Offensive verbal comments related to…religion — problematic precedent.

[aral]

"Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to… religion”

If we include this clause, we bar people from talking about various subjects at conferences, including:

• Evolution (this offends some Christians, Muslims, etc.)
• Speaking out against female genital mutilation (this offends certain Muslims)
• Stating that men and women should sit together (this offends certain Muslims and Hasidic Jews)

I find it problematic that we are lumping up a cultural construct (religion) alongside gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, and race. A person does not have a choice with regards to the others but can (and does) choose their religion. We have to be careful not to stifle — for example — scientific discussion just because some people find it offensive to their religions (because some people do). We should, at the least, draw a distinction here between harassing behaviour due to someone’s religion (which should not be tolerated) versus causing offence to someone’s religion (which should be tolerated under freedom of speech).

I would like to see this issue addressed, as, otherwise, I feel that this is an excellent template for a conference code of conduct.

[drtortoise]

I think you are using gender when you mean sex

[aral]

I was quoting from the text of the Code of Conduct :)

[drtortoise]

Yes - people shouldn't discriminate based on gender. that's fine.

But you can't say religion is a cultural construct and gender isn't.

[janl]

Just a humble observation, this is a topic close to my heart, but I’m nowhere near an expert on writing legalese, nor religious thinking, nor am I an english native speaker: I’ve never read this as anything but “you can’t use the religion of someone to harass them” (which is,a s I understand what we do want to prohibit). I can see how you can interpret the reverse if you are really trying hard, but it seems far-fetched to me, but I am happy to learn. FWIW, I also haven’t seen any reports that would support the alternate reading of this did actually happens in practice.

[tonylukasavage]

To @janl's point, and also IANAL, but this says to me I can't say "Christians are idiots", which I think we'd all agree is a good thing. I don't think anything here indicates that what could offend someone as a religious person is policed (i.e., talk of evolution, a kiss that happens to be between 2 homosexuals). Would love clarification on this.

[janl]

@tonylukasavage thanks for your input. How would you phrase it? Just as a sketch, doesn’t have to be final and perfect.Still struggling to find words for this.

[mindcrash]

@janl What about harassment regarding religious preference of a person instead of harassment being seen as taking offense due to ideological differences; a clear line between a ad hominem, personal attack (never OK) or a ideological discussion (OK). E.g. it's not ok to call a person an idiot because of his of her preferences but it's fine to discuss the Big Bang or the existence of God. Freedom of speech is one of the most important, treasured liberties in Western society, so while you may or may not feel offended by a opinion someone might have, you are also free to listen or to question what is being said and you are also free to stay or to walk out for whatever personal reason you might have.

In other words: While you can try as hard as you can you simply cannot be everything to everybody, if you need to consider every single thing which might offend someone, for non-personal (personal being everything that defines you as a person such as race, gender, sexual preference, body shape etc.) reasons ofcourse, it's a one way trip to (self) censorship hell for all the wrong reasons; and that's a line we, as a community, and as a modern civil society, should not dare cross.

Hope this thought train makes some sense.

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

I want to open this by saying: I'm playing a measure of devil's advocate, here. I love you, @aral, and I love what you do for our community. Please take my responses with a grain of salt. I only mean the best. As additional caveats, I'd love to be able to discuss these topics openly at conferences, personally; and I am not, myself, religious. (=

That said, I take these freedoms seriously. I don't want to see anybody excluded, and I especially don't want to see a group excluded because of a silent stigma against them (we're just escaping so much of that, right now!). There's such a self-perception in our community as scientists, when we're really not (or, to be completely fair, at least the vast majority of us are not); and I see such an amplification of this anti-religion bent due to this self-perception … meanwhile, nobody seems to notice, or care, that we're treading dangerously close to starting to exclude yet another huge category of the population from our field.

“We're smart compoooter scientists! If you dunno 'bout evolution, you can't write a Rails model! Silly god-botherer.” Okay, that's clearly an exaggeration, but that's also how I see a lot of developers coming across to their Christian or Muslim or counterparts: if you don't have the brains to believe in simple evolution, how can I be expected to share a codebase with you?

---

Anyway. I'm not here to argue the validity of religion as a whole. I'm simply here to show that it should absolutely be treated as an issue of inclusion and equality; one on the same developing playing-field we're exploring together with gender-identity, age, race, and body-image.

First off, before we even get into the rest, it's important to refute the idea that just because something is a developmental (instead of physiological/psychological) construct, it necessarily is a voluntary choice. There's plenty of cultures in which developmental constructs are enforced strongly enough as to make them effectively, for our purposes, involuntary. Developers subscribing to the restrictions of a particular religion may face consequences ranging from exclusion by their entire familial group (LDS) to some levels of physical harm to themselves, for even considering breaking with the strictures of their culture or faith; this ‘choice’ that you ascribe them is one that they've never been afforded, and your assumption that they have is, in and of itself, exclusionary of their contributions to our community.

Next, I want to address your implicit assertion that ‘freedom of speech’ is a protected aspect of these things (or, more insidiously, that it's the most important aspect of conferences). It's not. ‘Freedom of speech’ is a principle that affects governments, not individuals. When we see misandrists decrying us stomping on their freedom of speech, there's a very simple response: yes, you have the freedom to say hateful (or, at a more insidious and difficult level, simply exclusive) things. The standard response to that applies equally well here: “We also have the freedom to show you the door.” (Again, as an aside, I want to address you directly, @aral, and I hope to make sure you don't take me wrong here: I, personally, strongly believe in encouraging free and open speech, and the free dissemination of knowledge amongst cultures. In other words, all the things I see you fighting for. I just have slowly been coming to believe inclusivity is even more important.) Although a conference may be about such dissemination of knowledge, it's (and this is another important distinction) not the job of the organizers to mediate that dissemination: it's their position to enable others to participate in that dissemination.

(Another aside: Even if this were applied to a governmentally-backed/-organized conference of some sort, I'm sure an argument could be made for freedom to practice religion to counter such arguments on freedom of speech or freedom of association. That doesn't really get us anywhere useful; I just wanted to point out how silly a freedom-of-speech argument is in this context.)

So? All this talk of inclusivity is great and all, but this is about conferences. The whole point here is speech (of the free-and-clear form, or not ;). Again, the dissemination of information. Why're we so stuck up on including these religious people instead of encouraging more of that all-important sharing of knowledge? Well, I'll make an assertion here, that I'm sure will end up being the most controversial thing in this (I'msosorryitsalmostover) wall-of-text: In our current culture, going out of our way to cultivate inclusivity is a more important function of these congregations, than the age-old purposes of networking and learning. Every person who attends one of these conferences, one founded in uncompromising principles of inclusivity, is going to go home and spread that love: make their own workplace more inclusive, more friendly. That is going to do more good for our field as a whole than any alcohol-suffused networking event or talk on testing libraries ever could. This is especially important in the context of this current discussion; because, I'm going to posit that, as it turns out, encouraging unconstrained freedom-of-speech can often be at odds with encouraging inclusivity. You'd never (I hope) encourage attendees to publicly discuss their views on The Gays™, shattering the inclusive atmosphere we've worked so hard to generate for souls of all gender-identity and orientation … and although that's, again, an extreme example, I hope it conveys that we don't need to be protecting unconstrained speech on the topic of ones' beliefs, especially when we've good reason to be inclusive of those whose beliefs differ with the first group's.

Okay, so we're no longer going to act as if they're maliciously choosing to believe what they do; we will no longer assume that freedom-of-speech is inherently some paramount, protected goal that surmounts all other considerations, one that need not even be examined; nor is it in any way specially-protected, legally or morally … and, most importantly so far, that freedom-of-speech can actually often come in at-odds with what is a nominally more crucial topic, in our current environment: inclusivity. All these aside, though, there's yet another argument against putting freedom-of-speech first in the list of concerns in a situation like this: it's simply not relevant. I know that's mildly disgusting, and a little hard to hear (I'm sure plenty of us would like to share, or evangelize, what we see as more intelligent or enlightened beliefs) … but it's also incontrovertibly true. We're not here to talk about the facts (or theories, if you insist) of evolution. We're not here to convince a woman brought up Muslim that the males at the tables around her won't bite, or that it's somehow illogical or invalid for her to believe she shouldn't make physical contact with them. We're not here to convince the Hasidic Jews attending that a woman should be allowed to sit near them. Instead, we're here to expose those Jews about the neat things happening with WebRTC. We're here to hear what that Muslim woman has to say about applying your CSS skills to illustrations and icons by leveraging SVG.

Again, I reference this locally-held image of ourselves as Badass Scientists who Do Stuff™ … but even if you swallow that us code-monkeys are all somehow honorary logicians, philosophers, and acolytes of the natural sciences by default, you still can't draw the immediate conclusion that all of those things are relevant to our position as developers, or relevant to a conference of such developers in these positions. Not all Science™ is equivalent, and there's plenty of better forums in which to seriously discuss, perhaps, the human-rights violations of your aforementioned cultural genital mutilation, or the methods with which to educate about evolution. Those with differing beliefs can, and will, remove themselves from those forums … but it's unconscionable of us to exclude them from this forum, when it's entirely unnecessary to do so.

Finally, one last simple, logical argument: 1. which is more important; protecting each attendee's freedom to talk about any topic they please at a conference (which I believe to be your desire?), or protecting a single attendee's ability to be included at all? … and 2. which, then, is more totally-exclusionary: protecting the man who simply wishes to sit at the table that happens to be occupied by a group of Muslim women whose culture precludes them sitting with men, or protecting the Muslim women's ability to attend at all, given that they are demonstrably unable to sit anywhere else (and thus to attend at all), unless that right of theirs to prevent their space from being violated is protected by the organizers?

---

We should, at the least, draw a distinction here between harassing behaviour due to someone’s religion … versus causing offence to someone’s religion …

My thesis, then, being this: no. The distinction between “that's just offensive to you, I'm not trying to harass you” has already been (thank goodness!) pushed way, way beyond where it's been for the longest time. In the current environment, it's rightly perceived as harassment if you treat somebody in a way that, predictably, excludes that person by their grouping from our professional activities. I've pointed out that religion isn't necessarily a choice … but, more importantly, that shouldn't matter: even if it's a pasty WASP with a southern drawl, you still shouldn't be any more encouraging or accepting of behavior in a professional setting that excludes them, and those with their upbringing and their beliefs, from participating.

(Remember: offending them is excluding them. “But I didn't kick him out! I just said he wasn't really a her, privately, to my friend!” is still inherently exclusive activity, because it will predictably prevent her and those she communicates her hurt to from participating in the future.)

I want to wrap this up by proposing a real solution, something that builds us up, as a community, instead of just tearing @aral down. You ask, and rightly so, ‘where's the balance, here?’ As an addressable specific case of a general concern, how do we invite Southern Baptist programmers and out, gay couples to the same conference, and how do we ask them to ask? I suggest this: word this concern in terms of being versus expressing. It's important for a document like this to protect somebody's being, and thus their right and ability to participate; but it's not as important for it to protect their expression. In this case, I posit that @aral, or his hypothetical developer desiring to speak out against genital mutilation, need not be protected by the code-of-conduct: his opinion, while (in my own opinion, to get a bit meta) laudable, is not his being. It is not relevant, nor protected, if his expressing it would exclude someone else's being. However, in the other, of a gay couple attending, neither would a strongly opinionated Christian have the protected right to express his objection to their being. He can choose, and change, what he decides to say … they cannot choose, or change, what those things he says will make them feel; just as the Christian in question may not be in a position to choose, or change, his faith-based position on evolution while a nearby atheist developer can choose what he says about it in that public environment.

Postscript: This written during a talk (in fact, one presented by a Lebanese woman, and prefaced by the M.C. requesting that males in the room not attempt to shake her hand, as it is considered offensive in her religion), and I've been trying to pay enough attention to follow … so please, forgive me any typos / grammatical mistakes. :x Also, I really like using italicized words! >,>

[tonylukasavage]

I'm with @mindcrash. I can only add that even trying to put parameters around "offense" WRT religion seems contradictory to the purpose of the code of conduct, as there are a number of tenants of almost all organized religion that are inherently non-inclusive. The various dogmas surrounding the (to put it lightly) non-inclusion of homosexuals, women, non-believers, etc... make it impossible to manage offense in a universal way, so I think the code of conduct would do best to leave it be and focus on ad hominems as mentioned earlier.

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

Translated: “Let's not worry about being inclusive of religious beliefs, ones made by choice or not, because some of them are themselves non-inclusive.” That's cool, I've never once met an atheist gay guy who was non-inclusive of evolution-denying christians. Nor an opinionated feminist woman who was non-inclusive of trans* individuals. Not even one. ಠ_ಠ

Okay, a little bit over-the-top; but that's really what it comes off as. Just because people aren't themselves perfect, doesn't mean we shouldn't be protecting their right to participate in the even in our documentation and actions.

[aral]

A belief, by it's very definition, includes a choice. There are no religious beliefs that one believes in without choice. Remember that all people are born without religion and then acquire it. To make that equivalent with someone's sexual orientation — a trait that they truly do not have a choice in — is entirely contrary to the spirit of the code of conduct.

The reason we must not tolerate offence to religion is because, too often, that which causes offence to religion is exactly what a code of conduct is in place to protect: equality of all people regardless of sex, race, belief (or lack thereof), etc.

[aral]

• and by that I mean we must not tolerate “offence to religion” in the code of conduct.

[tonylukasavage]

@ELLIOTTCABLE it's a bad analogy. There is nothing inherent in atheism, for example, that is non-inclusive, nothing from which to protect a theist. Individual atheists could be assholes, but there's nothing about atheism itself that is non-inclusive. There are things, however, that are inherently non-inclusive in religion. In some cases they are directly contrary to the spirit of this code of conduct. In other cases they are conflicting with other religions. How do you universally prevent offense from a number of divergent and sometimes directly opposing world views?

Also, your "translation" is less-than-stellar and reductionist, but I think that was your intention anyway. I think you ask a good question in your original response:

which, then, is more totally-exclusionary: protecting the man who simply wishes to sit at the table that happens to be occupied by a group of Muslim women whose culture precludes them sitting with men, or protecting the Muslim women's ability to attend at all, given that they are demonstrably unable to sit anywhere else (and thus to attend at all), unless that right of theirs to prevent their space from being violated is protected by the organizers?

But what about the Islamic fundamentalist male who shows up and is offended that the women aren't wearing hijabs, or aren't partitioned entirely away from the men, not just by table? What if a Jainist is offended that there's a leather couch at the venue since an animal was obviously killed to make it? A Southern Baptist is offended that a speaker is talking about LGBT inclusivity in tech? Long story short, you cannot be inclusive of all religion (and I doubt you'd want to say which views are valid and which aren't) without additionally being non-inclusive of something or someone else. It's not just the right to talk about science.

[drtortoise]

@ELLIOTTCABLE am I right in reading this as sarcasm? as there are some feminist people who are non inclusive of trans* people :'( ? Sorry I am bad at detecting intention in text so just thought to clarify.

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

@drtortoise: not at all, unfortunately. Google “TERF.” It's eminently depressing, but it's a very real, huge faction.

@tonylukasavage: I think you missed most of my point (which is entirely my fault, and not yours: it's since been pointed out to me that I didn't reduce my point enough. That shit was simply too tl;dr. ;_; )

Instead of trying to re-state too much, I'll just repeat my final suggestion, which addresses every example you brought up: you're clearly correct, in that we can't protect everybody from being offended, and I posit that's not what we should be trying to do. I suggest that all we do is prevent people being, from people making choices that offend.

We shouldn't allow a trans* person's simply-being to lead to them being attacked or offended by a southern baptist making the choice to say something to, or around, them about their legitimacy as a person … while there is no way for us to prevent the southern baptist being offended except by excluding the trans* person, which we absolutely should not do. Similarly, the example of the Islamic fundamentalist is still covered by what I pointed out; it's nothing new, or different, than the example of our southern baptist: he's welcome, but we're not going to stop the women from being women, there with their friends and coworkers, sitting in the same room at the same conference as aforementioned men.

Long story short, you cannot be inclusive of all religion (and I doubt you'd want to say which views are valid and which aren't) without additionally being non-inclusive of something or someone else. It's not just the right to talk about science.

Long story short, I simply don't agree with that blanket statement. At all. I think we can easily be as inclusive of, yes, all the believers, as we are of everybody else. We're inclusive of the presence of those who might be termed as the ‘TERF’ mentioned above, or of militantly religion-hating atheists (again, as we should be: it's not our job to judge people for their opinions or beliefs, just to prevent those from negatively affecting others at our events) … we can easily be inclusive of a believer whose beliefs exclude others at our events (as long as their actions do not do so.) Again: if their beliefs make them uncomfortable with others' being, in or around the event, they are welcome to not attend … but we should not be allowing those others to undertake actions to offend the people with those beliefs.

(As for the Jainist: I don't think it's relevant to this point. We happily support both the vegans and bacon-loving redditor programmers attending; I don't think it's that hard for us to do our best to support a PETA activist or Jainist equally-well. Their beliefs aren't preventing anybody from being.)