From: roger@crux.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig)
Subject: Re: Homophobia (really not about  Homeschooling)
Originator: news@nimaster
Reply-To: roger@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig)
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 06:08:24 GMT

In article <C0KJvC.IAM@watserv2.uwaterloo.ca> msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris) writes:

>I said:
>  Steve, I would suggest that you do not understand my usage of
>  ``liberal''. I would also suggest that the reason for this is
>  that you have bought into the pop usage, meaning ``left'',
>  that is, socialist or social agendist, or more pejoratively
>  like Republicans (Rush Limbaugh, say, on the radio) use it
>  to mean ``tax-and-spend-our-money-on-social-programs-Democrats''.

>Roger Lustig responds:
>  I don't think he has -- and I think you're insisting on an excessive 
>  distinction between your brand and all others.

>I think you're wrong on both counts.

What a surprise!

>I identified my usage of ``liberal'' with Enlightenment liberalism.
>Roger responds:
>  Yet many of the "pop" liberal -- not that there's anything especially
>  "pop" about the term; it's just not the one you like, and "pop" is a
>  convenient pejorative -- causes are *also* derived from these things
>  by their advocates.

>Of course these advocates claim such a derivation. The question is whether
>they are correct in their derivation or not.

Reet.  No doubt you can set us straight on philosophical correctness in
these matters.  

>And ``pop'' wasn't intended so much as a pejorative as to concede to
>Steve that he would win any *descriptive* lexicographical argument. It's
>pretty clear that the pop conception is a linear spectrum, with liberal/left
>at one end and conservative/right at the other.

Not clear to me at all.  "Liberal" means all kinds of things in the 
informal world out there, many of them contradictory.  No clear 
spectrum there at all.

>MM:
>                   My problem is that I don't know of any
>  other word to call the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson
>  but ``liberal''. 

>RL:
>  How about "Jeffersonian"?  

>How about it indeed.

>RL:
>  (It might have saved you that enormous sentence above, not to mention
>  a good deal of what follows.)

>(It might have abandoned the word ``liberal'' to its common conflation
>with a kind of socialist democratism.)

Which might not be a bad thing, given the amount of disclaiming you
need to do every time you use it...

(Of course, you're still claiming this "socialist" thing, which is 
still inaccurate.)

>MM:
>  Central to liberalism, you see, is the formulation of the Rights of Man. 

>RL:
>  I don't see.  I see that *a* formulation is central; I'm not sure 
>  that we all agree on the specifics.

>I'm certain that you and I do not agree on the specifics. I'm also
>certain that (in part) to the extent that we don't, your politics
>are illiberal by the standard of Enlightenment liberalism.

I get it.  You get to decide what liberalism is, and you get to decide
what the Rights of Man are, and you get to decide what they mean in 
practice.  And since, by *any* definition, they're a Good Thing, your
political philosophy is automatically a good one, and divergence from
it is bad.  Say no more.  

Sorry, pal, but there is no unitary standard of Enlightenment Liberalism.
Nor is there a unitary 20th-century implementation of same.  The transition
from a philosophy espoused in a book written 200 to 300 years ago to 
a viable form of government or policy or whatever is a tricky one, and
not one that can be done with mere emphatic statement of principles.

>RL:
>  Yet that absolute moral judgment has limits.  Limits, in some cases,
>  on what *can* be judged; limits, in some other cases, as to the 
>  appropriateness of *applying* such judgments.

>Of course. Did you expect me to disagree about this?

Hard to tell, since the absolutes seemed to be what fascinated you.
imho, they're something to be used as little as possible.

>I said:
>                                                OK, so I hope I have made
>  it clear that liberalism is distinct and opposed to socialism or social
>  agendising. 

>RL:
>  You haven't.  Do you suppose that Jefferson had no social agenda?  Do you
>  suppose that *any* writer on rights had none?  And that these agendas
>  weren't reflected in their writing?

>No, I suppose that Jefferson's liberalism (and Locke's, and Voltaire's,
>and Mill's) was a political philosophy directed to the *limitation
>of the power of government in order to keep government from causing
>certain clearly perceived harms*. This is fundamentally different in kind
>from political philosophies that are directed towards *increasing the
>power of government to cause positive good to happen in the private
>sector*. Get it?

It is ALSO fundamentally different from your boneheaded insistence that 
any limitation of government is a good thing (see previous post) no matter
what the purpose of the thing being limited, and likewise fundamentally
different from your pretense that government should not address any 
clearly perceived harms in the public sector at all.  Your "positive
good" claim is a red herring; we are speaking of redressing positive,
perceived, felt, measured harm.  That this harm is in the private sector
is irrelevant; after all, so are most thefts.

>RL:
>  Great.  Now, what is it, and how does it work?  *Does* it work?  And what 
>  do the various "rights" -- e.g., to life or liberty -- mean in practice?

>What it does is disallow government the power to violate the Rights of
>individuals. This includes a disallowance for the power of government to 
>accomplish many seeming goods, exactly insofar as the exercise of this
>power might infringe upon the Rights of individuals. In other words,
>it is better to leave individuals unprotected against the encroachments
>against rapacious other individuals than to sanction one single law
>for which the government is even a little bit rapacious.

Yet we do this all the time, and no liberal (tm) has ever objected.

We have a police force that looks out for burglars, even though the 
existence of that police force can on occasion cause us non-burglars
problems.  It also costs money--tax money, usually.  I know of no passage
in Jefferson where he denies the police power of the state, yet that is
a clear violation of the Rights of individuals.  Is unlimited burglary
better?

Of course, your whole sentence above is one more straw man wrt the present
discussion.  Government is not being "rapacious" when it limits the 
ability of employers to control the private lives of their employees --
nor is government the only rapacious agent out there.  What of the 
*private* rapacious institutions -- not individuals -- that can take
on quasi-governmental authority if the government is not there to 
insist on justice?  See Japan, where corporations keep lists of caste
members and base hiring decisions on them.  (This is illegal in Japan,
of course, but the government has not been sufficiently rapacious so
far as to allow members of the untouchable caste to achieve full 
equality of opportunity.)

>I had said:
>  Now, Steve, I think you should understand by now from what I have
>  written in response to Evelyn about CO2 that if something like your
>  scenario *is* the case with CO2, then I would change my mind and
>  would oppose it. What I don't now believe is that what you have said
>  is true is what the law really means. (I am willing to be shown otherwise,
>  however.---I am not a lawyer.) 

>RL:
>  Read the statute.  Now consider a real case -- the firing of all gay
>  Cracker Barrel employees -- and show how a suit brought in Colorado
>  would NOT run up against CO2, and show how that firing is consistent
>  with liberalism.  (I.e., show what your brand of liberalism means
>  in that one practical case.)

>I think that the owners of Cracker Barrel have a Right to insist on
>a homespun, conservative, even flaming fundie image if they want to.

At the cost to their gay employees of all kinds of things.  Employer 
image is worth everything -- employee privacy worth nothing.  Why does
this smell less like liberty than what I would normally expect?

>Precisely insofar as hiring gays conflicts with this desire of the
>owners of Cracker Barrel to associate in their business only with
>people other than gays, or even only with people who disapprove of gayness,
>I think that Cracker Barrel ought to be allowed legally to fire the people
>it fired for this reason. In Colorado, because of CO2, it would
>be legal by state law for Cracker Barrel to do this. That is as
>I think it should be. In other states it would not be legal. That
>is wrong. (Point being there ought not to be legislated anything
>approaching a Right to Employment, 

YO!  MIKE!  WAKE UP!  WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT A RIGHT TO EMPLOYMENT!

We are talking about a right to be treated fairly.  We are talking
about a right to privacy.  We are talking about a right to live 
uncoerced by one's employer, especially when not at one's place of
employment.

These are not abstract things.  Employment is necessary for survival
for most of us.  If enough employers will it in your system, all the 
gays (or Chinese or Jews or whatever) starve.  

These are the rights, the freedoms, that classical liberalism, for 
heaven's sake, addressed in the first place -- the right of the 
INDIVIDUAL, not the corporation, to live as undisturbed as possible.

Corporations exist.  They have quite a bit of power.  If it is absolute,
it will, as you know, corrupt absolutely.  It will deny the employees 
ALL their rights other than that to flee, and even that has, in the 
past, been denied by employers.  

We don't live on a chessboard.  We live in a society.  Our rights are
not derived from a few simple principles, but from millennia of
observation of what people do and how they live.  The claim of derivation
from Natural Law is all very nice, but natural law eventually boils 
down either to bigotry or to observation of how the world works.  

>that being an intrusion by
>government on the private sector's business---even if that
>pursuit is morally misguided, as I think it is in Cracker
>Barrel's case.)

Well, the private sector is capable of misdeeds, as you know.  And
if their misdeeds are not only of a moral, but of a material sort,
then the government, which is generally considered to have a charter
to prevent acts of coercion and fraud, may indeed step in.  

>I said:
>  You see, if your point is that one may
>  use typically any grounds for ``wrongful termination'' suits *except
>  now* homosexual or bisexual orientation, then I doubt it.

>Roger says:
>  Well, that's *exactly* what the statute says: homosexuality is *not*
>  grounds for a discrimination suit, and "Wrongful termination" in this
>  case means termination on grounds of discrimination.  Yet it's bloody
>  obvious that termination on grounds of heterosexuality *would* be (and
>  is and ought to be) actionable.

>Well, that's exactly what I don't understand yet. Is it really
>true that the background of law makes it that *anything* can
>be grounds for a wrongful termination suit (so that the effect
>of CO2 is to except one lone reason among zillions)? Or is it only
>that a small list of social-agendist reasons can be used
>as grounds for wrongful termination suits (so that the effect
>of CO2 is to refuse to add or to delete the fifth or sixth
>entry, say, on a small privileged list)?

If you don't know, why not find out instead of posting all this 
verbiage?   

And skip the slanted nonsense -- those reasons are hardly "social-agendist."
Unless you consider combating coercion to be social-agendist in all cases.
  
If you will, the social agenda here boils down to the recognition of 
specific sets and patterns of wrongs, a refusal to play the game on
the chessboard, instead using government as it was founded -- to do
real things in the real world and address real problems.  

The background of law, for your information, leaves open what can and 
cannot be grounds for a wrongful termination suit.  Certain things
are not grounds -- poor performance, illegal activity, etc.  Other 
things have been established as grounds.  The rest remains to be 
decided, case by case -- something that must horrify your rule-based
world-view.

>I trust you've followed the origin of this thread? In brief:

Yes.

>Francis implied it would be foolish to think all OR9 supporters
>were homophobes. 

I agree.  Some are merely dupes.

>Laurie Mann said she thought all OR9 and all
>CO2 supporters were homophobes. I said I hadn't yet seen the text
>of the measures up here, but that my support or opposition to either
>measure was crucially dependent on the wording of the texts, and
>could anybody please supply them and then maybe I could learn
>whether I am to be judged homophobic? 

Well, you saw them.  

>Basically I said that if the
>measures denied to gays human Rights (Rights which come by
>virtue of humanity) then I would oppose them, but that if the
>measures denied gays coming by any sort of specially privileged 
>minority status *by virtue of their sexual preference*, then I would support
>them. 

And is not sexual preference a human right?  Or, since we generally
accept that humans do not come to their sexuality by preference, 
is not the right to *exist* a human right?  

You see, the CO2 statute actually limits the right of gays to EXIST 
in Colorado, to compete, to seek employment on the same terms as 
other people.  The measure specifically PRIVILEGES heterosexuals
by giving them a legal status that homosexuals do not have, and 
furthermore encourages intrusions into personal privacy by explicitly
holding harmless those employers who fire on grounds of homosexuality.

>Also I said that I have heard both these characterizations made of
>the measures by people who then either knew or supplied no details. Evelyn
>Leeper then posted the texts of both. And I determined upon reading them
>that I would oppose OR9 and support CO2, but I also said that my
>support of CO2 would be *contingent upon the answer to the questions
>I have just asked in the preceding paragraph*. For, if the background
>of law to which it would apply---claims of discrimination, that is---is
>such (as I said at first) to admit of *any* reason, then I would be willing
>to change my mind and oppose CO2. 

Well, I'm kind of shocked that you, who claims expertise in Natural Law
and human Rights and all kinds of capitalized things, doesn't know bupkis
about how real-life law works, and how decisions are made, and how the
right to privacy IN REAL LIFE affects one's freedoms.

>If, on the other hand, claims
>of unfair discrimination can only be made on a few specifically
>legislated grounds---race and gender, for instance---then I would
>favor CO2. I've had both answers given to me, so far without support.

Discrimination and unfair firing are two different things.  Which are 
you asking about?  

Moreover, are you asking about suits or about statutes?

>RL:
>  Depends on the situation.  If these things have nothing to do with 
>  one's ability to perform (food servers might have to deal with the 
>  body odor problem, submarine crews with tallness, pilots with poor
>  vision), then, yes, one can sue.  Why should one's wearing of glasses--
>  certainly an accepted social behavior--keep one from entering data
>  or whatever?  

>I didn't say that wearing glasses should keep one from being hired.
>Neither did I say that being gay should keep one from being hired.
>I think it oughtn't (at least in most cases). The question is whether
>I'm willing to agree to legal sanction against those who transgress
>the moral law that employers shouldn't fire anyone for irrelevent reasons.

There you go again -- it's NOT JUST MORAL LAW.  It affects far more than
that, and amounts to coercion, which is what the state is there to 
protect against.

>I'm not.

Fine.  Now address the issue at hand -- what of the MATERIAL harm that 
comes from such actions?  Screw the moral issue for a moment.

>I said:
>  My understanding is that such wrongful termination
>  suits can only be based on claims of discrimination on the basis
>  of sex, or race, or a finite discrete set of other special categories.

>RL:
>  Nope, not the case.  Workers are protected from capricious firing.  And
>  with good rights-of-man reasons, too.

>Well, you're assertive about it. Could you please back it up? I mean,
>with regard to claiming discrimination under Colorado law.

Federal law, actually.  Limits coercion in the workplace.  That's what 
the NLRB is for, for instance.  

>No, not with good Rights-of-Man reasons, however.

Well, you should know, being the one who gets to define them absolutely
(see above).

>RL:
>  b) the intent of the statute was nothing like that, either.  CO2 was
>  *not* the product of rights-of-man liberals like yourself, but of
>  homophobic religious bigots who would exclude atheists like yourself
>  if they could get away with it.  

>I understand the nefarious support of some for CO2. Do you understand
>the nefarious opposition of some to CO2?

Irrelevant.  Hitler liked chocolate cake.   So do I. 

But chocolate cake was not part of the agenda of the Third Reich.

This statute is part of a larger agenda to severely limit rights.  It
is, in fact, a campaign AGAINST classical -- and all other kinds of --
liberalism.  Your kind and mine.  It is an attempt to impose a Natural
Law unlike the kind you espouse.  

No, opposition to CO2 has not, as far as I can tell, been nefarious.
It has in no way threatened the rights of anyone, including employers.
I do not consider prying into the life of the individual employee to
be either right or privilege or prerogative of the employer; I do not 
believe that the rights of the individual end at the plant gate, and 
I do not believe that the individual should have no redress in court
against such aggression against the freedoms and rights of privacy.

>RL:
>  Yet you don't examine its crucial legal aspects--intent and likely
>  effect.  It was intended to take equality away from homosexuals and
>  may do just that if it is not found to be unconstitutional.

>Well, we all have intents. Similarly, there is equality and then
>equality. I do not think the kind of equality it was intended
>to take away is a Rightful equality.

Translation: there is no right to privacy; the employer may know all and
control all.  

Sorry, but the "Four-Legs-Good, Two-Legs-Bad" dichotomy of governmental
and private coercion you propose doesn't impress me, nor has it ever
been found to resemble justice.

>RL:
>  Fine.  But you're not a Colorado court, and it's what the law says to
>  THEM that matters.  And it says to them: don't consider complaints 
>  based on discrimination against gays.

>No. Based on discrimination against gays by reason of gayness.

Very good.  You get a gold star.  What's your point?  

>What *other* reasons *are* admissible ``claims of discrimination''
>under Colorado law?

Why do we have to tell the World's Foremost Authority about this?  Why
don't you find out a bit about this yourself?  It's not as though the 
newspapers haven't covered it.  As I stated above, this is not a 
completely decided issue.  However, sex, religion, marital status, etc.
are among the reasons that have been admitted.  

>RL:
>  THAT law is unfair, at top,  bottom, and in between.

>Nonsense. Some (even most) discriminations against gays by reason
>of gayness I might agree are morally wrong. But ought to be legally
>punishable, I don't think so.

So tell me, O Wise One -- what SHOULD be punishable?  If the coercion 
inherent in such discrimination isn't punishable, what is?

>RL:
>  Which laws are those?  I'm not sure I can think of a law that CO2 addresses
>  that would be contradictory to your liberal (tm) philosophy.

>The wrong laws are the laws that set out to establish a Right to
>Employment, or perhaps a legal Right to Fair Opportunity of Employment.

Still doesn't get it.  IT'S *PRIVACY*, STUPID!  This kind of discrimination
violates privacy.  The right to one's own person.  The right NOT TO BE ASKED
about matters not pertaining to employment when seeking employment.

And since systematic unfairness of opportunity most certainly does constitute
coercion, and most certainly exists, and is in fact encouraged by the 
statute in question, your talk of "wrong laws" is odd, to say the least.

>My authorities for my usage of ``liberal'' are Dumas Malone
>in the 1948 preface to his six-volume Jefferson bio, F.A. Hayek
>in the 1950s Forward to _The Road to Serfdom_ (where he specifically
>discusses the left's appropriation of the word away from Jeffersonian
>liberalism), and (you're gonna love this, Roger) Allan Bloom
>in the opening essay of _Giants and Dwarfs_ (where he calls
>Locke ``*the* philosopher of liberalism''---you might also check
>out his essay titled something like ``Raymond Aron: Last of the
>Liberals'', which I have not yet read).

No, go ahead -- be my guest.  

As for serfdom, I don't recall it having much to do with equality of 
opportunity, legislated or otherwise.  

>Perhaps you would be so kind as to provide me with some authority
>(I mean other than Clayton and Rush) for the usage of liberal
>to mean not the limitation of governmental power (i.e. leaving individuals
>free to choose wrong even), but the aggrandizement of governmental power
>for the purposes of *forcing* societal good? 

If you're not interested in this discussion, but just in false dichotomies
or straw men, why not just skip it entirely?  The goal is NOT any
"aggrandizement of governmental power" but the empowerment of the 
INDIVIDUAL to come to justice.  The government grows no larger by 
this statute -- but the doors of the courtroom are opened to those 
who are otherwise systematically denied elementary justice, elementary
privacy, elementary dignity -- human rights all.  

CO2 is, in a very real sense, a step on the road to serfdom: it makes
a group of people into second-class citizens, less entitled to redress
than others.  It is the first such legislation in this century.

>It's not so much that
>this might say anything to my point that there is an opposition
>between the two meanings, but I'd dearly love to learn how it is
>the word shifted from meaning one thing to the other
>(Hayek blames New Dealers in the States in the 30s and 40s for this),

Hayek doesn't bother to note that the New Dealers were also interested
in liberty.  He sees only demons among those who disagree with him.

>except in seemingly some literate circles.

Well, let us know when you find out.  "Liberal" has had all kinds of 
meanings.

Roger
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