Freedom of Speech

UKIP Take The Low Road

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

UKIP protest

 

Perhaps it was inevitable, given the relentless barrage of attacks on the party in recent days, but today marks the day that UKIP made a mistake, took a page from the conventional political handbook and played into their opponents hands. Their folly? Allowing three of their European election candidates to go running to the police, demanding that any demonstrators who call them ‘fascists’ or hurl other insults be arrested for committing a hate crime.

The Huffington Post reports:

Ukip has asked police officers to arrest demonstrators for a hate crime if they call their supporters “fascists” at a public meeting held by the party.

Three of the party’s European election candidates said, in a joint statement, that they had asked Sussex Police to arrest “any protestors who call our supporters ‘fascists’, hurl other abuse or any physical assault, for ‘hate crime’ or under the Public Order Act” at the Hove meeting on Tuesday night.

It has become fashionable in left-wing circles to talk about how UKIP represents next great fascist threat to the United Kingdom, and that its leader Nigel Farage is the reincarnation of Oswald Mosley with a sprinkling of Enoch Powell. Such outraged left-wing hysteria is only fuelled by the propensity of organisations that really should know better – such as Unite Against Fascism – to picket and protest UKIP’s political gatherings under the (either incredibly stupid or breathtakingly cynical) pretext that opposition to economic migration automatically equals racism.

That UKIP have been taking fire – often unfairly and excessively – from all sides is incontestable. But by doing what they claim to loathe, running to the government for protection and redress every time they get their feelings hurt in the rough and tumble of British political discourse, UKIP are undermining one of their most endearing aspects – the ‘no nonsense’ individualist approach that scoffs at today’s entitlements culture and the right to live life unoffended and unchallenged.

This impulse to hit back is partly understandable. For months, UKIP and their supporters have been heckled and jeered and accused of unpleasant things by every left-leaning organisation with a megaphone, while mainstream politicians rode the wave of anti-UKIP hysteria and stood in front of television cameras cynically repeating many of the same allegations and unpleasant talking points. For some in the party, used to seeing their own ‘kind’ on the receiving end of police harassment – for skirting too close to the wrong side of the law when speaking about immigration or gay marriage, for example –  it must be cathartic to imagine the police handcuffing and carting away the person who has heckled their every campaign stop or policy launch.

But just as opposing economic migration does not automatically make one a fascist, calling someone a fascist is not close to being a hate crime – fascists not being viewed as an especially sympathetic or endangered minority, for one reason. And if we as a country do decide to expand the (already overly-long) roll call of groups entitled to hate crime protection and the list of words whose utterance will prompt a police visit – to include new additions such as ‘hypocrite’ or ‘idiot’ for example – before long there will be no politicians, journalists or bloggers left.

One of UKIP’s core strengths – the thing that made them a breath of relatively fresh air in the very stale British political system – is the fact that they always pushed back against the growing nanny state-ism that values freedom from being offended over freedom of expression. What’s more, they have done this at a time when the bulk of British elite opinion has trended strongly in the other direction, almost sanctifying the ‘right’ of the individual to coast through life without ever being shocked or offended or insulted. Their motives for supporting free speech have not always been pure, but this is yet another indictment of the major political parties – the fact that it has often been left to a strident outlier party to speak out in defence of such a core British value.

At present, UKIP remain well placed to triumph at the upcoming European elections, but the result will be close and even the smallest missteps or scandals could tip the balance. If Nigel Farage’s party choose to surrender their successful and appealing ‘happy warrior’ image and replace it with the outraged snarl of the perpetually wronged victim, the danger is that they will start to resemble the very thing that their opponents accuse them of being – a sort of British National Party Lite, full of little-Englanders nursing a grudge.

UKIP have come too far – and enliven the British political debate too much – to allow this to happen.

Polis Annual Journalism Conference 2014

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

LSE_Polis_Journalism

 

Semi-Partisan Sam will be attending the annual Polis Journalism Conference later today at the London School of Economics for what promises to be a very stimulating day of discussion and debate, featuring – for good or for ill – a Who’s Who of the British media establishment.

Several sessions in particular are especially relevant to the aims and objectives of this blog:

Journalism after Snowden: Watchdog or thug? In the wake of the Snowden story and the Leveson Inquiry into the press, we ask whether British journalism is too supine or too aggressive? Was the publication of state secrets justified?

Taking on the world: The Guardian In the last 12 months The Guardian has published one the biggest scoops in its history. The Snowden revelations brought intelligence officials into its offices to smash up hard-drives. At the same time it is re-inventing itself as the radical liberal journalism platform for the world. Steve Hewlett puts its editor under the spotlight.

The future of transparency journalism A new generation of journalists is emerging, finding fresh ways to hold power to account. What skills do they need? How will their work change? We bring together former top news professionals and journalism educators to debate the way forward.

Holding Europe to account As Europe prepares to go to the polls in a month’s time it is facing a political crisis. How can journalists get citizens to engage with European issues and how should they report on the growth of scepticism?

 

Stay tuned to @SamHooper on Twitter for live-tweets from the event, and to this blog for discussion and analysis of the conference after the fact.

 

The death throes of free speech in Russia

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

 

As the world’s attention remains fixed on Ukraine, less attention is paid to the final nails being hammered into the coffin containing the corpse of Russia’s free and independent press. And while the annexation of Crimea and the west’s shamefully half-hearted response (slapping sanctions on a mere handful of Russian officials and exempting Vladimir Putin and his closest confidantes) certainly deserve their column inches, journalistic independence and free speech finally died in Russia, without a shot being fired. It is only right that we acknowledge this backward step, too.

A couple of excellent columns published over the past weekend aimed to do exactly that – Julia Ioffe writing at the New Republic and David Remick at The New Yorker. Both articles come highly recommended and paint a compelling, sad story.

In his piece, Remnick mourns the backwards steps under Putin which have now erased each and every gain made for freedom of expression under the Gorbachev glasnost era, with particular reference to the Russian government’s recent interference with popular news site Lenta.ru:

In recent years, when Russian liberals have tried to sound optimistic, they have invariably said, Well, at least they haven’t cracked down on the Internet the way the Chinese have. Lenta.ru is one Web site, not the entire Russian-language Web, to be sure, but today’s firing is still an important and ominous step. Lenta.ru was getting more than thirteen million unique visitors a month, and was far more direct and critically minded than anything on state television or in most print publications. Some staff writers and editors have said that they will leave rather than work with [new editor] Goreslavsky. They have no doubt that responsibility for today’s firing lay with Putin and his circle.

Seventy-nine staffers at Lenta.ru issued a statement of angry protest, reading, “Over the past couple of years, the space of free journalism in Russia has dramatically decreased. Some publications are directly controlled by the Kremlin, others through curators, and others by editors who fear losing their jobs. Some media outlets have been closed and others will be closed in the coming months. The problem is not that we have nowhere to run. The problem is that you have nothing more to read.”

Remnick notes that in today’s world and with modern technology, the domestic Russian media can be bought, manipulated and coerced very easily by Putin, with no need for recourse to any of the Soviet-era’s more heavy-handed techniques:

In each individual case, the degree of censorship and pressure is hardly Stalinist in degree. Putin’s media strategy is more sophisticated than that. (The book-publishing industry has remained quite free and unchanged in recent years.) The sophistication of it is that Putin exerts just enough control (blacklisting certain known dissident voices from state television, for example), and punishes just enough of his opponents, to set markers—boundaries of the permissible. Sometimes those boundaries are crossed, but a general tone has been set.

This is precisely the problem, and perhaps the reason why the assault on the Russian free press is getting much less attention than it deserves. In the modern age, the sheer number of cable television channels, newspapers and online news sites can easily give the impression of a vibrant, raucous and effective media, easily reflecting the views of the entire population and holding the leadership to account. However, because of concentration of ownership and endemic corruption, the appearance diversity or independence is merely an illusion – everyone toes the party line.

Julia Ioffe’s New Republic piece sees even more danger, with Russia’s authoritarian attempts to control speech and thought now reaching the internet:

Yesterday, the Kremlin went full-China on the Internet, the holy of holies of the Russian opposition. Using some flimsy legal pretexts, it banned access to various oppositional news sites, to the website of Moscow’s biggest radio station, and to the blog of Alexey Navalny, who is currently under house arrest. Last week, the owner of Dozhd announced that, due to the clampdown, the channel is going to close in a couple months.

Within the span of a couple months, the Kremlin, by hook and by crook, has cleared all the media underbrush. There’s suddenly not much left of the independent media, even of what little of it there was left after Putin’s first two terms at the wheel.

Some of the personal anecdotes recounted by Julia Ioffe are even more disturbing:

Then came the day a Moscow acquaintance announced on Facebook that her daughter, a first-grader, came home from school in a panic because the teacher had told the class that America was about to invade Russia. But then television host and attack dog Dmitry Kiselev went after the “radicals” in Kiev in a special broadcast dedicated to Ukraine, saying that the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954 was “a historical crime” and blaming the dissolution of Yugoslavia on the West. “What is Yugoslavia now? A pimple on the body of Europe.”

The Russian Writer’s Union then felt the need to write an open letter to the Kremlin throwing their wholehearted support behind Russia’s annexation of Crimea:

… the Russian Writers’ Union, which is as Soviet as it sounds, declared that, “in these worrying times, when the fate not only of Russia and Ukraine, but of all European civilization, is being decided, we want to express our support of your firm and responsible position.” They also blamed “the destructive forces of the West.”

Whatever one might think of the press in the United Kingdom or United States, one cannot imagine them banding together like this to explicitly praise the leader. It is certainly true that President George W. Bush received ridiculous levels of hagiography and unquestioningly supportive coverage from the western press in the run-up to the second Iraq war, the profession as a whole did not feel the need to pledge their fealty with one voice. And though they were largely banished from the main networks, there was strong and vocal opposition. Not so in Russia today.

If there is any glimmer of hope to be had in this sorry situation, it is the fact that a sizeable number of Russians – despite their almost total erasing from the domestic news – have grown heartily sick of their country’s backward slide, and are making their views known as best they can.

The BBC reports that up to 50,000 people attended a pro-Democracy “Hands Off Ukraine” rally in central Moscow. And apparently caught off guard, Putin’s regime did not thwart the march, and mustered only 15,000 of their own supporters in a counter-demonstration:

Earlier in Moscow, tens of thousands rallied against Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the biggest such protest in two years. As many as 50,000 attended the rally, with protesters shouting: “Hands off Ukraine.”

One man told the BBC he felt Russia was turning back to the days of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Nearby, some 15,000 supporters of President Vladimir Putin came out to support the Crimean referendum. Many of them wore identical red outfits and carried Russian and Soviet flags.

But displays such as this are likely to become far fewer as the number of truly – or even partially – independent news outlets willing to provide a non-Kremlin perspective on the world dwindles to nothing.

Regrettably, the paranoid propagandists at the Kremlin are now also being encouraged to a degree by some in the west. The usually-admirable Ron Paul, for example, clearly shows the limitations of applying libertarian philosophy to its ultimate limits, and of citing moral equivalency between Russian meddling in Ukraine and unauthorised Western invasions to argue that the West has no legitimate basis to condemn Russia’s actions. Because the United States and Britain did wrong in the past, goes this argument, Russia must be allowed to do wrong now:

Paul said Crimeans should be allowed to break away from Kiev.

“I think everyone should have right to express themselves,” he said. “It is messy, that is for sure, because two big governments are very much involved in trying to tell the Ukranians what to do.”

However he said Russia had a more justifiable basis for being involved in Crimea than the US, and no government should prevent locals on the peninsula from determining their future.

This deference toward Russia maintaining a geopolitical sphere of influence whereby it is allowed to meddle and assert special interests in the politics of its neighbours would be slightly more defensible coming from Ron Paul if he did not castigate the United States for doing the same thing when it comes to influencing America’s Latin American neighbours:

PAUL: Well, I think free trade is the answer. Free trade is an answer to a lot of conflicts around the world, so I’m always promoting free trade. And you might add Cuba, too. I think we would be a lot better off trading with Cuba.

But as far as us having an obligation, a military or a financial obligation to go down and dictate to them what government they should have, I don’t like that idea. I would try to set a standard here where countries would want to emulate us. Unfortunately, sometimes we slip up on our standards and we go around the world and we try to force ourselves on others.

If free trade and an absence of foreign meddling is truly the stance favoured by Ron Paul he should be vigorously denouncing the aggressive actions taken by Russia, not seeking to justify them by finding tenuous comparisons in recent US and western foreign policy. Ukraine had a clear choice – closer engagement with the European Union or re-embracing Russia. Until Vladimir Putin began interfering in Ukraine’s internal politics and encouraging President Yanukovych to abandon the EU deal in exchange for sweeteners from Russia, Ukraine leant towards Europe. The EU may have its imperfections, but it represents a much more liberal option than anything Putin’s Russia represents, and if anyone has subverted the will of the Ukrainian people and deserves Ron Paul’s disapproval today it is Vladimir Putin.

And while Ron Paul has led from the front in the important public debate about the nature and extent of the US surveillance state, and any curtailments on free speech in America, there is no acknowledgement from him of the grave and far more routine impositions on free speech that take place in Russia. That’s not to say that every criticism of America needs to be counterbalanced with a corresponding flaw in the rest of the world, but it is certainly the case that jumping into the debate on Ukraine without acknowledging this elephant in the room significantly detracts from his argument.

When it comes to counterarguments and balance in media coverage, Russia makes America and Britain’s own tribulations look like nothing by comparison. And while it is unfortunate that some people – particular those from the left/libertarian part of the spectrum – have felt the need to use the Ukrainian crisis as an “I told you so” moment or to burnish their own non-interventionist credentials, this is nothing more than posturing for a domestic audience. It does nothing to help the people of Ukraine or Russia.

While it is Ukraine that is currently being deprived of its territory in Crimea, the usurping Russians are also being robbed. Their loss, taking place with far less comment, is that of their independent press and free speech. And without a free domestic press to even go through the motions of scrutinising Vladimir Putin’s leadership, today’s Russia – in full paranoid, expansionist, Soviet-nostalgic mode – is not going to stop at Ukraine.

Who Really Wants A Free Press?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

MapRSF

 

The United Kingdom has fallen from 29th to 33rd in the world in the World Press Freedoms Index 2014.

The report, compiled annually by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is scrupulous in methodology and incorporates both qualitative and quantitative data. And for a country like Britain, which likes nothing more than to strut around the world proclaiming its comparative virtues, it makes for some dismal reading.

RSF’s summary of Britain is dominated by the British government’s chilling and bullying treatment of the Guardian newspaper as it sought to suppress the publication of information based on the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, as well as the fallout from the Leveson Enquiry into the press behaviour and the prospect for further stultifying regulation of the industry:

In the United Kingdom, the government sent officials to The Guardian’s basement to supervise destruction of the newspaper’s computer hard disks containing information from whistleblower Edward Snowden about the practices of GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency. Shortly thereafter, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian star reporter who had worked closely with Snowden, was held at Heathrow Airport for nine hours under the Terrorism Act. By identifying journalism with terrorism with such disturbing ease, the UK authorities are following one of the most widespread practices of authoritarian regimes. Against this backdrop, civil society could only be alarmed by a Royal Charter for regulating the press. Adopted in response to the outcry about the News of the World tabloid’s scandalous phone hacking, its impact on freedom of information in the UK will be assessed in the next index.

Britain isn’t always called out by name, but there can be little doubt which European country was the intended target of this particularly barbed comment:

These developments showed that, while freedom of information has an excellent legal framework and is exercised in a relatively satisfactory manner overall in the European Union, it is put to a severe test in some member countries including those that most pride themselves on respecting civil liberties.

How true this is. Britain has long been (and has long considered itself) a stalwart defender of free speech, but the recent thuggish attempt to use anti-terrorism laws to detain a relative of a journalist and to threaten a national newspaper with closure unless it destroyed information which had the potential to embarrass the government are more worthy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia than the land of Magna Carta.

The New York Times, on the other hand, looks at the same report and seems to take succour from it, which is very surprising given the fact that their journalists have worked so closely with their beleaguered colleagues at The Guardian.

Their editorial board is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the landmark New York Times vs. Sullivan case, which set the bar for winning libel or defamation claims much higher than in Europe and thus created a bulwark protecting press freedom in the United States. This excerpt from the majority opinion in that case should be mandatory reading for all British politicians and those involved in public life, who are often all too keen to clamp down on free speech at the first sign of discord:

The Supreme Court voted unanimously to overturn that verdict. The country’s founders believed, Justice William Brennan Jr. wrote, quoting an earlier decision, “that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.” Such discussion, he added, must be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” and “may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

While the New York Times is absolutely right to recall and celebrate this landmark victory – libel laws in many other countries, especially Britain, are far too plaintiff-friendly – they seem all too willing to ignore the negative actions that have chipped away at this victory in the intervening half century, the various acts of craven self-censorship or collusion with imperial government overreach or the undermining of factfinding by the ongoing war on whistleblowers.

This selective amnesia leads to the following self-congratulatory pronouncement by the Times editorial board:

Still, American press freedoms rank among the broadest in the world. Citizens and media organizations in countries from China to India to Britain do not enjoy the same protections. In many parts of the world, journalists are censored, harassed, imprisoned and worse, simply for doing their jobs and challenging or criticizing government officials. In this area of the law, at least, the United States remains a laudable example.

The only problem with this statement? The United States ranks thirteen places behind the United Kingdom, at 46th in the world.

Fortunately for the New York Times and the reputation of the American press, the RSF world press freedom index does not take quality of journalism into account, only the ability of the journalist to practice their trade freely – otherwise they could have found themselves docked another few positions for that howler of an America-must-be-best presumption.

The truth is that neither Britain or America have anything to be proud of faced with this latest report. In an ideal world, David Cameron and Barack Obama would be held to account and hauled over the coals for presiding over such a poor performance. A backbench MP looking to bolster his or her civil liberties credentials could do worse than to ask the prime minister to defend or account for his government’s performance on press freedom at Prime Minister’s Questions this coming Wednesday.

But regrettably, a place in the mid-low 30s ranking is exactly where David Cameron, Barack Obama and many of those in power in Britain and America want their respective countries to sit. It allows for a press that is boisterous and noisy in all of the areas that don’t really matter (and so showing every outward appearance of being free), but that meekly tows the line when it comes to critical issues such as national security, civil liberties and holding those in power to account for their actions.

We in Britain or America may not think of countries such as Finland, Norway, Luxembourg or Liechtenstein as shining role models to emulate, if indeed we ever think about them at all. But in some key aspects, it is they who now carry the torch for freedom of speech and the free press, not the traditional Anglo-American partnership who held it aloft so dutifully for so long.

Citing Religious Freedom To Excuse Discrimination Will Come Back To Bite

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

segregation

If your religion requires that you attend church every Sunday, you have the right to do so, and no government should ever strip you of that freedom. And if your religious beliefs compel you to speak out publicly on social issues, that also should be your absolute right, provided that you are not inciting violence against anyone else.*

But if the free exercise of your religion requires that you don’t serve gay people at your place of business because you disapprove of their lifestyle choice, that is just called being sanctimonious, and has nothing to do with piety and everything to do with being judgmental – incidentally, a character trait that some major religions frown upon.

And yet this is exactly the type of behaviour that would be sanctioned under a raft of discriminatory legislation working its way through a number of state houses throughout America. MotherJones reports on this new social conservative backlash:

Kansas set off a national firestorm last week when the GOP-controlled House passed a bill that would have allowed anyone to refuse to do business with same-sex couples by citing religious beliefs. The bill, which covered both private businesses and individuals, including government employees, would have barred same-sex couples from suing anyone who denies them food service, hotel rooms, social services, adoption rights, or employment—as long as the person denying the service said he or she had a religious objection to homosexuality. As of this week, the legislation was dead in the Senate. But the Kansas bill is not a one-off effort.

Republicans lawmakers and a network of conservative religious groups has been pushing similar bills in other states, essentially forging a national campaign that, critics say, would legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Republicans in Idaho, Oregon, South Dakota, and Tennessee recently introduced provisions that mimic the Kansas legislation. And Arizona, Hawaii, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Mississippi have introduced broader “religious freedom” bills with a unique provision that would also allow people to deny services or employment to LGBT Americans, legal experts say.

One gets the very strong sense that the principle of “religious freedom” is being used by the proponents of these bills as a cudgel with which to hit people that they don’t much like.

We can also safely strike out the word “religious” and replace it with “Christian” without affecting the real intent of the legislation, because you can bet your life that supporters of the Kansas bill would go insane if the same law that they support was cited in defence of a Muslim waiter who refused to serve pork sausages to a customer. In fact, ten new campaigns to “keep Shariah law out of America” would be launched before you could utter the phrase “hypocritical, discriminatory nonsense masquerading unconvincingly as a principled defense of religious freedom”.

In short, these bills are exactly what we have come to expect from a religious and social right wing in America that believe the founding fathers established America as an explicitly judeo-Christian land and that the Constitution is nothing more than an appendix to the Bible.

Dan Savage pulls no punches in delivering his verdict on the spate of new discriminatory legislation:

I don’t remember where I read it but this is a good idea: these laws should include a provision requiring business owners who wish to access their “protections” to publicly post signs in their windows and on their websites that list the types of people they refuse to serve. That might prompt some hateful Christianists to think twice. Because then they wouldn’t just be losing the business of the odd gay couple they got to turn away in a fit of self-righteous assholery. They would also be losing the business of straight people who don’t want to patronize businesses that discriminate against their gay and lesbian friends, neighbors, and family members—and others who worry about where empowering religious bigots could ultimately lead.

Not a bad idea at all. Savage may propose it only in jest, but perhaps, if these odious bills are to be passed over Democratic opposition, they could be sabotaged with amendments to include just such a poison pill clause. You want to arbitrarily turn away gay people from your business establishment? Well sure, go right on ahead – but make sure that you post a big sign out front listing all of the types of people whose lifestyles you frown on and consequently refuse to serve. And while you’re at it, post the same list prominently at the top of your company website, just to make absolutely clear which potential customers you are willing to welcome and which ones you will shun. After all, a well-functioning market requires perfect information.

In seeking to usurp the protections of the First Amendment and bastardise them in service of their cynical anti-gay agenda, supporters of this pro-discrimination legislation are starting down a dangerous road. Having only recently put the Jim Crow era behind them, some people seem only too eager to dust off the old “No Colored Allowed” signs and repurpose them for the war against their next target.

Of course, even if the pro-discrimination bills do successfully make it through the state legislatures and get signed into law by the Governors (many of whom have national political aspirations of their own), and even if they survive their inevitable challenge all the way up to the Supreme Court, the legislation would almost certainly be destroyed in the fiery crucible of broader public opinion, most of all among young people with whom the Republican Party has enough of an image problem already.

One of the main problems is the fact that there are no real logical or enforceable limits to “religious freedoms” being proposed. One can easily picture Newt and Callista Gingrich forlornly walking the streets of Washington D.C. in the rain, being turned away from one fancy restaurant after another because the proprietor’s sincerely held religious beliefs prohibit adultery and call it a sin. Of course, under no circumstances could the proprietor ever entertain the idea of serving a customer whose life story did not perfectly comply with the teachings of Jesus Pat Robertson, and if the new legislation is passed he would now have the weight of the law to back him up.

A prohibition on stealing was important enough to be included among the Ten Commandments, so perhaps we can also expect huge lines building outside places like Starbucks as the already overworked employees complete the mandatory criminal records background check before serving you your tall non-fat vanilla spice latte with extra nutmeg.

We are able to laugh at these ludicrous examples of the laws being applied to their bizarre extremes because although the attempt to push new legislation is troubling, it is really nothing more than the death throes of an old way of life where persecution and ostracisation of people because of their sexuality is excused and permitted. The legislation represents a collective shriek of indignance and self-pity from people who are finally starting to realise that they have irretrievably lost the argument, and will soon have to change their own behaviour rather than bully others into suppressing their real selves for fear of causing offense or inviting persecution.

As Andrew Sullivan said of the Kansas bill:

It is premised on the notion that the most pressing injustice in Kansas right now is the persecution some religious people are allegedly experiencing at the hands of homosexuals.

Such a notion is plainly absurd. Certain bigoted Christianists may have convinced themselves that they are being persecuted because they are no longer allowed to inflict their worldview and moral code on others, but there are now too few Americans willing to show up to their pity party to be of any help. Playing the victim card will not work outside the confines of their own shrinking closed network of intolerant people. Sullivan continues:

It’s a misstep because it so clearly casts the anti-gay movement as the heirs to Jim Crow. If you want to taint the Republican right as nasty bigots who would do to gays today what Southerners did to segregated African-Americans in the past, you’ve now got a text-book case. The incidents of discrimination will surely follow, and, under the law, be seen to have impunity. Someone will be denied a seat at a lunch counter. The next day, dozens of customers will replace him. The state will have to enforce the owner’s right to refuse service. You can imagine the scenes. Or someone will be fired for marrying the person they love. The next day, his neighbors and friends will rally around.

If you were devising a strategy to make the Republicans look like the Bull Connors of our time, you just stumbled across a winner. If you wanted a strategy to define gay couples as victims and fundamentalist Christians as oppressors, you’ve hit the jackpot. In a period when public opinion has shifted decisively in favor of gay equality and dignity, Kansas and the GOP have decided to go in precisely the opposite direction.

Instead of full-throated encouragement from the Republican national leadership in support of what the state parties are doing in their name, there is nothing but a conspicuous silence from the likes of John Boehner and Eric Cantor. Nothing from the congressional leadership and precious little from the conservative blogosphere either – tumbleweeds abound. There is a reason for this.

There exists a group of people whose behaviour is so odious and disgusting that it should not be spoken of in polite society; those involved in promoting it are amoral subversives perpetrating foul deeds which constitute an affront to God and to civilisation itself. Such people can barely be described as Americans, and certainly don’t deserve acknowledgement from Washington or protection by the law.

Unfortunately for the Kansas GOP, through their actions they are now that group, not the gay people they so love to persecute.

 

* Should be, but sadly is not currently the case in modern Britain, where the rights of the ultra-sensitive and the politically correct not to be offended supersede the right of the people to free speech.