More on the AALS Boycott

I think that Susan and Greg have articulated well the reasons why the proposed boycott at AALS is a bad thing, and they help me put details on my not-fully-articulated question about whether the presence of "market power" makes this wrong.  (I think we agree that the boycott is legal -- an exercise of the boycotters' own speech and other freedoms -- except perhaps for Fr. Araujo; I'm not sure how to read his argument that the boycotters "are challenging [Mr. Manchester's] right to exercise his political voice").  I do think we have to be careful about saying that "it's not within [an organization's] nature or purpose" to engage in a given expression of conscience in the marketplace.  That's the argument that's used to say landlords shouldn't refuse to rent to unmarried couples, pharmacists shouldn't refuse to dispense Plan B, and federally funded soup-kitchen program shouldn't consider religion in hiring: their purpose, the argument goes, is simply to provide commercial and social services, not to express conscience.  But I agree that the presumption should be different when a scholarly organization with a wide membership, i.e. encompassing the whole legal academy in a given subject matter, takes an official stance based on someone's expression of views.  Such organizations should have a much stronger ethos of maintaning a neutral stance between people (including their own members) of fundamentally different political views.  I was pointing toward something like that with the "market power" question, but the others articulate it much better.

I think Greg is also right to recognize that SALT, which is an an ideologically grounded rather than an umbrella subject-matter organization, presents different questions.  In response to Greg's charge that SALT is contradicting its professed commitment to freedom of speech, I imagine SALT would say that if Mr. Manchester's giving his money to a cause based on his belief is speech, then so is their members' withholding their money based on their beliefs.

Now if Mr. Manchester repeatedly expressed racist views, or contributed $125,000 to a constitutional-amendment drive to reverse the right to interracial marriage, would Greg, Susan, et al. respond differently to a proposed boycott?  If so, that would bring us back again to the argument, which recurs in all of these disputes, that opposing same-sex marriage and seeking to reflect that opposition in the law, should not be treated the same as racism.  There is, at the least, enough room for good-faith debate about this issue that those with whom one disagrees ought not to be marginalized, not just in the academic sphere directly -- this is not a boycott against academic speakers who oppose same-sex marriage -- but in closely related spheres like where to hold a conference.  Thus Patrick's post on the same-sex marriage/racism comparison is highly relevant.