Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Beware of the 'safe space' movement
Much like school zones,
the "safe places" cropping up on campuses represent an attempt to twist the laws of nature in a decidedly unnatural way, creating a world where contrary ideas are never heard, where nobody has to deal with anything they might find offensive, where "trigger warnings" precede lectures and where some ideas are just too outrageous to be heard at all.
And much like school zones,
acquiescence to this kind of thinking breeds adults ill-equipped to deal with life after education, where offensive ideas and people abound. There are no safe spaces in the real world, in the workplace or in life. Quite the opposite, actually.
Sadly, liberals should be the people most opposed to the squelching of free speech in the academy in the name of inclusion and tolerance, for no better reason than this: free speech is the tool that created tolerance and social change. Speeches, marches, sit-ins, demonstrations and protests gave us suffrage, civil rights, voting rights and, now, marriage equality. And entrenched establishment interests consistently sought to squelch those ideas. Sometimes they used the law, but ultimately those anti-freedom efforts ended the way all fascism does: with fire hoses, billy clubs and dogs.
So to find liberals not only silent in the face of safe spaces, but actually advocating for them is heartbreaking. Liberals were once the forces agitating for change, relying on freedom of speech and freedom of thought to do it. Now that liberalism is ascendant, they have become the oppressors, the very people the previous generation would have sought to overthrow.
And make no mistake: The "safe space" movement is not simply an effort to help people get along with each other, to lessen the historical pain of discrimination or expiate the original American sin of slavery. It's a naked, obvious attempt to control not just what people say, but what they think and what they believe.http://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/columns-blogs/steve-sebelius/beware-the-safe-space-movement
Without ranting, my concern is that "political correctness" is right when it's about some very basic things -- like just equal rights and equal access and people not being bigots and yelling at others *just because* they are black or latino or gay or transgender etc.
That make sense. People can't go around being bigots in society, it's not right, anti-bigotry is a moral issue. It's right and wrong, bigotry is flat wrong.
But then -- with the "safe spaces" thing, it's not just political correctness but it's like the "safe space" encompasses an entire ideology, a whole list of things and more things keep getting added, and then everyone just has to accept it in entirety and it cannot be questioned -- because it is in the safe space.
An analogy to this forum would be: what if "peak oil" were declared "safe space" -- therefore, no cornies allowed. Would that really be best? Or would it turn into an echo chamber?
Now think about a safe space with a set of ideologies that encompass all of society -- all universities, all workplaces.
It just feels to me like a "safe space" for the far left to be "safe" from criticism from centrists, and the right. As if the far left are the only ones that can talk, their ideas are "in the safe space." Liberalism itself is not a protected class, nor should conservativism be.
There's not supposed to be a protected class of ideas at all, it's supposed to be organic and natural and consensus is organic and a result of free speech and free press and free assembly and vigorous debate and consensus just naturally emerges, without declared "safe spaces" from criticism.