MeDotOrg wrote:A man who worked for an Electrical Company in San Francisco was scheduled to speak at the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. Johnny Raymondetta, a.k.a. Johnny Monoxide, has a right wing blog and a
lovely bio page at the Southern Poverty Law Center web site.
After word of his scheduled speech at the rally became public, Johnny's employer started getting death threats. Rosendin Electric subsequently fired Johnny, stating only that his actions did not match their policies.
Here's a bit of the response from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers:
The views and opinions expressed by insider wireman electrician and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union No. 6 member, John Ramondetta, are solely his own and do not reflect the opinions of IBEW Local Union No. 6 or its parent organization the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers,” read the statement issued by the Union’s Business Manager and Financial Secretary John J. Doherty.
However, the released statement also noted that the union recognizes “that the Constitution of the United States allows him to express these views and opinions provided that he does so in accordance with the law” and that the union’s authorities to discipline or hold Ramondetta accountable did not “extend to the expression of his views and opinions as an individual outside of the workplace.”
I see the point of those who would like to see him fired. If we live in a society where public displays of racism make you a pariah within the larger community, you pay a terrible economic price for the expression of your views.
But as repugnant as I find the views of Johnny Monoxide, I still feel like we are losing something here. I wonder if we are stamping out the problem or driving it deep underground. What is the greater danger? The suppression of freedom of speech? I think of this suppression as being a two-edged sword. Imagine a conservative southern town where a local citizen is scheduled to speak at a Pro Choice rally. What happens if the electric company in that town begins to get death threats for employing a Pro Choice person?
Or is the greater danger the specific nature of the speech itself. Do we need to carve out exceptions to freedom of speech for hate speech? Other countries have done so.
So I'm not really formulating an answer here. I'm inviting discussion.
Timely OP, MeDotOrg, and well stated as always.
I heard a story on NPR on Friday while driving into work that left me perplexed. It was reporting on a previously organized rally to take place in Boston, and on both the concern regarding speakers who had ties to the alt-right and the movement to protest the rally. The rally itself was organized back in July by a group called the Boston Free Speech Coalition who apparently are a group of largely libertarian and conservatives who organized following the high profile protests of controversial speakers at college campuses such as at Berkeley early this year.
As I listened to the report, I wondered if I was the only person who heard it and cringed every time the reporter mentioned protesting the free speech rally? The reporter seemed oblivious to this, taking the direction that the rally was a group of alt-right Nazis, there was a large movement to protest the rally, and the City of Boston was taking many measures to prevent another Charlottesville from occurring.
I thought about this and waited to see if there was news on Saturday when the event occurred. Here are a couple of stories -
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/thousa ... smsnnews11https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/ ... story.htmlThree quotes jumped out at me. From the first link:
Organizers of Saturday's rally in Boston have denounced the white supremacist message and violence of Charlottesville and said their event would be peaceful.
"The point of this is to have political speech from across the spectrum, conservative, libertarian, centrist," said Chris Hood, an 18-year-old Boston resident who stood among a crowd of a few dozen people who planned to join the Free Speech rally. "This is not about Nazis. If there were Nazis here, I'd be protesting against them."In contrast, from the same report:
"Ignoring a problem has never solved it," Cannon said in a phone interview. "We cannot continue to ignore racism."And from the second link:
Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, said the coalition is naïve to think that the issue is about the right to free speech if the expression at their rally dissolves into bigotry and violence.
“You have the right to speak. You don’t have the right to threaten or intimidate people,’’ he said. “You don’t have a right to promote racial violence.”Boston Commons has a unique place in our democracy. It is the first place set aside for all members of the public back in 1634 and is considered the first park in the nation. It represents a democratic ideal that no matter who one is, how wealthy they are, what they do for a living, there are certain public goods and services that should be available to all because there is benefit to the individuals as well as society in having these. It's truly at the heart of what defines our way of doing things as a democracy, more so than how we vote or our system of republican government. It's our public places, schools, libraries, roads, access to information, and above all access to common rights such as that of peaceful assembly and the right to speech.
The second quote is dead wrong in the assumption that everything needs to be actively opposed with which one disagrees, in my opinion. There is no way in a pluralistic society that we should have any expectation that people aren't able to have views with which we disagree. There are a plurality of things we do have to learn to ignore with which we may disagree. We have to have some expectation that others will believe and publicly say things that we find reprehensible. And we can, and in many cases, ought to speak out with counter speech. By that, though, I don't think we are engaging well when we consider spraying people with mace or throwing urine on cops as our civic duty to combat racism. And every expression that doesn't align with one's own particular view isn't necessarily Nazism. I'm not a fan of Trump. At all. And frankly I wish he'd not participate in the conversation right now because things are getting too emotional to allow us to approach the questions more rationally. But we need to be able to question if there are bad players on both sides in order to improve how one goes about striving for a better world for all.
The third quote struck me as sadly ironic as it was the counter-protestors who were doing the threatening, the intimidating. And all in the name of protesting a free speech rally in Boston Commons.
There are times I really wonder how the future will judge us. This is one of those times I have zero insight into, but worry it won't be charitably.
People like Ajax let their basest of emotions guide their thinking, feeding fear and hate. And they encourage others to share in these base emotional responses to our complex world. I hate to say it, but they aren't the only ones. The best among us are cognizant of the values that were the foundation of our society. It was the appeal to these values that made the civil rights movement successful, in large part by embracing them more fully than those they opposed in their non-violent protests and resolve. I think that fighting racism, fear, hate can only be done in this way and be successful.