> Up till about 1985 the window [of what you can say without being cancelled] had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.
In 1985 in most places in the USA a public school teacher openly supporting gay rights in the classroom would have been risking their job and possibly their entire career.
I know, it's a very common but very bizarre centering of the general concept of intolerance on China and on lib college students. States make laws denying work to people who support BDS. Announcing that you don't give a shit about whether Russia takes over Ukraine could get you fired, especially if you're ethnically Russian, but announcing that Ukraine should fight until the breath of the last Ukrainian is spent and the last blade of Ukrainian grass is burned will get you a spot on local TV news in Milwaukee, WI, USA.
The BBC had MI5 vet its employees for correct political opinions and associations into the 90s, and won't deny that they do it now.
The major difference is that captains of industry used to be able to almost completely dictate orthodoxy, and now in the age of the internet there are competing orthodoxies - some of which don't consider power and wealth synonymous with wisdom and genius. It also turns out that plenty of powerful people who control institutions don't care about being seen as philosopher-kings, and are happy to let their PR and HR departments deal with controversy. They will happily capitulate to all orthodoxies in order to protect the institution.
The problem is that labor rights have been overrun by freedom-of-contract at-will libertarians, so instead of people just hating you for things you've said and done, everyone also has to deal with apolitical sociopathic corporations that will excise you like a suspicious mole at the first whiff of controversy.
The man seems to have also forgotten the cold war and the entire era of McCarthyism because if he thought being a socialist in cold war America wasn't a heresy he should ask some. I'd pin 1985 as one of the most monotonous periods of American discourse (mirrored in the election results of the time). Discourse is much wider today, mirrored in the resulting polarization that everybody talks about.
Ignoring for a second that it's perfectly legitimate for a teacher to do something like have a rainbow flag bumper sticker on their car, or be openly gay and mention their same-sex spouse in class, all of which would not go well in many places in 1985... you can't think of a reason to discuss gay rights in, say, high school level social studies, history, or literature classes?
A high school teacher needs a view on gay rights like they need an understanding of quantum mechanics. It's out there, but their students don't have the tools to come to grips with it.
In an ideal world, our high schools would have taught the Constitution, the American Revolution, slavery, the abolition movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, and on that basis taught the civil rights movement. They would have taught Homer, Virgil, Greek drama, Chaucer, Shakespeare, poetry and novels. They would have looked at modern explorations of identity such as Kafka and Dostoevesky. They would have taught the Bible and the basics of Christian theology and morality, not as Truth but as the mindset and background of most of those who have, to date, built up our culture. (Much as they might teach Marx as vital background for understanding historically important movements.)
They would also train students to think and reason for themselves, to recognize and reac to susceptibility to persuasion, and to detect and break down propaganda.
With these foundations, a student might then be able to intelligently study "gay rights" or gay identity in literature.
Those foundations are the first job of the schools. Let them do that before anything else.
Too bad nobody respects teachers in the United States.
There's a reason the conventionalists don't want real education for their children and zero involvement of society in their nuclear family: control. They then frame it as some libertarian ideal.
Until a public school teacher can say no to a student, and their parents, nobody will learn the foundations of complex thought in the classroom. That is by design.
Because it is the role of a teacher to educate, and it's entirely possible that some children enter the classroom with a set of values incompatible with modern life?
In other words, for the same reason that a teacher should have "a position" on any other civil rights.
Because it is the role of a teacher to educate, and it's entirely possible that some children enter the classroom with a set of values incompatible with modern life?
In 1985 in most places in the USA a public school teacher openly supporting gay rights in the classroom would have been risking their job and possibly their entire career.