Our Commitment to the Principles of Social Justice
We want to begin by stating that the many voices and contributors to the ideas, concerns, and messages on this site are all committed to a just world in which all people can live and thrive without the fear of being harmed, oppressed, or exploited by bad actors. This means that the over-arching principle of social justice is important to them all.
We recognize that there are differences of opportunity between certain groups and that more work needs to be done in changing our systems to reflect those differences and to respond to them in a way that is both compassionate and practically useful. We also recognize that there is at least some degree of intergenerational trauma that can be passed down through the years in certain populations, especially demographic groups that have historically experienced the severest forms of oppression and those whose sexual and gender identities lie so far out of the norm that they are more likely to experience themselves as surrounded by a hostile world that is not naturally wired to accept them -whatever the cause, cultural, parental upbringing or other factors.
Therefore, we agree with and support the basic principle of looking out for those who have been placed (or forced) to the margins of our institutions, networks, communities, and the larger society. This means that we support and work to install policies on many levels of society that -to use a popular phrase- center the voices and experiences of people who have been marginalized.
But, there is a difference between the principle of what some call social justice or human rights and the most recent iteration of what we refer to as Social Justice Ideology (SJI) with its hardened categories and ideology-based assumptions about all of social reality, human behavior, and entire groups of people.
These people just want a better world and know that we can't have that better world if we seek to control other people, dominate them, dehumanize them and destroy their lives and livelihoods simply because they've made a mistake or because they belong to identity groups that our ideology has chosen to target as less than human.