What does this headline immediately imply? Ohhhh, those nasty Americans, unilaterally engaging in speech acts that nobody else thinks are OK! Ohhhh, those nasty Americans, how much better off they'd be if they'd conform to everybody else and criminalize offensive speech!
And when I moved to email the article, the Times blurb for it reads: "As more countries move to ban or restrict hate speech, some legal scholars say the U.S. should reconsider the broad scope of First Amendment protection."
Wow, folks. You talk about American freedom of speech as though it were a bad thing. Ditto for the broad scope of First Amendment protection. I don't know about you, but I want my First Amendment scope of protection to be as wide as possible, and I'm deeply skeptical of any attempts to cut slices from it -- for whatever reason. Oh, and if the scope of protection in America is bigger than it is in other places, that's even better. So why then does the opinion piece seem to say that we ought to reduce that scope?
Here's a blurb from the piece:
“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”(OK, here's a warning: I am now about to launch a certain form of vicious attack on this entire idea.)
Yes, let's curtail freedom of speech because all the cool kids are doing it! Because it's the latest trend! And the cool kids think that the fuzzy idea of "mutual respect" is more important than centuries of hard-fought freedom of speech. And of course the enlightened European elites are surely more evolved than we Neanderthals over here in the New World, we who still believe in the right to do things like . . . bear arms.
In fact, this entire line of reasoning is deeply misguided because it's based on the fundamental idea of Big Government. Yes, Big Nanny Babysitter Government who has to hover over our shoulders and make sure the little people play nicely with each other. I don't want to be monitored. I'm reminded of George Will's pithy statement that the government's job is to deliver the mail, defend the shores, and get out of the way.
Do I really have to say it again? In a world where you have actual civil liberties and actual freedom of expression, you have no guarantee that somebody somewhere along the line is not going to be offended. And if any nanny government attempts to guarantee that nobody will be offended, then you can kiss goodbye to actual freedom of expression -- because what you'll end up with is policed speech. In a truly free society, the mere idea of using government force to shut up people, even (and especially) people you don't like, should be absolutely anathema.
And this Times piece is supposed to be some kind of enlightened response to the recent Canadian "show trial" of Mark Steyn and MacLean's magazine in front of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. ("Tribunal"? That sounds kind of . . . ominous.)
You know, I'm about willing to argue that hate speech restrictions in themselves are offensive. Putting in speech restrictions in the name of human rights is an even blurrier enterprise, as "human rights" becomes the club with which to beat people you don't like. Besides, hasn't someone once said that it's impossible to speak so that you won't be misunderstood? I add that nowadays there's really no way to speak so that you won't offend somebody who wants to be offended.
I'm not saying that you should go out and intentionally offend as many people as possible just because it's legal. There is such a thing as common sense decency and notions of good behavior. But there is a difference between (a) being rude and incurring the social criticism of your peers, and (b) being rude and incurring government response like fines, citations, and human right tribunals. And by being "rude" I mean either by intent or accident.
Anyway, I end by noting the slick, slimy smoothness of the "let's cut back freedom of expression" advocates. They make it sound so civilized, so reasonable, so desirable . . . and instead of celebrating the unique robustness of American speech freedoms, they seem to say that this achievement (won by blood and effort by people with more guts and conviction than the critics can aspire to) is bad and should be jettisoned in favor of the amorphous morass of quasi-policed speech because All the Cool Kids Are Doing It. Oh, and if all the cool kids decide to jump off a cliff, would . . . ? Because frankly I think that's where the road is leading. Right off the cliff and into oblivion. The pernicious cult of political correctness has yielded the most politically repugnant possibility: the crushing of actual freedom in the name of faux enlightenment.
Oh, and here is some Harvard-flavored nerd reportage on the First Amendment and American exceptionalism.
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