
individuals, comprising “freedom to unite for any purpose not involving harm to
others; the persons combining being supposed to be of full age and not forced
or deceived.” (12)
2.2 Academic freedom and liberty
of conscience
If Mill was alive at the time the stop WOKE
act was being debated in the Florida legislature, he would have vigorously
argued that there is no moral justification for making illegal the three woke opinions expressed in part 1.
Mill’s argument for
this is set out in chapter 2 of On Liberty (“Liberty of Thought and
Expression”). Without going into much detail, here is one of Mill’s arguments
against the suppression of speech:
(T)he peculiar evil of silencing the
expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race… If the opinion is right, they are deprived
of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is
almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of
truth produced by its collision with error.
The Woke Act in Florida says that
the following opinion (#3, above) is false and should not be expressed in
public schools: “Discrimination is an acceptable way to achieve diversity in
education and business.” Instead of responding that this opinion is not
false, Mill would say that the first task should be to get the Florida legislators
to admit that this opinion might be true. If they flatly deny that
a controversial opinion might be true, then their denial “is to
assume [their] own infallibility.”
If it the legislators believe
themselves to be infallible and refuse to admit to the possibility that the
discrimination opinion might be true, then they are robbing students of the
opportunity to “exchange error for truth.” Although there are some
politicians in our society who think it is a good thing to prevent students from
challenging opinions that the politicians believe to be true, this is usually
good only for the politician and not for the populace at large.
Mill
contends that silencing the promulgation of an opinion and refusing to allow
debate about it ultimately robs the populace of the benefit gained from the “clearer
perception and livelier impression” of the truth as it collides with the
so-called erroneous opinion. This happens when students are allowed to
think critically and defend their ideas.
But none of this will
happen if woke ideas are silenced in the classroom. Instead, the
politically approved opinions will eventually become dogma. Mill writes
that students will eventually forget the rational basis for the approved
opinions and they will revert to “the manner of prejudice, …[thereby
preventing] the growth of any real and heart-felt conviction from reason or
personal experience.”
2.3 Drag queens and liberty
of tastes and pursuits
Mill says of “the liberty of tastes and pursuits”
that they give us the freedom to live a life that suits our own character, “of
doing what we like…so long as what we do does not harm [others].” (12) If the life that suits a person’s character
is a life of teaching philosophy or a life of drag performances (or both), then
neither life should be prohibited.
The Tennessee legislators believe that exposing
minors to the public performances of drag queens and topless dancers is
harmful. But the statute does not make clear what it is about these
performances that could harm minors.
Perhaps there is fear among some parents that if children are allowed to
watch the performances of drag queens, then their children might want to become
drag queens when they grow up. To put it
another way, behavior that some parents (and Republican legislators) believe to
be offensive might be attractive to some minors.
Hence, an act is harmful to minors if it might lead them to become
offensive “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or
female impersonators, or similar entertainers.”
When Mill proposed that causing harm to others
was the only justification for interfering with individual liberty, he did not
apply the harm principle to the conduct of children. A minor does not have "liberty of tastes
and pursuits." Parents of the minor have the right to guide their children to
live an adult life that is like their own or to expose them to a variety of
lives that they might want to choose when they become an adult. For example, parents whose religious beliefs
condemn LGBTQ people might want to keep their children away from any exposure
to them, and liberal parents might want expose their children to a variety of tastes
and pursuits that they might choose to live when they come of age.
Parents have legal duties as well as rights. They have a duty not to abuse or neglect
their children. But there is no evidence
that taking their child to a drag queen performance is abusive. The fact that
such performances are offensive to legislators is not evidence that seeing a
man dressed as a woman harms the child either physically or emotionally.
And if it is (wrongly) decided that drag queen
performances are harmful to minors, the person or persons who should be
punished are the minor’s parents not the drag queens. Targeting and punishing female impersonators
is like the medieval practice of punishing disabled and deformed people for appearing
in public, except that a disability or deformity is not something that one can discard.
3. Freedom and Rights
A majority of legislators in Florida want to
suppress classroom discussions of Critical Race Theory (CRT), and in Tennessee
a majority of legislators want to suppress public displays of drag queen
performances. They refer to these
suppressions as “freedom.” What they mean is that under their new laws, Florida
students and public employees will be free from hearing a professor
explain CRT and the children of Tennessee parents will free from
witnessing a drag queen performance.
But “freedom from” is not what the framers of the
First Amendment to the Constitution meant.
The kind of freedom the framers wanted to protect is freedom to not
freedom from. They did this by making them rights. Under
the First Amendment, Americans have the right to choose their own
religion (or none), the right to persuade others about the truth of your
political opinions, and the right to associate and stand with others in
front of the U.S. Capitol protesting laws that they believe are bad.
The constitutional right to freedom of speech would
be encroached by state laws that prohibit the promulgation of the three woke
opinions stated earlier. By making students
free from attempts of teachers to convince them that woke opinions are
true, they encroach on the constitutional right to freedom of speech. By making children parents free from
witnessing public drag queen performances they interfere with parental rights
to make decisions about what is good or bad for their children.
And if the
legislators complain that students and
parents should from woke speech and drag queens, then we can reply “You already have them – you
can walk out of the lecture hall and you can walk away from a public drag queen
performance.”
4. Free societies
Mill says of the three
spheres of liberty that:
No
society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected is free,
whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which
they do not exist absolute and unqualified. (12)
A society that regards
itself as “completely free” must not only allow people to combine for the
purpose of baking cakes for the poor, but also for the purpose of publishing
and disseminating anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic literature. It must not
only allow people to pursue their interest in birds and combine with others
into bird watching clubs, but it must allow people to pursue their desire to take
off their bathing suits and walk naked at public beaches.
The disutility of
prohibitions on any of the three liberties enumerated above is encapsulated in
this single sentence:
Mankind
are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves
than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. (12)
If the governors and legislators of Florida and Tennessee
want citizens to be free, then they should stop efforts to compel minorities to
think and act in ways that “seems good” to the governor and the legislature.
