Faux outrage, or sounding the alarm?

Last updated on: May 25, 2015 at 3:40 pm by Jane the Actuary

Faux outrage, or sounding the alarm? 2015-05-25T15:40:01-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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A couple days ago I registered my disapproval of the National Review’s attempt to gain eyeballs by ginning up outrage over a Boy Scout prohibition of water gun games. (Talked to my Scout-leader husband earlier about it; he’s A-OK with this policy, given that it’s in the context of 11 year olds being entrusted with rifles.) They’re continuing to promote this story on Facebook and Twitter, which seems exceptionally short-sighted.

In the meantime, Ann Althouse wrote today about the gypped jewelers — you know, the custom jewelry shop in Canada who, after taking an order for a custom ring set for a lesbian couple, then placed a sign opposing gay marriage in their shop; the couple got upset, and after unspecified threats to the business, the shop provided their deposit back, even though, since this was custom-made, they will take a significant loss on this. “Heads, I win, tails, you lose” seems to be the message here, or rather, even expression of opposition to gay marriage by business owners is forbidden.

Althouse is skeptical of reports that the owners received threats, and interpreted their decision to refund the money as a voluntary one, so that she thinks the outrage is being ginned up out of nothing; at least, reading the comments on this post thus far, she appears to reject the claim that the owners were coerced into refunding the deposit and releasing the couple from their obligation. She goes further and says that the couple was morally right to want the refund because

This sign was posted after they made the deal to buy the rings, and at that point they felt bad about having their rings — the rings that are highly symbolic to them — coming from that place. The jeweler displayed a message of disrespect to them and they objected.

Now, on the one hand, I think Althouse is mistaken here; there are enough cases out there of people being threatened that I think the shopowner’s fears (of boycott, of Memories Pizza-style Yelp campaigns, of vandalism or violence) are credible. It is not appropriate to say “it’s all being blown out of proportion,” nor to say, as she says in a comment at 12:41 pm, that such businesses are fair game because “my position on this issue is that it’s speech, it’s debate . . . He CHOSE to engage in public speech and he got a RESPONSE in public speech.” When you are attempting to put out of business someone with whom you disagree, or worse, it’s not a “free speech” issue. Besides which, her approach is that, because the jewelers “disrespected” the couple, they were in the right in backing out of a contract because it made them feel bad. (And, by the way, she doesn’t back down in the least in the comments.)

Of course, on the other hand, the specific nature of the threats isn’t being reported (or perhaps I haven’t read enough), and the shopowners don’t appear to be threatened by the couple themselves as by anonymous self-appointed defenders.

So we’ve got the Left being outraged, and the Right being outraged, and the Left being outraged that the Right would dare be outraged —

and I am really so tired of this.

Tired of this endless outrage.

Tired of this industry, of blogging sites and opinion sites and facebook- and twitter-sharing, that depends on eyeballs that are drawn to outrage-stories, because that (and click-baity headlines) is what gets the pageviews and the facebook shares and, ultimately, the advertisers’ revenue.

Aren’t you?

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