Hey! Someone is criticizing ME!

This blog is all about criticizing infractions of free speech and the only people who argue with me about what I write are normally my own readers. And they certainly don't always agree with me. However, some fat guy in Michigan has put up a post on Science Blogs criticizing a post I put up both here and on STACLU.

His argument is fundamentally a legalistic one but maybe I should say a few words about it. He is talking about the case where some California Christians were forbidden from putting up on a noticeboard a flier containing such dreaded words as "natural family", "marriage" and "family values". I pointed out that forbidding these words seemed to be based on the view that they were hate speech directed at homosexuals.

My critic says that the court ruling supporting the ban has nothing to do with hate speech. He says: "The issue in the case was the application of Pickering, which requires judges to apply a balancing test between free speech rights and the administrative needs of the employer

So the administrative needs of the employer required them to ban use of "natural family," "marriage" and "family values"! Pretty strange administrative needs! My post went to the heart of WHY the empoyer had such strange needs and I stand by my view that the need arose from a perception and treatment of the words as hate speech. The fact that the Christians were threatened with being fired over it certainly reinforces that impression.

P.S.
I called my critic a "fat guy in Michigan" just for a stir. "Stirring the possum" is something of a habit we Australians have. But he did accuse me of "singing an absurd song" so maybe an improvement in manners on his part might get him more favourable mention. He is at least an intelligent critic and has an argument -- both of which are routinely missing from the emails I get from Leftists.


Update:

I see that my critic has replied to this post. He refuses to look at anything but the law and I refuse to look at anything but the total context in which the law was applied -- so it is rather a dialogue of the deaf. His narrowness of thinking does however show in that he closes his post by accusing me of exactly what I said was characteristic of Leftists. A shouting match seems to be the limit of his polemical talents.