Breakpoint
Author: John Stonestreet and Dr. Timothy D. Padgett
In March, with an 8-1 majority vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “counseling conversations are speech and that states cannot silence viewpoints in the counseling room.” The majority included all but Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who claimed in dissent that states should be able to use “police powers to establish and enforce the standards of care that bind medical professionals,” including what she called “professional medical speech.” Apparently, for Justice Jackson, that power also includes the ability to determine what should count as “scientific consensus,” given the collapse of consensus on the issue of “gender-affirming care.”
In a concurring opinion, liberal Justices Kagan and Sotomayor noted that the Colorado law in question, which banned conversion therapy for minors, was not “viewpoint-neutral.” Had it been, they said, it would raise a different and more difficult question." In another instance last summer, Justice Sotomayor did not agree with a Trump administration policy but also believed it was not the place of the Court to decide. Justice Jackson, on the other hand, described her appointment to the Supreme Court as an opportunity “to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues.”
This is an example of an ongoing fissure between liberals and progressives on the political and ideological Left in America. As Colson Center Senior Fellow Dr. Glenn Sunshine has previously described, part of this difference is that standpoint epistemology, the liberal idea that each has our own truth from our own perspective, has devolved into expressive individualism, the idea that “our truth” should be imposed on everyone else as a matter of human dignity.
The implications of this shift from “liberalism” to “progressivism” are significant, especially for rights of speech and conscience. On April 22, Lois McLatchie Miller posted a clip of a British police officer informing a street preacher that he could not share the Gospel in places or ways that “may” cause offense or dissuade people from seeking abortions.
Back in March, Päivi Räsänen, a lawmaker in Finland, was found guilty of “inciting hatred” for calling homosexuality a “disorder” in 2004. No riots or hatred were actually incited in the over twenty years since. She was guilty of believing and expressing the wrong things. Also in March, the Chicago Bulls waived guard Jaden Ivey “due to conduct detrimental to the team.” Given the conduct regularly tolerated by sports franchises, it is notable that Mr. Ivey’s “offense” was posting a video of himself critiquing the NBA’s promotion of “Pride Month.”
Many progressives left Twitter when it was purchased by Elon Musk, not because their ideas would be suppressed but because contrary ideas would not be. But the move to alternate social media platform Bluesky has turned out to be a mess. The progressive drive for ideological purity has stunted any real conversation. As biologist Colin Wright noted:
I'm blocked by thousands of accounts on Bluesky I've never even interacted with, since I almost never post. People over there block on first contact with any ideological friction. That results in a bunch of small isolated communities. Not ideal for a social media app.
This kind of intolerance is a feature of progressivism, not a bug. Though people often use “liberal” and “progressive” interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Like the new “dissident Right,” which devolved out of classic conservatism and rejected core tenets of it, progressivism and liberalism are not the same either.
Liberalism calls for tolerance. Progressivism silences dissent and calls it tolerance. Progressivism claims to be about moving forward, but “forward” is just a rejection of anything old, traditional, and settled. To modern progressives, progress is transgression. They sense the world is not as it should be but are threatened by the idea that there is a way it should be.
Divorced from reality and reason, compliance with this vision cannot be argued. Rather, it must be enforced. Thus, the shift from “encouraging all viewpoints” to punishing all dissent.