In this edition of The GRID, hosts Chris Kuhlmann and Shaun Griffin explore the strategy of the left to consider words as violence in order to justify a violent response. A citizen says something they disagree with, and they then label the statement as violent speech. This justifies either a violent physical response or a legal response where they demand punishment and legal action for violent statement.
CREDITS
Hosts: Chris Kuhlmann and Shaun Griffin
Written by: Chris Kuhlmann
Produced by: Shaun Griffin
Music composed by JD Kuhlmann
Art: Shaun Griffin
Sound: Chris Kuhlmann and Shaun Griffin
Sponsor: Forever 17
www.Forever17.com
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“It’s time for violence. That and more, today, on the Grid.”
Sometimes I bait our audience with our approach. Today, let’s get started by listening to this clip from Laverne Cox. Laverne Cox was born a male in 1972 and later became a transgender woman, meaning he/she identifies as a female even though born male.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_cI-7_Phog
This is clip is 8 years old, but because it’s significance is now gaining significant momentum, I thought it was particularly relevant to today.
Let’s shift to an actual article from bigthink.com I’m going to read several sentences from this article to get your reaction.
Read Article https://bigthink.com/thinking/is-speech-violence/
In 1989, the novelist Salman Rushdie went into hiding. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwā calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world” to kill the writer without delay, for which the assassin would receive a bounty of $1 million.
Rushdie’s offense was writing a novel. Called the Satanic Verses, the story depicted the prophet Muhammad (and his wives) in ways that incensed parts of the Muslim community and turned the author into the world’s most infamous heretic. As the story circulated through international media, Western intellectuals often offered muddled responses.
Of course it was wrong for Khomeini to call for the murder of a novelist who had merely written a book, most agreed. But few liberal-minded commentators seemed eager to say Rushdie was entirely without fault. The Indian-born writer had, after all, deeply offended the religious beliefs of millions of Muslims, in nations where values like piety and respect for authority had long been deemed more important than free expression….
When speech causes emotional or mental pain, the offended parties are morally entitled to nothing in the form of compensation from or punishment for the offender.
There is, to put it baldly, no right not to be offended. To be sure, that doesn’t mean that deliberately offending people for its own sake is morally acceptable, or that people should be entitled to use speech to incite violence, harass, or threaten. Rather, it means that the impulse to punish people who offend is a regressive urge, one that necessarily chips away at intellectual freedom, even if the punishers do not wield legal authority. Rauch outlined the reasoning:
“If [the offenders] cannot be put in jail, then they should lose their jobs, be subjected to organized campaigns of vilification, be made to apologize, be pressed to recant. If government cannot do the punishing, then private institutions and pressure groups — thought vigilantes, in effect — should do it.”
... In Kindly Inquisitors, Rauch described a problem that every society in human history has faced: How do groups of people best decide who is right? Every person, after all, is fallible, biased, and can only know so much. To answer the question, societies have followed a variety of principles that have helped them reach consensus and produce knowledge…
… Three decades after the Rushdie affair, you do not need to look far for examples of offended people claiming to have been harmed by words. But the only thing new about this phenomenon is the volume. The Roman Catholic Church considered the idea of heliocentricity to be harmful in the 16th century; the same with evolution three centuries later. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Second Red Scare deemed pro-communist writing and speech to be so dangerous to the point of treason…. Whenever speech or ideas are categorized as violence, akin to physical assault, an inevitable conclusion emerges: something must be done…
…“[A]sking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act,” read one op-ed published in The Daily Californian…
… In her opinion piece, Barrett raised valid points about how speech and ideas can cause damaging stress. But ultimately, the so-called “scientific” policy of categorizing speech as violence yields the same prescription proffered by so many people before her: something must be done.
“[W]e must also halt speech that bullies and torments,” she concluded. “From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence…”
… But classifying speech as violence and treating it as such pretends as if the harms caused by words and physical actions are equivalent, despite fundamental differences between the two that even children understand. The classification demands that offenders be punished, leaving people with two options: speak in ways that hurt people with words or in ways that don’t…
…“When we do become offended, as we all will, we must settle for responding with criticism or contempt, and stop short of demanding that the offender be punished or required to make restitution,” Rauch wrote. “If you are unwilling to shoulder that obligation, if you insist on punishing people who say or believe ‘hurtful’ things (as opposed to telling them why they are wrong, or just ignoring them) then you cannot fairly expect to share in the peace, freedom, and problem-solving success that liberal science is uniquely able to provide; indeed, you are putting those very benefits at risk….”
Let’s listen to this video clip from John Stossel.
Play clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=metw9-cdf3U
Now we turn our attention to this brief clip from the Lance Walnau Show
Play clip: https://youtu.be/ttOUffbNM0A
So what are we supposed to do? If our very words, even as benign as they seem quote unquote are “violence” what are we supposed to do?
First, I think we can’t define violence the way the progressive, humanist, void of God, left chooses to do so, and for that I think we have to go to scripture:
First, we definitely should be wary of the tongue and it’s power:
James 3: 1-12
There is no doubt that the tongue is powerful and destructive. Is say that because it’s true. But the emphasis in this passage is the tongue is destructive especially when we “praise our Father in Heaven” but curse our brothers and sisters…this really speaks to a hypocrisy, a presentation of being two completely different individuals.
Read Ephesians 4:15
Now the rubber meets the road. In my mind, the purpose of the left is to silence disagreement, silence those who would call out sin, but as Christians, we should silence our own tongues if we are cursing those we disagree with. BUT and this is a huge BUT, taming our tongue does not mean silencing truth - huge distinction.
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