Defining Down Hate Speech - You're Next!

From LifeSite News:
On Thursday morning, in a special session being held at the Stanford University Law School campus a critical First Amendment case is being argued before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The case deals squarely with the issue of whether Christians have a right to use neutral language in the workplace to talk about same-sex marriage and other issues at the forefront of national debate.

Attorneys Scott Lively and Richard D. Ackerman will be arguing the case before the Ninth Circuit on behalf of an African- American Christian woman who was threatened with termination at her job with the City of Oakland. The City of Oakland claims that references to the "natural family, marriage and family values" constitute hate speech which is scary to city workers. The Ninth Circuit panel of judges includes two women and one man.

[…] Back in February of 2005, United States District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled the city of Oakland had a right to bar two employees from posting a Good News Employee Association flier promoting traditional family values on an office bulletin board. According to the lawsuit, gay and lesbian city workers had already been using the city's e-mail, bulletin board, and written communications systems for promoting their views to other workers, including the plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs, Regina Rederford and Robin Christy posted the flier in response to an e-mail to city employees announcing formation of a gay and lesbian employee association. The two responded with a promotion of their own -- the start of an informal group that respects "the natural family, marriage and family values."

But supervisors Robert Bobb, then city manager, and Joyce Hicks, then deputy director of the Community and Economic Development Agency, ordered removal of the flier, stating it contained "statements of a homophobic nature" and promoted "sexual- orientation-based harassment," even though it made no absolutely no mention of homosexuality.

To paraphrase Neuhaus’s Law (I’ll call it “Mike’s Corollary”), whenever moral values can be selected from a smorgasbord, traditional values will sooner or later become forbidden. The reason is that the mere existence of the good stands as an intolerable affront to the wicked – a constant, unspoken reminder that moral equivalence is an illusion. In order to confirm the legitimacy of one’s choice of the deviant, the normal has to be obliterated.

Do not move your hands; stay where you are; security is on the way!