NYC Kills Free Speech

Excerpts from Eugene Volokh:

We can’t be required to even display a license plate that says “Live Free or Die” on our car, if we object to the message; that’s what the court held in Wooley v. Maynard (1978). But New York is requiring people to actually say words that convey a message of approval of the view that gender is a matter of self-perception rather than anatomy, and that, as to “ze,” were deliberately created to convey that a message.

What’s more, according to the City, “refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment.” The label “harassment” is important here because harassment law requires employers and businesses to prevent harassment by co-workers and patrons and not just by themselves or their own employees ...

And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak. Nor is this likely to stay in New York City ... the federal government is taking the view that existing federal bans on sex discrimination also in effect ban gender identity discrimination, and the New York analysis would equally apply to that view; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already taken the view that it is illegal under federal law to persistently call employees by pronouns that correspond to their anatomical sex but not their gender identity, though it has not yet had occasion to opine about “ze.”

6 comments:

raven said...

It's getting to the point where ignorance of the law may be necessary for sanity's sake. I read somewhere that Toronto is considering this with prison time for violators.

Remember the baker and florist, who were deliberately targeted for for their religious beliefs , so those ever tolerant gays could destroy them under the sex discrimination laws? How soon will it be before this new law is used, not to ensure "equality", but a a hammer to hurt the selected?

To paraphrase a bit-
A civil war is the ultimate extension of identity politics.

Grim said...

If I say, "Ze can go **** zirself with that horse****," is that considered acceptable?

E Hines said...

If I say, "Ze can go **** zirself with that horse****," is that considered acceptable?

I'll be saying it in...plainer...English. After all, even the Supreme Court limits us to the plain meaning of the language in court proceedings, and what broader courts can there be than the public square and the court of public opinion?

Eric Hines

Eric Blair said...

Eventually somebody will figure out that if one set of unhappy people can push their drama on everybody else, that everybody else can push back, and there will be lawsuits galore.

Ymar Sakar said...

When the lawyers are the first to die, lawsuits may no longer be such an efficient way to harvest cash from the peasants.

To servants of evil, money is valuable as it is the sinews of their war against humanity. But since they can't resurrect or reconstruct dead people right now, being dead is still a major problem.

On this side of mortality, at least. On the other side, the war continues.

The Leftist alliance continues to slowly mobilize their strategic reserve for their war against humanity, of which Civil War II is merely a minor blip on the radar in the path. Things are proceeding quite according to plan.

Ymar Sakar said...

When Cruz talked about Trum's New York values... well, that's something people intentionally took offense to. Because their New York values has become their Trum hope for a new totalitarian system, in their desperation to fight a totalitarian system.

Humans are ever pathetic in their desperate clinging of hope and unrealistic fantasies.