Excellent post by Andrew Sullivan on the right to say prejudiced things, which a lefty blog called Crooked Timber wants banned by law. Excerpt:
To make my own position clear: The elimination of bigotry is not a legitimate role of government. In fact, bigotry is a right, a basic freedom, as intrinsic to freedom as freedom of religion and speech. Once you start deciding what speech is or is not acceptable, we no longer live in a free society. We live in a tyranny - where Crooked Timber and the benign left will call the shots and enforce their orthodoxy.
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It shall be interesting to see who shows up and absolutely condemns any sort of restrictions of speech at all...
...and yet were in favor of banning or 'restricting' pornography a month ago. Because, in their book, that doesn't 'count' as speech.
And the posts in response on Crooked Timber for this article are very interesting. Almost no one agrees with it, luckily, and of those that appear to agree and are demanding examples of speech to censor, I can't tell if they're serious or concern trolls. (There's sometimes a fine line between being a concern troll and reductio ad absurdum by agreeing with everything people say and getting them to continue to the logical conclusion.)
And it might worth noting this entire chain started off in England, somewhere with no 1st amendment rights. I'm not even entirely sure how it got over here, except that a confused progressive took exception to the idea that 'human rights' outweigh freedom of speech, which is a crazy invention of a dichotomy, as free speech is probably the second most important human right in existence. (Freedom from imprisonment without trial being the first, as you can't have any other rights without that one.)
The liberals on the left have to watch that pesky infestation of progressive thought. :)
...and yet were in favor of banning or 'restricting' pornography a month ago. Because, in their book, that doesn't 'count' as speech.
Pornography should not, and historically did not, count as "speech." Broadening the scope of free speech to include such things as pornography only has the long term effect of undermining belief in the value of free speech.
With respect to expressions of opinion on social, cultural, religious, political issues, etc., I'm probably as much of a free speech absolutist as Franklyn.
Caveat, however: Criticizing what someone else says (about anything), and even ostracizing the person for his or her views, is NOT an abridgment of free speech. That is simply other people exercising their rights to speak freely.
I agree with your caveat, Simon, but I wish to quibble a bit about the context around undermining belief in the value of free speech.
It is the freedom itself, and the exercise thereof, that IMO contains the value. I would include pornography under the caveat, and include the restrictive reactions to pornography under the heading of exercising the right to disapprove of it.
We can value the speech negatively without making prevention a part of the reaction. If enough people ignore something, it will eventually go away. Shrug.
Criticizing what someone else says (about anything), and even ostracizing the person for his or her views, is NOT an abridgment of free speech. That is simply other people exercising their rights to speak freely.
So true. One of my pet peeves is people screaming "censorship!" when a nightclub bans a controversial performer or the corner store declines to display a poster for an event that some people find offensive. We have the right to say what we want, but the world (at least the private sector part of it) isn't obligated to provide a platform for us.
Mrs. Pringle
Pornography should not, and historically did not, count as "speech." Broadening the scope of free speech to include such things as pornography only has the long term effect of undermining belief in the value of free speech.
Historically, blogs didn't count as speech either. And, historically, freedom of speech has been illegally suppressed repeatedly in this country, or do I need to mention various sedition acts?
Saying 'We cannot do X, but we can manipulate the laws so that certain things are not classified as part of X', basically means you can, in fact, do X. You've made a mockery of the entire system.
It's like removing habeas corpus from non-citizens. Now no one has habeas corpus, because all you have to do is assert someone is a non-citizen, lock them up, and they can't challenge that in court.
There is a fuzzy are WRT to actions that are also speech...are we trying to regulation the speech or the action? That's a valid question, and I don't think that people should be free to spray paint a message on a random building (As long as they aren't restricted only from certain messages.), and I think wearing an armband counts as speech, and I think there's a shading between the two where, at some point, it starts being regulatable, and that people could disagree on that.
But a movie is speech, period. A printed page is speech, period. There's not really any debate possible on that. It is solely a message. Lewd messages are, indeed, messages. Messages intended to arouse are messages just like messages intended to entertain or inform are messages.
But I'll enjoy watching the people who argued that porn should be banned because it's 'degrading to women' explain exactly why hate speech, which is also degrading, should not.
I mean, it's literally exactly the same justification, isn't it? That the message is one that X are less worthwhile human beings than everyone else, and thus we can justify censoring that message because that leads to harm?
Instead of a generic neo-nazi rant, let's postulate that said 'hate speech' is a video of the beating of black man by a gang of neo-nazis. And let's postulate the pornography is the rape of some woman. (Both of these, of course, totally simulated for filming, with no one actually being harmed. Heck, let's say they're CGI.) These are both rather extreme examples of their genre, but whatever.
Who's up for explaining why one should be banned and the other not?
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