Fuck The Thought Police
I predict this particular rant will cost me friends in the Pagan community, at least online. So those of you who were inclined to before, should go ahead and unfriend me now. It’ll save time.
The Pantycon Incident happened when a satirical publication that came out at Pantheacon made fun of Covenant of the Goddess’s extremely lame response to “Black Lives Matter.” CoG decided that “All Lives Matter,” was the better slogan, in a show of astonishing whitey cluelessness. When told that they were being white and clueless, CoG reacted by censuring anyone who told them they were being white and clueless. Pantycon rightly satirized this blunder on the part of CoG.
When asked to explain, the objectors to Pantycon’s satire seemed to say that people might confuse the Pantycon satire for reality, and that people were overheard making racist comments and having racist discussions at Pantheacon, so therefore this was no subject to joke about.
Then, they added, the authors of the Pantycon satire needed to be personally, individually identified, dragged out in public, made to confess their sins in front of all of Salem, and then pressed to death underneath a door and a pile of rocks.
Wait, I mean, made to confess their sins, banished from Pantheacon for life, never allowed to publish anything ever again, and be excommunicated from all of Pagan society for ever and ever, world without end, amen.
In other words, a great many voices, including some leaders in the Pagan community, were willing to persecute the satirists for thoughtcrime. That's basically what it boiled down to. They wanted to ban the Pantycon writers from Pantheacon for committing thoughtcrime.
Does anybody besides me see exactly what kind of madness this is? Does anyone besides me see that this is the path to fundamentalism? Only this time it would be a fundamentalism of enforced inoffensiveness, a humorless, joyless, toothless Paganism that insists on a lockstep conformity to a list of narrow rules.
The rules are designed to reinforce conformity and silence dissent. They do not actually do anything about racism in Paganism, which is a real issue. They do not do anything about social injustice. They do not do anything about sexism. The rules are designed to make sure that everyone thinks the same, and that they shut up if they don’t think the same as everyone else. The rules endorse and enforce conformity and silence.
Censure is the end of discussion and the death of dissent. It ensures that only one way of thinking is the standard and that any variation from that standard is rejected and, as much as possible, destroyed. And censure does not at all address the problem of racism in Paganism.
Killing the messenger - censuring the people who are telling the truth - not letting the little boy who sees that the emperor has no clothes speak up - is thought policing, and creating truth as thoughtcrime.
Do Pagans really want to go in that direction?