Stretching a Narrative: A Quick Reply to Frank Casper
Frank Casper, one of the founders of the Fifth Principle Project and a staunch defender of the Gadfly narrative, recently attended the 2020 Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly and came away with a narrative in which some Unitarian Universalists are destroying the liberal values America is built upon. In his article “New UU Theology,” he lays out an attempt to frame various workshops and lectures he attended as being all that is wrong with Unitarian Universalism.
I will not here attempt to respond to all his accusations against various presenters, but will focus solely on my own workshop.
He attended a workshop I led with Dr. Sharon Welch titled “Building Communities to Counter White Nationalism/White Power.” My portion of the workshop mostly dealt with how the current conservative understanding of free speech has enabled an uptick in white nationalist and white supremacist activity in America. This apparently alarmed Mr. Casper, a staunch believer in this conservative conception of free speech, enough so that he sounded the alarm that I want to restrict various groups’ free speech. Indeed, I do suggest that we need to be responsible to one another for the beliefs we hold, and that includes who we listen and give platforms to, but the question of free speech is much more complicated than simply whether it is good or bad.
However, Casper skips a few crucial bullet points. He completely ignores how I’m framing free speech as a legal concept in the context of the workshop, not as an intellectual concept, and so free speech, in this context, is applicable to whether the government can deprive a person of speech or not.
[Edit: To be as fair as possible to Mr. Casper, some folks I respect have let me know that this point may not have come through as I intended it to. I reject expansionist definitions of free speech because I don’t find them useful and they usually serve to water down the concept. I intend to be more clear on this in future workshops. That being said, in a recent interaction, Mr. Casper made it clear that he doesn’t care about my definition and is going to continue to use his own because it makes it easier to critique interpretations of the fourth principle, and that he considers the framing of free speech in this way to be a cover in itself to deny free speech.]
He also leaves out that all the quotes he pulled from me were immediately preceded by a discussion of how our understanding of free speech evolved in the twentieth century, from a time when free speech was interpreted, perhaps, too restrictively, resulting in perennial Communist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debbs being jailed for speaking out against American intervention in World War I, to the 1980s, when a concerted paternalistic propaganda effort from conservative millionaires such as the Koch Brothers led to the popularization of the opposite extreme in the debate: where virtually nothing is off limits in free speech. This is the paradigm we currently live under, one that has existed for less time than I have been alive. Yet, Casper seems to believe it was baked into the very founding of our nation, a patently untrue and intellectually dishonest assertion given the history I laid out in that very workshop.
Nobody wants to go back to the day when political dissenters like Debbs could be jailed merely for criticizing the power structure, but what I am asking is who this new conservative model of free speech benefits, and it’s certainly not those who would criticize power structures.
My entire thesis, which I stand by, is that this new libertarian-esque conception of free speech, which has allowed conservative white men to retain the bulk of power in our society, has allowed white nationalist and white supremacist groups to flourish because, in a society where nothing is off limits, nothing can be forbidden.
Most dishonestly, Casper implies I believe in the limiting of free speech, something I multiple times say I do not believe in during the workshop. In fact, during questions and answers, someone brought up hate speech laws as a possible solution, and I very specifically mentioned a passage from P.E. Moskowitz’s The Case Against Free Speech where Moskowitz points out how hate speech laws in Europe can and have been misused to censor political opposition. Like Moskowitz, I am skeptical whether hate speech laws are the answer, and generally like the government to have as little say as possible.
What I did say is that private institutions limiting who can or cannot have a platform is not a violation of free speech as a legal concept, nor does free speech say everyone deserves to be listened to or that everyone has a right to speech free of consequences. (For a detailed examination of these last two points, see the first chapter of Stanley Fish’s excellent book The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump.)
Instead, I suggest we develop a system of relational ethics where we are accountable to one another for what we say. This was the goal that the commission that drafted our current Unitarian Universalist principles and purposes had in mind when they added the word “responsible” to the fourth principle: to remind us that our search for truth and meaning, as Unitarian Universalists, is done in community, responsible to one another. I suggested that this could be a way to look at how we interact with each other: that we listen to one another and are accountable for the impact of our beliefs and actions.
Frankly, if Casper is against this, then he is against Unitarian Universalism.
Tellingly, Casper tries to link this all to the Gadflies and Todd Eklof, even though I never mention either. It may surprise Casper, but it’s because I don’t believe that either the Gadflies or Eklof have much of anything to do with white nationalism, though some of the same ideas that are currently empowering them are also empowering the current rise of white nationalism. In fact, my only direct mention of Unitarian Universalism was to bring up the fourth principle. The workshop was about how to build communities to counter white nationalism, and it’s apparent that Casper was so taken in his own agenda that he completely missed the entire point.
In fact, as a legal concept, free speech has very little to do with Unitarian Universalism. We are a private organization, so legal concepts like free speech have no bearing on us. Even as a legal concept, free speech is much more complicated than “Everything goes!”, a point Casper also leaves out.
What Casper is concerned about is the “free” part of the fourth principle, something our workshop did not deal with at all, and which, while related to the concept of free speech, is a separate concern altogether. (We had an hour and a half and there are a lot more paths we could have gone down.) The fact is that the “free” and “responsible” parts of the fourth principle are in deliberate tension to one another, and to completely ignore one in favor of the other is to write off that tension out of hand rather than live into it.
This is why I’ve been such an outspoken critic of this group: I do not believe the majority of them are interested in dialogue; they only want to be told they’re right, and this article is the epitome of intellectual dishonesty in order to try to prove that point. They want to take words that have nothing to do with what they’re talking about and twist them to fit their agenda. Ironically, it’s the exact same thing Eklof did last year when he left out crucial details that complicated his narrative to construct a story about what was happening in the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Casper, like Eklof, never asked a single question to clarify his understanding of the workshop, though both Dr. Welch and I gave out our email addresses publicly. Maybe that’s the most damning thing of all: by going with such a cherry-picked understanding of our workshop, he missed out on any learning he could have gleamed from us, even if he disagreed with or was concerned about parts of it.
And, indeed, much like the case studies I brought up in the workshop, Casper tears down all scholarship without taking seriously the problem it is seeking to address: the rise and proliferation of far right ideologies in twenty-first century America and the indoctrination of young white boys from liberal and leftist backgrounds. This might be the biggest shame of all: if Casper is concerned about this, he does not let on at all, but is just happy to destroy all attempts at looking at these issues because it might complicate something he already believes in.
As a side note, by popular demand, Dr. Welch and I will be expanding our workshop this fall and inviting in new collaborators! If you are interested in hearing more, please be in touch!
Addendum: I am writing this quick addendum on July 10, nearly a week after Casper and I both wrote our pieces. I had an encounter with Casper in the Facebook group “Unitarian Universalism — Faith of the Free” yesterday and he was quite upset that I labeled him as being intellectually dishonest because he is using a different definition of free speech from me and then conflating the definitions to imply that I want to limit free speech — which he considers to be an issue for private organizations and criticism as well as the government. I write this addendum only to answer these charges because I suspect it is how he will defend his article.
Even if Casper was unaware at the time he wrote his article that we were using different definitions of free speech, he is definitely now aware and has made it exceedingly clear he doesn’t care because his definition makes it easier to criticize both me and how I view the fourth principle. But he ignores that intellectual honesty requires he lay this out in his article — that he makes it clear how his definition is different from mine. He does not and refuses to do this. He has made it clear that he considers any definition of free speech other than his own illegitimate no matter how much scholarship is available on the topic and, therefore, he can dismiss it out of hand.
He also ignores that his own readers do not seem to understand he has a different definition of free speech than I do.
In a recent comment, one of his readers, who was not present at my workshop, insinuated that I was saying that there are certain ideas that do not need legal protections, and went on to make a joke implying I was being just like the Soviets. THIS IS THE VERY THING I DO NOT BELIEVE! If he was being intellectually honest in this whole endeavor, Caper would let him know i don’t believe this. He does not; instead, he just thanks him for the funny joke.
Casper did not respond to all the comments on his entry, but choose to respond to this one in particular for some reason. Being ambiguous allows Casper to appeal to both people who agree with his belief that speech is being limited in the UUA as well as folks concerned about freedom of speech as a civil principle.
I can only guess why he would do this, but the fact remains that Casper’s article is so poorly written and skewed to his own point of view that it is now possible for anyone who finds Casper’s blog to believe I hold a view I do not.
My previous experience with Mr. Casper has been of a similar vein, and I may write further on it if the need arises, but, suffice it to say, this is all to employ an old propaganda trick: to accuse your opponents of the very thing you are doing. Mr. Casper says he wants to protect speech, but he also wants people to be quiet about the “responsible” part of the fourth principle. Mr. Casper implies that I’m just being extreme in how I’m “reinterpreting” the fourth principle, even though my words are based upon the reports of Rev. Walter Royal Jones, who was chair of the commission that drafted the current principles in 1984.
I will choose here not to speculate about the motivations behind this minimization of the accountability portion of our principles, but just point out that one of the primary issues of the Gadflies this year has been an extreme anger that some of them are being held accountable for actions they did, that, in their view, the fourth principle protects them from accountability on.
Make of that what you will.
