As Evans sees it, in Foucault’s history discursive change was “all-permeating” transforming the “whole of society” by the “replacement of one discourse by another.” Control was total, no one could escape. From such a viewpoint Foucault’s Discipline and Punish appears simply to describe another, perhaps more extreme, case of a systematic transformation in systems of social control.
What was true of deduction in general was true of the “right of death” specifically: it did not disappear. Instead, it was altered and, as Foucault argued, increasingly displays a “tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly.” Rather than being justified by “the right of the sovereign” the right of death “is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life.” Death now serves the preservation of life itself; it operates in the name of the population and its preservation not sovereignty and its defense.
- What does the neighbors mean in Iranian society?
You have to understand that the average Iranian family lives for the mardom, their neighbors and relatives. They don't have an individual life: everything is done to satisfy the opinion of the mardom. The clothes you wear, the car you drive, the parties you have, your life and soul, everything is for the mardom. The typical Iranian family would rather see their son dead than gay.
The parents of one of my friends pressured him to attempt suicide. They openly asked him to either become "normal" or to kill himself. That didn't work, but they managed to send him somewhere very far away, so none of the mardom would recognize him. They are willing to lose their son, just for the mardom.
When I was in the closet, and suffering through medical school, I became obsessed about my sister's welfare. I thought, "If I come out no decent Iranian man will ever marry her. Maybe I should wait until she gets married, then come out. But what if she never gets married? What if her future husband forbids her to see me if I come out?"
I didn't see myself as my sister's equal. She had the right to have a happy family with a husband. But did she recognize my right to have a loving and caring man in my life? Would she wait until I found my lover, then get married? I am the older one after all. Why would I want a homophobic Iranian man as my brother-in-law, anyway? Homophobia is not a single disorder. It is usually associated with sexism and machismo. Why would I want my sister to marry such a guy?
free speech and discrimination
In the United States and other Western democracies, free speech and freedom from discrimination are regarded as fundamental rights that most citizens take for granted. But what happens when these two rights clash? Which right carries the trump card? There is no place in a democratic society for book burning or censorship. Freedom of expression is the ultimate good. It is a basic right in every democracy. But just as essential is the right not to be discriminated against. Certainly, in a democratic society all people are guaranteed equal treatment and protection under the law.
Discrimination — treating various categories of people unequally — is clearly contrary to the democratic principle of equality. Any democratic government is therefore expected to use legislation and other means to protect its citizens against discrimination. Freedom of speech is the foundation of any democratic society. It should be possible to freely and publicly express a vast range of ideas, opinions and concepts.
A democratic government will use many means, including legislation, to guarantee its citizens free speech. But freedom of expression does not mean that anyone can get away with saying or shouting anything one wants to in public. The United States has regulations and laws that set limits of freedom of expression. For example certain forms of slander are regarded as punishable offences, as are the spreading of particular lies and the incitement to murder or commit violence. Legal innovation is a means to sanction hate speech, providing protection from discrimination.
The United States takes a distinct approach to the conflict between free speech and the ban on discrimination compared to the democratic societies in Western Europe. In the United States, there is genuine lack of enthusiasm to set limits on freedom of speech. In fact, according to the First Amendment of the American Constitution, lawmakers may not pass any legislation that unnecessarily limits freedom of speech.
In Western Europe, there is a greater tendency to place limits on freedom of expression if the right to protect against discrimination is at issue. The constitution of the Netherlands, for example, begins with a ban on discrimination: all residents of the country must be treated equally under equivalent circumstances. Other countries of Western Europe are also more inclined to limit the freedom of speech than in the Unites States. For example, in many Western European counties, public denial of the Holocaust is a punishable offense. Here, it is not.
When hate speech is antithetical to the underlying democratic principles that inform both the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, it should be restricted. The strong link between hate speech and hate crime, and loss of liberty experienced by victims of hate speech, makes evident the contradiction between First Amendment absolutism and the democratic goals of liberty and equality. There is a critical distinction between dissent — the right to criticize the powerful institutions that govern our lives — and hate speech, which is directed against the relatively powerless segments of our society.
WORDS THAT WOUND
We should recognize the grave injuries inflicted by racist hate speech and the potential tensions between legal solutions to those injuries and the First Amendment.
Sociology, psychology and political theory can be used to explain the nature of such harm. Values central to the First Amendment itself are subverted by hate speech.
Racism is the cause of this selective disregard. The inhibition to restrict hate speech is based on unconscious racism. The American Civil Liberties Union has issued a policy statement that reflects sensitivity to the damage that hate speech does to both its victims and to the political discourse that the First Amendment is intended to protect.
Oftentimes, victims of hate are unable to articulate what they feel. They may internalize the injury, rendering them silent in the face of continuing injury. The origins are often masked in the language of shared values and objective legal principles. If ideology is deconstructed and the harm generated from hate speech is identified and defined, degraded victims find their voices. They discover their subordination is hared, thus enabling collective empowerment.
The thread of subordination weaves through analyses of hate speech, legal history, affirmative action, desegregation, religious freedom, civil rights and reparations.
Not surprisingly, there has been a vigorous backlash to affirmative action. In academia, this backlash has been ostensibly polite, using code words such as merit, rigor, standards, qualifications and excellence.
Those who favor regulating hate speech have been labeled intolerant, silencing, McCarthyists and censors. The language of the debate provides a multi-layered blanket of meanings.
Traditional interpretations of the First Amendment arms conscious and unconscious racists — both members of the Ku Klux Klan and political liberals — with the right to be racist. Accordingly, racism is merely another idea that deserves to be protected by the Constitution.
The First Amendment is misused to nullify the only substantive meaning of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, that the Constitution requires the unstructuring of racist ideology.
Freedom and equality are the two major principles supported by the Constitution. Freedom connotes freedom from degradation, humiliation, battering, starvation, homelessness, hopelessness and other forms of violence to the person that deny one’s full humanity.
The danger of white supremist groups such as the White Aryan Resistance, the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi skinheads surpasses their violent hate crimes.
Their mere existence and the active distribution of racist propaganda result in the nullification of personal security and liberty for targeted victims in their everyday life.
Out of question
Consequently, formal criminal and administrative sanction—public vis-à-vis private prosecution—is an appropriate reply to hate speech.
This push for a formal, legal-structural response to hate speech flies in the face of a long-standing and healthy mistrust of government authority. It opposes our tradition of tolerance that is precious and valuable yet fragile.
The basic purpose for the legal restriction of hate speech is to reinforce our commitment to tolerance as a value.
