Censorship only perpetuates anti-LGBT hate

Late last Tuesday night, the News Editorial Board rightfully published a piece condemning anti-LGBT hate in the wake of the Club Q shooting in Colorado. Unfortunately, the Board severely erred with its suggested remedy: censorship. 

The Board called on Yale to censor divisive speakers by refusing them a platform on campus, going so far as to say the University has an “ethical responsibility” to do so. “What message is Yale sending to its students, especially its queer students,” the Board asks, “when it amplifies and creates spaces for individuals who foster hate, division and violence?” As a gay alumnus of 2022 and advocate for civil liberties, I fervently disagree with the Board.

I work at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) –– an organization dedicated to defending the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought. Still, I admit that arguments to deplatform hateful speakers are appealing and continue to give me pause on occasion. Nonetheless, I believe these arguments are mistaken. Below, I present some of the most compelling defenses of deplatforming and explain why they are misguided.

“Nothing is to gain from hosting a controversial speaker, but everything is to lose”

A Yale lecture hall will never be the most effective platform for manipulative hate mongers– Not that “hate” is clearly identifiable, nor that the speakers coming to campus are obviously “hateful” according to any consensus; “hate” might merely be ideas the Board doesn’t like. Students attend Yale to learn how to think critically and defend their ideas. Unless students believe their views against “conversion therapy, the criminalization of homosexuality, the mandatory sterilization of transgender people, and the … links of homosexuality to pedophilia” cannot withstand rigorous debate, they should allow controversial speakers on campus and subsequently rebut them. I happen to believe each one of these views is easy to refute.

Furthermore, the ability to refute hateful rhetoric is an absolutely paramount skill for activists. While the Board strives to eradicate hate from Yale through censorship, its members will find their censorious attitudes quite unproductive outside Yale, where the First Amendment bars censorship.

Finally, the attention garnered from shouting down or deplatforming speakers, far from silencing unfavorable views, gives those views a far bigger platform than the scheduled talk would have provided. Sometimes, the best protest against hateful rhetoric is to ignore it.

“Hateful speech victimizes minority students”

That is the whole idea of it, right? Indeed, antagonizing minorities is often the goal of hateful speakers. Yet, hateful rhetoric often has the opposite effect. Despite a momentary shock or feeling of hurt upon hearing an incendiary message, I imagine very few Yalies would retreat for long. No, Yalies get pissed off. We march and outnumber the hateful. We don’t lose our “personhood” as the Board suggests; we espouse pride in our identities. To put it another way, calling me the f-slur is the worst thing a homophobe could do for his cause.

What I describe is the theory of antifragility: Just as a person’s immune system grows stronger by exposure to pathogens, a student grows by responding to stressors such as inflammatory rhetoric. Certainly, too strong an attack can wreak havoc on any antifragile system. Accordingly, perhaps the strongest counter to my antifragile argument is the fact LGBT people attempt suicide at a far higher rate than the general population. Speech that makes LGBT people question their worth undoubtedly increases suicidal ideation. Despite the pernicious tendency of such speech, however, its ultimate impact depends largely on the listener’s attitude.

For my first few years at Yale, I accepted the idea that any idea which challenged my life as a gay man victimized me. In doing so, I let it. My attitude created a self-fulfilling prophecy: I was miserable and clinically depressed. I finally overcame that depression, in large part, by realizing that I was not a victim –– at least, I didn’t need to act like one. Although hateful speech certainly does victimize minorities in some tangible way, the extent to which it affects us is primarily up to us. By calling to remove controversial speakers from campus, the Board furthers the notion that LGBT people are victims and ought to act like victims. Advocating that LGBT people should live like victims helps the bigot succeed at antagonizing us.

“Harmful tendency”

“The logic is simple,” the Editorial Board writes. “[T]he more negative light is shown upon the LGBTQ community, the more likely queer folk are to suffer from violent transgressions.” Although the Board makes a bit of a jump in logic here, I embrace the fact that even words that do not call for violence can influence those who commit violence. As former ACLU president Nadine Strossen writes, “We cherish speech precisely because of its unique capacity to influence us, both positively and negatively.” 

Certainly, far fewer people would believe in “groomer” conspiracy theories if politicians never talked about them; and the more people that buy into unsubstantiated theories about queer people, the more likely a misguided person will commit an act of violence. However, the suppression of those views by a handful of elite universities would not lead to the Board’s desired outcome. These viewpoints will promulgate whether Yale provides a stage or not.

In fact, the refutation that Yale students provide to these speakers’ arguments is perhaps the greatest check on that speech: in the same way a thesis is strengthened by refuting counterarguments, a social justice cause is furthered not by ignoring contrary views and pretending they don’t exist, but by refuting them forcefully. It is human tendency to want the forbidden fruit; but no one wants a demonstrably rotten apple.

I fear that in calling for censorship of speech it does not like the Editorial Board inadvertently enhances the rise of anti-LGBT hate in our country. Deplatforming disfavored speakers usually provides their views with more attention, and their ostracism lets them play the victim.

Much more than censorship, the efficacious strategy to eradicate anti-LGBT sentiments is to use the exact same stage as the speaker –– the one that, according to the Editorial Board, is so symbolically powerful –– to prove those views wrong.

JEFF CIESLIKOWSKI ‘22 graduated from Franklin College this past May with a B.S. in Political Science and Physics. Since graduating, he has worked as a Research Associate at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in Washington, DC.