A proposed bill in Tennessee would create a loophole in the state’s anti-bullying laws to protect those expressing religious, philosophical or political beliefs, which one proponent says would ensure that people can still express their “views on homosexuality.”As if bullying the vulnerable were a kind of prayer or philosophical proposition, a poem! To say that the queer people in their communities are not people at all is not to express a view but to engage in a violence against those people, against their community, and as such against themselves though they will not know it.
The intolerant always demands tolerance for his intolerance. The bigot always decries as violence and as bigotry the restraint of his bigotry from the worst of its violence. The racist always declares racist the exposure and denunciation of his racism. How righteously they demand the rights they violate, how convinced and smug they are in their hypocrisy, how sure they are of the unassailable logic of their self-contradictions! It is a demoralizing game the moralizers play, endless and enervating, and the only winning move for those who would oppose their mean parochialism and energetic cruelty is simply never to play it on their terms.
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