"Opinions"
It’s important to respect, protect, and even try to understand opinions. But an “opinion” implies either that there is no right answer, or the right answer isn’t known. People make judgments, and take sides, but does that really give someone the right to demand their belief be respected as just as valid an opinion as any other, despite what facts may be against them?
Chauvinism, the ideology of believing a group (religious, ethnic, gender, etc.) you identify with is superior to another group, is inherently wrong. Or, ironically, that’s my opinion. People have been discriminating against each other for millennia. Sometimes it’s necessary to divide and judge people, even in the most innocent of ways. But ideas like racism, sexism, antisemitism, can they really be classified as just an opinion?
In studying the Holocaust, it quickly becomes apparent how contradictory the chaotic regime of the Nazi party was. The Fourth Reich was, among many other things, largely motivated by antisemitism. But from the drastically different ideologies and methods of ethnic cleansing in Germany’s acquired part of Poland to the constant fights on what to do with the Jewish people (outright kill them, work them to death, imprison them, etc.), there seems to be little agreement on what the “problem” and “solution” of and for the Jewish people should be. There’s an inherent lack of logic or evidence in ideas like antisemitism or racism. Even back in the first semester, we saw the complete lack of scientific evidence for a biological difference between races.
There’s no logic, no good reasoning, to any sort of chauvinism, but it does hurt and oppress people. For that reason, I think no one should be able to defend their racism or sexism or anything else of the sort as an opinion. It’s just wrong, and we treat it as such. Nothing more than an unfounded bias, with no right to be respected.
I agree with your argument that the defense of "stating an opinion" should not be accepted as an excuse for racism, sexism, antisemitism, or any kind of chauvinism. It is dangerous when people minimize the realities of their harmful, ignorant, and unfounded beliefs by simply deeming them "opinions." People who hold these beliefs should not have this defense--what is generally seen as people's right to state their opinions--to merely protect their own ignorance at the expense of the lives of others. Yet, the right to state one's opinion on anything, regardless of whether it is rooted in truth, is protected by the First Amendment, which crucially also protects people's right to express beliefs that are based on truth rather than harmful prejudices. Some opinions can certainly be dangerous, but the potential for those opinions to be expressed, sometimes even in disturbing ways, is the price we pay for the ability to have protected free speech for people who use it for good. Further, in societies where citizens do not have the right to free speech, those in power often utilize that to spread their own prejudices (often to preserve their own power by taking it away from people whom they view as potential threats to that power), and people who do believe otherwise do not have the right to prove them wrong or express the truth. Since some people will always either try to use prejudices or hatred in attempts to subjugate certain groups or people or will simply be ignorant, it is important in a society that people who know the danger in that and are aware of the truth also have the right to speak up.
ReplyDelete