There are still people out there arguing that slavery might be an ok system. That landowners or taxpayers should be the only ones with the right to vote. That the slaughter of other peoples is the natural way of things and has some benefit and that workers should have zero protections.
All of these things, to you and me, seem obviously like backward movement in terms of general well-being.
We don't hear about these extreme views because they are abhorrent to most people and the people that hold them get ridiculed. Can you not see someone losing their job is they publicly support a return to slavery? Would that be repression of that idea?
I would argue, no, its not. The discourse has reached a societal consensus that slavery is bad. Why? Because it violates some very fundamental rights of human beings. I think we have reached that threshold with the rights of people with various modes of sexual choice.
The appropriate response to someone who is advocating an idea that has been proven wrong, from flat-earthers, to Holocaust deniers, to slavery advocates, is not to ostracize or fire them (unless their job directly relates to the subject that they're mistaken about), but simply to either a) ignore their wrong opinion, or b) gently explain why they are wrong.
The trouble with using "societal consensus" to determine which views should be repressed is that sometimes the consensus is wrong. We cannot know a priori whether the majority or minority is right, so we need to protect all viewpoints, even if it means some wrong ones will persist a little longer. It's ok; eventually they will die off -- two generations from now, a anti-gay-marriage person will be almost as rare as a slavery advocate is today.
It is a huge mistake to ignore people who are in the wrong. If their ideas gain traction because they are given an unchallenged platform that could lead to bad policy that is hard to reverse. Gently explaining they are wrong is only slightly better than sticking our head in the sand...sometimes worse because it is seen as a legitimate debate.
We absolutely do not have to protect all viewpoints. We need to allow people to have them and their freedom to express them but, in the same motion, we must protect others freedom to express disgust.
We cannot allow the behemoth of government acting as referee and thus control the conversation. But the conversation must be allowed to take its natural course.
1. An idea is self-evidently wrong to the vast majority of educated people; e.g., the earth is flat, slavery is good. In this case, the idea can be safely ignored because it has no political power.
2. A bad idea (from our perspective) has the support of a decent-sized group; e.g., opposing gay marriage. In this case, the idea should be vehemently opposed by reasoned argument and political protest, but I think for the reasons given above that it is unethical and unwise to persecute the advocates of the idea themselves. It's perfectly okay to be disgusted with the idea of suppressing rights for a group of citizens, and to express that disgust.
If a big group believes something differently from me, there must be a reason why. In the case of the majority of Californians who voted in favor of Prop 8, they didn't do so because they are fundamentally evil bigots. They did it (in the most common case) because they have been raised to believe a relatively literal interpretation of the Bible, which if read straightforwardly, condemns homosexuality and sees it as a harbinger of a corrupt society.
Aggressively coming out and calling them bigots and publicly ousting people supporting their viewpoint is not persuasive; given their worldview, it will only strengthen their conviction that society around them is corrupt and harden their resolve. If, on the other hand, we make a reasoned and compassionate case that gay rights are a good idea on libertarian grounds and as a way of maximizing the well-being of our fellow citizens, people will, and have, come around.
So, in short, personal attacks like what happened to Eich are neither ethical nor effective as a persuasive tactic.
All of these things, to you and me, seem obviously like backward movement in terms of general well-being.
We don't hear about these extreme views because they are abhorrent to most people and the people that hold them get ridiculed. Can you not see someone losing their job is they publicly support a return to slavery? Would that be repression of that idea?
I would argue, no, its not. The discourse has reached a societal consensus that slavery is bad. Why? Because it violates some very fundamental rights of human beings. I think we have reached that threshold with the rights of people with various modes of sexual choice.