“No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” - The United States Supreme Court, Texas v. Johnson
From Twitter:
_____ Superintendent
Democracy Prep Public Schools …
Las Vegas, Nevada
Re: Your Mandatory “Critical Race Theory” Class, “The Sociology of Change”
To Whom It May Concern:
I am an attorney and representative of the ___ Family. W. is a student at your DPAC public school and G. is his mother. … [They] objected on conscience to the content … of your “Sociology of Change” class. …
[They] repeatedly objected to the discriminatory content of [this] class that served no apparent pedagogical purpose beyond ideological thought reform. …
[This biracial family] objects to the glib racism of your course materials … which includes … “Racism is what white people do to people of color,” repeated ad infinitum. This and statements like it are patently racist, create a hostile and divisive educational environment, and violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act … which you must follow. …
Mandatory participation … requires … affirming a … politically loaded worldview which W. and G. cannot in good conscience abide. … The teacher … explicitly discouraged disagreement. … [Students were required] to publicly profess their sexual, racial, and religious identities [for scrutiny] … in a derogatory manner. … [This exercise] amounts to compelled speech. …
W. [was threatened with] non-graduation … if he … did not participate fully. …
The purported goal of the “Sociology of Change” class is to change students' fundamental personal convictions. Your behavior implicates the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments. …
The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” _Texas v. Johnson_. …
Burns O'Brien Law
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“Check your white privilege” also demands compelled speech and prescribes “what shall be orthodox” in a matter of opinion.
The sad fact that I have objected to “check your privilege” arguments several times already here [on social media], and always gotten a hostile, condemning response, means either that the public schools of our democracy no longer have Civics courses, or that the Civics courses are intellectually and morally incompetent.
A corollary is that sometimes being a responsible citizen of a liberal democracy may require publicly disagreeing with the community. Moral responsibility can’t be evaded by going along with social opinion. Sometimes, as Mill’s On Liberty states, society practices “social tyranny.”
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John Stuart Mill: “Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compels all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”
[On Liberty can easily be pulled up in any browser. The above passage is about Page 3.]
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