Notes on Freedom

Category: Free expression

October 13, 2022

PayPal is acting like a feudal overlord

In the past, if a government wanted a bank to close or freeze a customer’s account it would have to come banging on the door with a court order. Now, governments have shown that they can close private accounts at the drop of a hat. During the Freedom Convoy protests, the Canadian government drew up a list of individuals – on grounds that were never made clear, although the Justice Minister said that Trump supporters should be ‘worried’ – and banks immediately froze their customers’ accounts, no questions asked.

Indeed, payment companies are taking the lead and freezing their own customers’ accounts, because of vague offences such as perceived ‘misinformation’. PayPal recently closed the accounts of lockdown sceptics, doctors for informed consent, critics of trans ideology, even the Free Speech Union (perhaps for defending trans critical feminists). Other companies such as GoFundMe, MasterCard, Stripe, Etsy, and Patreon have closed the accounts of gender campaigners, right-wing campaigners and critics of vaccine mandates.

PayPal’s recent threat to fine its customers up to $2500 for ‘misinformation’ was a new step. Now they are not only closing accounts but also potentially seizing funds. Although PayPal implausibly claimed that the new ‘acceptable use policy’ was published in error – it was up for several days as a link from its Policy Updates page – the principle of PayPal potentially seizing customers’ funds had already been established. When it closed recent accounts, PayPal stated that it would be holding funds for 180 days to see if any ‘damages’ were due. The idea of holding and perhaps seizing customers’ money was already established in practice.

Similarly, during the truckers’ protests in Canada, GoFundMe decided that it was not going to pass on 9 million Canadian dollars of donations to the Freedom Convoy, since the protests had violated its ‘terms of service’. Instead, it would pass the money to ‘credible and established charities verified by GoFundMe’ (donors could get a refund if they filled in a form). Millions of dollars that had been donated by the public for a particular cause were reappropriated and used for some other cause.

Companies are violating the rules of their own market system. Private property rights are supposed to be sacred, protected with a single-minded obsession that outweighs almost everything else. The sociologist Max Weber said that the operation of the market requires that all authorities work according to ‘calculable rules’ and ‘without regard for persons’ (1). When you put money in an account you need to know that it is safe; when you make a payment you need to know that it will go to its intended beneficiary and not someone else.

Now, governments and companies are randomly freezing people’s accounts and they often won’t even tell you why they have done it. They are lording it over private interests. This has something of the Middle Ages about it, when all lands were nominally held from the king and could be seized at any time if a vassal was not sufficiently loyal; the lands would then be given to a more loyal follower. Now, the bureaucratic-corporate elite nominally holds the wealth of the world; we are graciously allowed to use it, so long as we do not use it for misinformation, in which case it will be taken back and reappropriated to a cause of its choice.

Here is another form of that nefarious principle that your ability to take part in public life is a privilege dependent upon good behaviour. With vaccine passports, you could only take part in society if you had obediently received the correct sequence of vaccines and boosters. If you didn’t get a booster on time, your QR code was deactivated and when you tried to buy a cup of coffee it would not work: ‘This code is no longer valid.’ Now, companies are taking it upon themselves to police the marketplace, so that you can only receive funds and make donations if you express the correct opinions on their flagship issues.

Public life is increasingly becoming subject to an ‘acceptable use policy’. If digital currencies go ahead, the potential for authorities to close accounts, freeze and reclaim funds and refuse purchases will be taken to a new level.

The public backlash against PayPal’s latest account freezes was phenomenal. Thousands of people sent complaints to Paypal and cancelled their PayPal accounts in solidarity, a pressure that led to some of these frozen accounts to be reinstated. The lordly presumption of the new corporate elite is terrifying; we must be prepared to fight it every step of the way.

(1) Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol 2, Uni California Press, p975

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February 3, 2017

Microaggressions – fostering the alienated self

enhanced-buzz-1002-1386285201-29-2The current trend of identifying ‘micro-aggressions’ is not about social categories of exploitation or dominance. Nor is it just about personal touchiness or sensitivity. Instead, it is a prism through which social life and the world is experienced, as something set against and hostile towards the self.

This was shown in a perceptive satire of microaggressions by University of Michigan student, Omar Mahmood, in character as ‘womyn of color’. The satire captures how the experience of aggression structures every aspect of a person’s relations and environment. Even the falling snow: ‘The blistering cold did not turn my eyes from all the white privilege falling around me.’ The ‘womyn’ slipped over on to some steps and was approached by ‘a white cis-gendered hetero upper-class man’; she detected the ‘patronising sneer’ behind his words, ‘Cold, isn’t it?’; and when the man offered her his hand she observed ‘a manifestation of the patriarchy patronizing me’. In the end, the womyn realised that it was not about her colour but her left handedness (an awareness triggered by the cis-man’s comment, ‘I was just trying to do the right thing!’):

The right thing… The right thing… I became so aware at that moment of the left hand that I had thrust out before falling, and suddenly my humanity was reduced to my handydnyss. The words rang in my eardrums, and my blood throbbed.

The satire captures the arbitrary nature of the categories being employed. Categories such as ‘WOC/cis-male-hetero’ are detached from social structure: they do not represent groups or their relations, any more than does left-handedness or snow. Some of these categories are taken from past relations of inequality, but they exist as utterly transformed (which is why they use different terms and are described in an often unrecognisable jargon).

Instead, micro-aggressions represent the polarisation of everyday relations. The offer of a hand, or a consoling comment, is experienced as an act of hostility. In micro-aggressions, to be black, or female, or gay lacks much positive significance; there is little celebration of black or gay pride, or feminist sisterhood. The role of the category (of women, colour, handydnyss) is to give form to the feeling that social relations undo us, are aggressive. That others are set counter to us.

A glance, a question, the direction of someone’s gaze is experienced as a devaluation or an aggression for the individual. One Latino student complains about the way another student ‘noticed my Frida Khalo lighter and was more concerned about her appearance than the actual painting on it’, which was representative of ‘white supremacy at work’ and the exclipse of Mexican art by Eurocentric art. Another student complains that cashiers are not sufficiently cheery with them, perceiving a greater cheeriness with white people before and after them in the queue.

Often, the reality of the situation shines through: you can see the ‘aggressive’ person is just being curious, or making conversation, or making a guess, or a mistake. They ask why you don’t speak Spanish or whether you can read a Japanese character. They call you Jaime Garcia rather than Jaime Rodriguez. A person is offering you their hand and the gesture is transformed into an aggressive act, only because everyday sociality is experienced as a form of hostility.

It is sometimes the case that genuine acts of racism and sexism get called microaggressions, but these are in the minority. The essence of the category (which is why it has a new name) is the individual experience of dissonance with the world. This is why many of the complaints are highly subjective: you can sense a person’s upset and anger, but you cannot understand what the problem was. Why is it a problem that someone said ‘you do not look like the type of person that is interested in watching sports’? Why is this an invalidation?

Groups of all kinds are experienced as toxic, hostile, uncomfortable and painful, even those of one’s own identity category. One gay black woman complained that:

The queer community on this campus can be so incredibly toxic & policing, especially for womxn of color. Identifying as queer is such a hard experience on this campus because of all the heavy internalizations of queerphobia, but not feeling able to sit fully and comfortably with my qwoc self in queer/qpoc spaces is the most painful.

It is notable that the category of micro-aggression is authored by the victim. In effect, they are authoring the narrative of their own non-subjectivity, and the cis-hetero-male aggressor is constructed as a part in this narrative. The cis-man is holding his hands up, saying hey, I was only trying to help, I didn’t mean anything by it.

This means that the category of microaggression doesn’t only express the individual experience of dissonance with the world; it also actively fosters it. Experiencing the world in this way means that someone becomes attached to their alienated condition. A person starts to cultivate dissonance, to almost to revel in their non-identity with the world. The self becomes attached to the experience of alienation; it creates itself as alienated.

This new basis of identity is the reverse of the classical individual, who was based on the extent to which a person distinguished themselves. The personalities of ancient heroes were defined in the extent to which they left established boundaries, and went out seeking voyages, quests, ordeals. By contrast, the micro-aggressed self is defined in terms of what has been inflicted upon it. Therefore, they stake themselves upon their unfreedom, upon their object-character to the wills of others.

Yet of course, this is not an individual at all, but the eclipse of individuality. The same act that estranges the individual from the social, also estranges a person from themselves, from their individual abilities and qualities. Someone becomes not Carol or Jane, a specific individual with a specific inner life, but a ‘qwoc self’, with the self as a composite of queer-woman-of-colour-etc etc. As the satire put it: ‘Suddenly my humanity was reduced to my handydnyss’. Such a person is, at base, uncomfortable – with others, with themselves.

Therefore, the new phenomenon of micro-aggressions reflects neither exclusion nor oppression; nor is it merely the over-sensitivity of people who must be told to buck up. Instead, it reflects a new social structure; a new alienation in social relations, which is reaching into the most everyday encounters and people’s experience of their own personalities.

The solution can only be in combating these structures, and posing against them the truth and innocence of the everyday encounter, the person who is just offering you a hand up or asking about you because they are curious. We must also affirm the individual who is comfortable with themselves, who is not a category but a person, and who is not glowering and counting offences but throwing themselves into the curiousities and delights of our varied social world.

November 19, 2015

After Paris: the ultimate value of the free life

There is a single response to the Paris attacks which alone is positive and worthy of defence: the affirmation of the value of the free life.

The day after the attacks, people instinctively started to gather in Paris and in towns and cities across France. When asked why, they said ‘to do something, to be with other people’ but most of all, ‘to show them that we’re not afraid’. These demonstrations formed in spite of the prohibition on demonstrations: police asked people to disperse but many refused to go. In Toulouse, thousands of people gathered in the main square in open violation of this order.

People responded to the attack on a city crowd by forming as a city crowd. They responded to the terrorists’ attack on the ‘abominations and perversions’ of modern life, on music, drinking and football, by affirming and seeking out these pursuits.

These ordinary aspects of the free modern life took on a kind of glow and heroism. Parisians posted pictures of themselves drinking outside in cafes and bars under the hashtag ‘JeSuisEnTerrasse’. They sought out the bars of attacked areas as a matter of principle, ignoring the government’s request to only go out ‘if absolutely necessary’. People posted their memories of the Bataclan (MonPlusBeauSouvenirDuBataclan), affirming the glory of music and lights and crowds, while a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist did a series celebrating the Paris of ‘music! kisses! life! champagne and joy!.

Before the England-France football match, the French manager said that after the attacks it might seem that football is an inconsequential thing, unimportant, but that actually it has become vital. The Radio France commentator said that football is the pursuit of a passion, the development of a skill, and the public enjoyment of this: ‘We will continue to go out – to live – to play football’.

This assertion of the value of these things in defiance of the terrorists was also a rediscovering of their value, in a culture that is so often cynical about ‘freedom, modernity, etcetera’. Forms of free culture and association are so often seen as shallow, consumerist, anti-social, polluting: every well-formed political ideology of our age appears to be set against those people drinking in bars or dancing to music. The extreme attacks of the terrorists, their absolute distain, develops out of a thread of culture within the West itself.

The public response shows that the elements of a free life have a universal value which people are willing to fight for. They will go out to bars, concerts and football matches, even if this means to put themselves at risk. They state the value of these things and defend them. Charlie Hebdo will continue to critique and satirise, mocking Islamic extremists (‘fuck them, we have champagne’) along with everyone else, though they are under daily threat.

Most incredibly, such affirmation was found even among some of those directly affected by the attacks, as with the Radio France journalist whose wife was killed in the Bataclan. He wrote a much-shared Facebook post addressed to the terrorists: ‘You would like me to be scared, for me to look at my fellow citizens with a suspicious eye, for me to sacrifice my liberty for my security. Perdu’, he wrote, saying of his 17-month old son ‘all his life this little boy will – in affront to you – be happy and free’. He told Radio France that his wife had had ‘enormous eyes’ and their son was born ‘with both eyes wide open’: the value was in pursuing ‘the difficult path of reflection, of reason’, of living with one’s eyes open, choosing and thinking for oneself.

There is a scene in The Narrow Road to the Deep North where an Australian camp prisoner faces up to ‘the grim strength, the righteous obedience to codes of honour that showed no doubt’ of the camp guard, and ‘could find in himself no equivalent life force that might challenge it’.

People are finding an equivalent life force in free life. However, this public response was notably different in tenor to that of the French government. The French state – as well as being preoccupied with those highly necessary tasks of investigating the attacks, pursuing fugitives, arresting suspects – has also struck another line: the assertion of executive power almost as a point of principle. The immediate response to events was a series of restrictions, which included not only bans on demonstrations, orders to not go out, but also declaring a state of emergency which gives prefects (local representatives of the executive) powers to declare curfews and to ban any event. All school trips have been cancelled as an order of the ministry of education.

At a local level, mayors and prefectures have been imposing restrictions upon daily life. At my son’s school in South-West France there is now a large orange sign on the door, announcing that parents are no longer allowed to enter the school and children must be deposited at the external door. Many of these assertions of executive authority appear pointless, a gesture: a terrorist could push his way past the middle-aged classroom assistant, or indeed merely attack the class of 3-year olds lined up by the external door because their parents have not been allowed to take them to their classroom. In practice, the restrictions imposed ‘against the terrorists’ are being imposed against people trying to gather in the streets or parents trying to enter a school. They are blocking everyday associations and free ways of relating to one another.

Therefore, after Paris we should be for freedom and for the free life – staked against the terrorists, the anti-modern cynics, and pointless assertions of executive power.

July 24, 2015

The ‘trigger warning’ school of literary criticism

Why are ‘trigger warnings’ now stamped on everything from the Great Gatsby to Ovid?

The notion of being ‘triggered’ by a book or film is an extension of ideas of ‘offence’ or feeling ‘uncomfortable’. In all these cases, the individual’s encounter with a cultural product is experienced as somehow harming or impinging upon that person. The work or idea is experienced as hostile, corrosive of the self and their identity.

These new terms replace the idea of disagreement or critique, which formed the basis of people’s relationship to books or works of art in the classical public sphere. Each work was held at arm’s length, scrutinised and weighed, probed in all its elements. A disagreement was stated precisely: this work is incorrect or flawed for x or y reasons.

Now, a person’s disagreement with an argument or a book is experienced as an unravelling of the viewer. The dissonance between individual and work is experienced as an affliction: rather than probe the work, the individual is undone by it.

Over time, the nature of the harm supposedly inflicted by an artwork has become increasingly subjective, wordless, and automatic.

The idea of ‘offence’ came first. Offence still contains something of the idea of disagreement – the notion that a person’s specific opinion or belief has been contradicted – even if only in an emotive form. Then came ‘uncomfortable’, with students saying that a particular book or particular ideas made them feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is a more degraded form than offence, because it is inexpressive and purely subjective. When people say they feel uncomfortable they are expressing only the subjective feeling of being infringed or unsettled.

‘Triggering’ is the end point of this process. Here, the unravelling of the individual in an encounter is much more extreme. Being triggered is a form of total breakdown, like a panic attack or another point when the self is entirely undone. The ‘trigger’ is like a sudden attack, and the breakdown of the self is instant and automatic, like the firing of a gun or flicking a switch. ‘I suddenly and quite dramatically feel all-encompassing panic spread through my entire body’, said one woman, describing her experience of ‘being triggered’ (the passive verb form indicates the passive role that the individual is playing in relation to the object).

Trigger warnings began in relation to sexual assault victims on discussion sites, and have spread to every possible phobia (spiders, small holes), negative experience (violence, mental illness, self-harm), and then further to the content of opinions with which a person disagrees (sexism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia). In this process, trigger warnings moved from a specific context to the wider public sphere, to structure the way in which people engage with cultural products.

Sexual assaults and phobias have started to take on a general and metaphoric resonance, as being in some way emblematic of people’s encounters in the public sphere. Sexual assault becomes a metaphor for our encounter with books or films with which we disagree: we are being undone, violated in the most intimate manner.

The trigger warning moves beyond the subjective perspective of the person being triggered, and starts to become an actual system for organising cultural products and people’s relationship to them. Websites such as ‘thiscouldbetriggering’ or ‘whatsthetriggerwarning’ have begun the encyclopaedic project of organising the works of humanity according to their specific trauma-causing qualities.

Works are given tags, labels: the Great Gatsby gets ‘violence against women’ and ‘sexism’. A Streetcar Named Desire gets: domestic violence, suicide, homophobia, rape, statutory rape, and mental illness. The tendency over time is for these categories to escalate, and people are encouraged to write in suggesting new tags or new areas of cultural life to consider in this manner: Can you add a transphobia tag? Can you add ableism? Can you also do songs? The answer is always yes.

Therefore, with the trigger warning we see how the subjective feeling of offence, or discomfort, has been raised into a system in public life: it becomes a school of criticism, a way of systematically reading a work and categorising it. While the triggered person is undone, wordless, the author of the trigger warning is clinical and systematic. One US student had the perseverance to read the works of Ovid and count the number of sexual assaults: she clearly maintained her wherewithal throughout. People work their way through whole television series, or literary tomes, systematically allotting works their respective labels.

These trigger warning critics have the same indifferent clinical approach as a state board of film classification. Everybody recognises that the board of film classification tells you nothing about a film: the statement that a film ‘contains moderate nudity and extreme language’ is a category slapped by officials on the world of culture.

Trigger warnings, by contrast, are produced by the public itself, and become part of the way in which people engage with and categorise artworks. As a result, trigger warnings start to transform the meaning of a work; they are not seen as an external imposition, slapped on, but rather start to become a system that structures interpretation and evaluation.

A novel or film is tainted by its trigger warning in a way it was not by the Board of Film Classification. One novelist described how his reading of Lolita had been forever tainted by his literary professor’s statement that it ‘represented the systematic rape of a young girl’. A work he had looked to for inspiration was reduced to this single negative dimension. A work that ‘contains’ sexism or racism, as opposed to nudity or strong language, becomes subsumed by that negative judgement. In the novelists’ phrase, the trigger warning is a ‘pre-emptive defacement’. A novel or artwork becomes its label; it cannot be looked at in the same way again.

This ‘trigger warning’ school of literary criticism has the peculiar detachment of state censors, whose only concern in a love scene is the precise parts of the anatomy revealed. A book about slavery is found to ‘contain racism’, even if it ultimately is a condemnation of such oppression. The dimensions of the work are flattened out, so that an essentially humanist text can be turned into its opposite.

The trigger warning is a tag which dissuades people from encountering the art object. The warning is there so that you can leave the room, put down the book, turn off the television. Therefore, the individual need never undergo the experience of dissonance with an artwork; they need never encounter the things they find disturbing or the views with which they disagree. The trigger warning, as a system, becomes a guide through the world of culture, such that dissonance can be avoided.

The individual is defined by their tags, the specific elements in the world which undo them. Their exchange with the cultural world can be negotiated, such that clashing tags need never meet. People who are triggered often have friends who watch films for them, test them out, before they are declared safe to be viewed. They move through the world like a paranoid king who fears that every food item or gift contains poison and must be tested first.

The university professor Todd Gitlin criticised his students’ dislike of anything ‘uncomfortable’ and defended the importance of discomfort in teaching. It is the experience of dissonance which takes us out of ourselves, shocks us with another view, and so forms us; it is in the encounter with our contrary that we are developed. This is why negative experiences can often teach us more than positive ones. One psychiatrist argued that trigger warnings even go against treatment of genuine trauma and phobia: it is in repeatedly encountering the object of their fears that the person is reinforced, made self-sufficient, and eventually can face the world again.

The works of art and literature should be cleaned of these defacing warning signs – we must defend the free encounter between individual and artwork, and the developmental value of dissonance.

July 7, 2015

‘Gay cake’ wars and the eclipse of conscience

An Oregon baker has been ordered to pay $135,000 damages to a lesbian couple after refusing to bake a cake for their wedding. A Colorado bakery was ordered to fulfill gay wedding orders and to send its staff for sensitivity training. The ‘gay cake’ wars show the lamentable position into which the idea of conscience has fallen.

These cases are not about an actual conflict of interest: the couples could have found another baker who was happy to fulfill the order and attend the wedding with good heart. Instead, a battle of conscience is being sought where it could have been avoided, brushed over. One person is taking the case in order to force another to affirm their values or way of life.

Indeed, it appears that in some cases gay activists are searching out traditionalist bakers in order to ask them to bake wedding cakes. They had specifically chosen the bakery that they knew would not want to make the cake. In a similar spirit, Christians are seeking out liberal bakers to ask them to make cakes bearing slogans such as ‘God hates fags’, and going to court when they refuse. The cake becomes a means to make someone else voice your views; the case plays the role of the victory of one conscience over another.

These battles show how sorely we are missing the idea of conscience – one’s grounding in a private life or belief, and one’s respect for other people who are similarly grounded. When the idea of conscience emerged in the 17th century it was as an almost sacred faculty implanted by God. The one and only rule of ethics was: do not go against your conscience and do not violate the conscience of another. The primary value was sincerity, and your rights to free expression were derived from your duty to be sincere, to only say things you sincerely believed (1).

In the view of philosopher Pierre Bayle, it was not a sin to err, only to go against one’s conscience;  the ‘erring conscience’ had rights to respect and toleration as much as any other. The notion of conscience at heart implied a reciprocity, that ‘each could recognise in the other the sincerity of their convictions, even if the truth that he sustained differed from ours’ (2).

In these terms, belief was a largely private matter, something like one’s internal reckoning or inner relationship with God. When the formation of belief moved into the public sphere in the 18th century – with coffee shops, publications, salons – and people came together in discussion, these were independent consciences that were brought into dispute. The public culture brought together independent men and women, independent consciences, into reciprocal relation. The relation of argument or persuasion is one that respects this inner core: a person can be won only through reason, and of their own volition.

Now, this reciprocal relation has collapsed. There is at once a lack of respect for the conscience of the other, and a concomitant lack of grounding in oneself. This is why the refusal of a cake order is experienced as a violation or delegitimation of oneself. A man who had a pro-gay marriage cake refused in Northern Ireland said that this made him feel ‘unworthy, a lesser person’. The two Oregon women claimed 88 and 90 different forms of damage respectively, covering every aspect of their psychological and physical being, including: ‘acute loss of confidence’, ‘doubt,” ‘excessive sleep’, ‘felt mentally raped, dirty and shameful’, ‘high blood pressure’, ‘impaired digestion’, ‘loss of appetite’, ‘migraine headaches’, ‘pale and sick at home after work’, ‘resumption of smoking habit’, ‘shock’, ‘stunned’, ‘surprise’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘weight gain’ and ‘worry’.

If one is grounded in one’s own private values, then the encounter with alternative values does not lead to unraveling in this manner. There is no reason why the polite refusal of a cake order need make someone feel unworthy or shameful, or strike at the core of their being.

When a conscience lacks its own grounding, it is touchy and offended at every turn; it is also through overcoming opposing views that it seeks to ground itself. In forcing someone else to affirm your views or way of life – even, or especially, against their own beliefs – then your own values are apparently affirmed. By winning court cases against Christians, gay activists seek to establish the value of their way of life. The relation of mutual respect between independent consciences is transformed into a fight to the death, where one seemingly exists only through the violation of the other.

Yet in truth, the violation of the other turns – with all the justice of the dialectic – into the violation of the self. Ultimately, ‘gay cake’ cases strip these gay relations and weddings of their intrinsic meaning and value. By becoming the subject of a court case, these relations become a parody of themselves, just as a religion is emptied out when it is forced down the throats of heretics.

(By the same accounts, there is also a parody version of Christian marriage, defined against gay marriage: Christian marriage is not grounded in itself, but becomes not-gay-marriage, and defines itself by the question of the ‘compatibility of organs’ and the act of physical consummation. This may be the thing that separates it from gay marriage but it is an entirely brutalist account of the marital union which harks back to the primitive marriage ceremony, with the demonstration of blood on the sheets to the awaiting relatives. As Hegel wrote already in 1821 (3), modern marriage is primarily a ‘spiritual union’, and the physical or ‘natural character’ is downgraded.)

The demand that gay relations or families be universally celebrated is just as distorting of these relations as any criticism. The value of a family – gay or straight, single parent or step-parent, religious or secular or hippy – is that it is a private life-world, founded in the bonds among the members and their friends and extended family. The couple or family does not have to justify itself to society at large, nor does it require universal affirmation for its existence.

The principles of tolerance and formal respect in public life allow different people to pursue very different paths, yet to mutually respect one another. The urbanist Jane Jacobs argues that discretion is essential for public civility. She describes how people would leave their keys with a particular Deli owner for friends borrowing their flat: the deli owner owner combined a ‘feeling of good will with a feeling of no personal responsibility about our private affairs’. He did not judge who they had chosen to lend their flat to, and they did not ask for his approval. Mutual respect requires a certain formal distance, an understanding that people have their own lives to lead that are nobody else’s business.

Public coexistence requires a certain discretion and not forcing the issue. If a Jew cannot work a Friday night, or a Muslim cannot eat sausages, then they require neither condemnation nor enthusiastic affirmation, but merely an accommodation of their private position. It requires a certain tact and avoiding of conflict: this is how very different belief systems can coexist harmoniously.

Such formal respect is as vital to the freedom and equality of gays as it is to other groups. We should halt these absurd battles over the icing of confectionery – live our own lives, and allow others to live theirs.

(1) La Tolerance, Julie Saada-Gendron, Flammarion, Paris, 1999

(2) La Tolerance, Julie Saada-Gendron, Flammarion, Paris, 1999

(3) The Philosophy of Right, OUP, 2008

(4) The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, p78

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