“Simply expressing religious opinions about homosexual acts”
Yet another Open Letter to Peter Tatchell – perhaps the most confused to date.
I am hosting this open letter on Peter Tatchell, Censorship, and Criticism written by concerned activists, writers and scholars. The letter has been signed by over 100 people. To add your signature, please email freespeechletter@gmail.com. Here is a link to a press release put out today, February 22 to accompany it
As human rights activists, writers, and scholars, we strongly condemn the actions of Peter Tatchell in bullying, vilifying, and inciting a media furor against a student who criticized him in a private e-mail. These attacks exemplify a pattern; Tatchell has repeatedly shown intolerance of criticism and disrespect for others’ free expression. They also exemplify a broader problem. A moral panic over inflated claims of ‘no-platforming’ reflects a persistent, deep resistance to diversity in intellectual and public life.
What? Objecting to no-platforming and/or related forms of shunning reflects resistance to diversity in intellectual and public life? As opposed to shunning itself doing that?
It all depends on which shoe is on which foot, of course. The words all depend on who is talking and who is the talked-about. I don’t have a single, firm, no exceptions view on no platforming and other shunning, because I think it depends, and has to depend. I think it’s ludicrous to shun Peter Tatchell while I don’t think it’s ludicrous to shun, say, Roy Warden. I think some protests are more reasonable than others. But I think it’s flagrantly absurd to claim that objecting to shunning people over minute differences reflects resistance to diversity as opposed to advocacy of diversity. I don’t buy the claim that you get more diversity in intellectual and public life by shunning Peter Tatchell.
UK media have attacked Fran Cowling, National Union of Students (NUS) LGBT+ Officer (Women’s Place), for allegedly ‘no-platforming’ Tatchell from a conference on “Re-Radicalizing Queers” held at Canterbury Christchurch University. These reports are simply untrue.
The facts are these. Cowling was invited to attend the conference by the event organizer, another Canterbury Christchurch student. She declined. Her decision not to attend was informed by her belief that Peter Tatchell has engaged in problematic tactics and politics regarding Muslim, Black and trans communities, for which she provided evidence. Without permission, the other student forwarded this confidential email chain to Peter Tatchell.
Waaaaaaaaaait a second there. Slow down. Cowling was invited to attend? Well if she was invited to attend, why did she feel any need to “provide evidence” of anything? Why didn’t she just say no, or no, I can’t, but thank you? Why did she need to tell the organizer about her “belief that Peter Tatchell has engaged in problematic tactics and politics regarding Muslim, Black and trans communities”?
And note the awful, stupid, thought-free wording of that claim – note the pious way of lumping all those people together as “communities” and pretending Tatchell dissed all of them. Note the creep-word “problematic.”
In the following days, Peter emailed NUS demanding further evidence for this claim. NUS assured him he had not been ‘no platformed’ and that Fran’s decision was not an organisational one. Tatchell persisted, however, and on the afternoon of February 11 he demanded that Fran Cowling apologise to him and to the University for her private e-mail. Less than 24 hours later, NUS received a press request from the Observer: Peter had forwarded them the emails. They asked why he had been ‘no platformed’.
In the massive furor that followed Fran Cowling has been smeared, bullied, trolled, and harassed in the national press and on social media. Tatchell has personally vilified her and encouraged others to do so, writing in the right-wing Telegraph that she posed a threat to “enlightenment values.” Yet Tatchell was never censored. He spoke at the conference; he took his case to the Telegraph and Newsnight; he has not been “silenced.”
But he’s been accused of being “problematic,” and we know where that leads. It leads to being silenced. It leads to being discredited among the people Tatchell works with – his “community” if you like.
Peter Tatchell has little credibility as a free-speech defender.
- Tatchell has a long record of urging that public platforms be denied members of ethnic and religious groups, especially He has called for banning so-called “Islamist” speakers from Universities. He has even demanded mosques apologise “for hosting homophobic hate preachers” and give “assurances that they will not host them again.” Tatchell claims the right to decide who qualifies as a “homophobic hate preacher”; what counts is not inciting violence or any tangible threats to LGBT Londoners, but rather simply expressing religious opinions about homosexual acts. The peculiar urgency with which Tatchell targets Muslims lends credibility to the charge of racial insensitivity.
Wow. So Alana Lentin is saying “religious opinions” about “homosexual acts” are not something that should be protested or apologized for, while Peter Tatchell is. And then calling him racist for good measure.
This is not my Left. I shun it.
This would seem to imply that it’s OK to incite violence against LGBT people in other places…
I think my brain is melting from all this. The ‘left’ does have a spectacular propensity to publicly eat itself, which is then gleefully used by conservatives to demonstrate the lefts unfitness to be taken seriously.
I can understand that Cowling and their supporters feel aggrieved at someone with Tatchell’s clout taking this so public. There is undoubtedly a power imbalance to the extent that Tatchell can attract more mainstream attention. However, once that attention has been attracted and the 15 minute furore this generates in the MSM dies down, the only opinions that will have any lasting impact are those in the community/communities they share. These are essentially left wing activist communities of one sort or another.
The power imbalance is much less pronounced there, as is evident by the support that Cowling has been getting. It is also an environment in which Tatchell’s reputation can easily be destroyed or badly damaged by back channel whispers and communications.
It is also terribly naive to perceive or characterise the email communication with the event organiser as private. This wasn’t a conversation between two activists regarding their opinions about a third activist. This was an invitation to participate at an event turned down because of specific (perceived) problems with Tatchell. The organiser would have been remiss in their duty to the event and participants if they had not investigated those claims further. Certainly, it was clumsy to forward the original email to Tatchell, but at the same time he has a right to know who his accuser is and exactly what has been said about him. Any defence is almost impossible otherwise and whispers rule. Tatchell may well have felt the only way he could preserve even a shred of his own reputation was to immediately cast a cold light of public scrutiny on the allegations made about him.
Jib, I don’t think so, but it is a sign of just how inward looking some people are.
I’m not surprised. Muslims and other religious immigrants from “the global south” outnumber LGB people in the UK, and the British Left has been sidelining/downplaying LGB (*) issues for fear of alienating the larger bloc. Whenever these “oppressions intersect,” it’s gays who are expected to shut up and be respectful of different beliefs (it’s nothing new for Tatchell, for instance, to be accused of racism and Islamophobia for daring to suggest that he doesn’t feel like being thrown from the highest mountain, or that he doesn’t enjoy reggae/dancehall songs about killing gays for sport). A few years ago the UK’s Respect party actually removed mentions of LGBT rights from its platform (one of their leaders, Lindsey German, declared that LGB rights are fine and everything but should not be a “shibboleth”) prior to an election because they were doing a lot of campaigning for Muslim votes.
I see this continuing and getting worse. People assume that progress can’t be turned back, but I see LGB people returning to pariah status in the West if the Left continues to defend right-wing stances on social issues in pursuit of being “multicultural” and “post-secular.”
(*) I’m excluding the T because the “social justice” crowd doesn’t seem as willing to throw transgender people under the bus; they seem to accept Iran’s stance on sex reassignment as a sign that Islam and trans are compatible.
I think intersectionalism is harder than most people realise. Sometimes it leads to unresolvable ambiguity. Working out which axes of oppression should trump which is not going to lead to fair outcomes. Instead, we need to discuss them all with empathy and reason. Unfortunately, empathy and reason are all too often in short supply.
Urgh, what a mess. The NUS is a joke.
I’d question whether this was a case of ‘no platforming’ though. Declining an invitation to share a stage with someone isn’t a problem in an of itself (nor is it remotely new). Was there a campaign to put pressure on the organisers to disinvite Tatchell? Cowling’s ‘evidence’ e-mail was unnecessary and completely wrong, but I’m not sure it counts unless there was a concerted effort to have him removed.
“Expressing religious opinions about homosexual acts” sounds so much better than “advocating the death penalty for homosexuals” or just “wanting to kill the gays”.
I think some kind of concept has developed that if a group are disadvantaged on one axis (ethnic or religious minority immigrants) then they have to be excused for being horrible on another axis (e.g. vicious homophobia and misogyny).
It’s the racism of low expectations once again. And now they’re telling Peter Tatchell that he ought to be OK with people calling for his death. This is revolting.
@6,
Utterly. There is now an Orwellian hierarchy of victimhood in the regressive left, and the views of the Muslim minority in western countries (though growing fast and whose repulsive religion already controls large regions of the world) somehow trump the rights of gays and women, not to mention ordinary freethinkers. And those who would defend what the left used to represent are now somehow the villains!
How on earth did groveling before Islamists become ‘progressive?’
How did we end up with ‘FEMINISTS’ rationalizing the veil and FGM?
How did the ‘left’ become solidly anti-Semitic (oops! anti zionist…) in unison with neo-fascists?
Oh yes the antisemitism is astounding. This article on feministing.com approvingly mentioning the boycott of Israel was really something. http://feministing.com/2015/12/03/largest-academic-feminist-organization-in-north-america-backs-israel-boycott/ (“Dont buy from Jews!”) They sound like confused German conspiracy nuts. (There is this weird movement going on here at the moment which is like a mixture of ultra leftwing and ultra rightwing ideas with lots of anti-Americanism and “Antizionism” and the belief that Germany is actually not a Republic but a company controlled by the US or something. But they also throw in a lot of rhetoric about how harmful capitalism is and about peace and environmental issues. It’s pretty disturbing, because they manage to attract naive left leaning young people towards conspiracy nonsense and antisemitism.)
(I’m sorry if my comment was off topic, by the way. I didn’t mean to ramble)
I’m struggling to see the feminist angle to the Palestine / Israel / BDS situation. Yes it affects Palestinian women, but as far as I can see, it affects Palestinian men to the same degree. Hence if it is a feminist issue, then it is also a men’s issue to the same degree; but I find it simpler to say that it is neither on the basis that the issue is not biased with respect to gender.
(Tangentially, and even further off topic, I don’t agree that BDS is anti-semitic.)
Oops… my comment at #9 was meant as a follow-up to the one by SAWells at #8.
When people start to speak of shunning, I start to think of a squabble among the Amish.
He has called for banning so-called “Islamist” speakers from Universities. He has even demanded mosques apologise “for hosting homophobic hate preachers” and give “assurances that they will not host them again.
They’ve veered of into sheer insanity here. When Muslim ‘scholars’ openly call for the death of homosexuals at university venues, it most certainly is time to ban them.
Alana Lentin and Fran Cowling will eventually encounter their own tailor-made Gulags.
The thing about so many passionate leftists these days is that the only platforms they can find tend to be in more the conservative publications or organizations. I’m quite sure the ‘simpleton’ left ( best exemplified by Jeremy Corbyn) would consider Germaine Greer as *Far Right*.
But I take heart, though, because none of them are ever going to get anywhere.