SansPretense

Hell, I’m gonna grant your greatest wish. I’m gonna show you a world without sin. -Mal from the movie Serenity (2005)

Hate speech laws have a lot of appeal to many people, for some fu screwed up reason.  From what I’ve gathered, the basic reasoning is that restricting speech so that hateful words, speeches, writing, acts, etc. are banned would help minorities and underprivelaged people feel less exluded in society.  This in turn will allow them to achieve a better level of success and equality with the majority.  It will also, in theory, cut down on hate crimes and violence by not inciting these feelings in others.  Am I missing anything? 

Now hate speech regulation (and political correctness in general) comes from the vault of bright ideas originating in modern Marxist thought processes (the American political Left), but limiting speech isn’t strictly a liberal stance.  Conservatives have forms of speech they want to regulate and inhibit as well.  We’ll save that for a later topic.

If you want to see a case study of what it’s like living in a country where the government has been given the power to regulate speech, then all we Americans have to do is look at our Canadian brothers and sisters (for those who don’t know, Canada is that place just north of the United States…no, it’s not a state and no they didn’t fight against us in the Civil War…).  Right now, six conservative bloggers are being sued for hateful speech by a former member of the Human Rights Commission, Richard Warman, there that stands to make more money bringing lawsuits to the commission than he did working for them.  The bloggers sued are Katy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury (see here and here), Ezra Levant, Kate McMillan from Small Dead Animals, two bloggers from FreeDominion.ca, and Jonathan Kay from the National Post.  They are being accused of “Islamophobia” or something like that.  Hell, read the pdf of the lawsuit yourself and try to figure it out.  The scariest thing, to me, is that these aren’t politicians or persons in positions of power.  They are normal, everyday people. 

***UPDATE: I stand correct by commentor Don McCarten: The bloggers are being sued by Richard Warman in a Court of Law for libel, not the Human Right Commission, for hate speech. The libel charge is against FreeDominion for accusing Warman in a post (and allowing comments about) of pretending to be someone else and making bigotted comments. Apparently Warman admitted to posting “undercover” at one point, and the FreeDominion bloggers found that he had the same IP address (and Windows 98 operating system, Firefox browser, etc) as someone who posted the bigoted comments. Putting 2 and 2 together, they believe, for good reason, that it was Warman. The other bloggers “republished” this information by linking to the post, commenting on it, allowing others to comment on it, and hence, they, too, are being sued for libel.

One can argue that the lawsuit is legitimate since libel is not the same as hate-speech. However, one can also argue that the defendents have good reason to believe that what they posted is true (or at least had good reason at the time - I don’t know if new evidence has surfaced). To be clear, I still think the lawsuit is made by a whiny, left-wing, cry-to-your-mama little twit who needs to suck it up and defend himself in the court of public opinion instead of bringing his issues to a court of law simply because he can’t handle the repercussions of his previous actions. The problem Warman has is that he went on the site, made comments under a fake id, and now those he tried to “entrap” no longer trust him, the CHRC, or his motives. You reap what you sow. You hide behind a mask, don’t be surprised if people have trouble seeing past it (hence the name of this site). **End Update

So why shouldn’t the government restrict hateful speech? What good does it do society to allow such speech when it hurts so many people?

The easiest argument to make and understand is… that by allowing the government to control what speech is legal and what speech is civilly or criminally against the law is that it makes it that much easier for a future government to turn those laws around to work towards a tyrannical end. This has happenned very often in the past. Tyrannical governments don’t normally just come in and overthrow the existing government. They twist around the legal norms are precedents to make the government work the way they want. Any restrictions in our fundamental rights starts us down a slippery slope, but let’s not talk about the possibility that this happens even if it is likely to be an issue future Americans face. Let’s instead talk about the fundamental flaw in these laws and why they are wrong NOW and not for their future effects.

The very reason that Free Speech is protected under the very first and most important Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights is because it is one of the most first things tyrants attack as well as the first and most important tool for protecting the individuals within society. There’s a reason it was, at one point, illegal to teach a slave to read and write. By allowing and promoting open communication within a society one fosters the spread of ideas. Indeed, that’s the point of hate speech laws: to stop the flow of ideas that the government (and the Left) deem evil and wrong. Apparently the irony of their actions are completely missed considering fighting anti-speech laws enabled slaves to educate themselves, Patriots to come together in 1776 to overthrow a government, and well, you get the point.

What Hate Speech Law advocates are effectively supporting is restrictions on thoughts and feelings. By controlling speech one controls how people think and feel in a very direct way. Humans learn and grow through the sharing of ideas and experiences. We need the negative and bad ideas just as much as we need the good ideas in order to gain the feedback on our own worldview. We would still be thinking the Earth is the center of the universe if it wasn’t for a very politically incorrect idea getting heard. Furthermore, if we never have dialogue with the people who do harbor feelings and attitude of hate, then those feelings just keep getting passed on along with the resentment. Isn’t one of the causes of terrorism that the group doing the terrorizing must feel excluded from society - that their ideas are not listened to or cared about? Keep in mind that much of their speech could be considered hate speech.

Whether or not you agree with a person’s thoughts or attitude, as an individual they have an inherent right to think and feel the way they do. Nature programmed us in this way. From this inherent right comes the inherent right to also express those thoughts and feelings because, again, Nature made us in such a way. Humans who go against this and suppress their feelings and thoughts tend to not be the healthiest amongst us. So here in the United States we have written down this belief in our Constitution - not because we believe it comes from the government, but from Nature - it’s Natural Law and called it Freedom of Speech.

We don’t abridge it because it’s not something the government has the right to restrict. But why not pass reasonable laws against hateful speech when we have laws against things like yelling fire in a movie theatre? It’s a very fine line, but restricting dishonest speech that can lead to injury or death is not the same as restricting honest and open speech (hence thoughts and feelings) just because it offends someone. There’s no such thing as a Constitutional or human right to not be offended. There’s no such thing as a reasonable law that prevents someone from telling you what they percieve to be the truth. Anyone who doesn’t see the difference (not saying you have to agree) needs to get their head out of their stubborn ass and try to think for themselves for a change.

Hate speech laws does nothing to stop the hate. You cannot change society or people by force, and that’s exactly what the Left wants to do with these “hate” laws.

Besides, there is nothing I hate more than some jackass pretending to be all friendly and polite when on the inside they’re just a sneering, two-faced, double-crossing…

Anyway, to give a little more background into what’s going on in Canada, let me quote from a very excellent article by Mark Steyn about his own run-ins with Canada’s Human Rights Commission: 

Last week’s letters page included a missive from Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., chief commissioner of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, defending her employees from the accusation of “improper investigative techniques” by yours truly. Steyn, she writes, “provides no substantiation for these claims,” and then concludes:

“Why is this all important? Because words are important. Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to place reasonable limits on the expression of hatred.”

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The problem the Jews found themselves up against in Germany and elsewhere was not the lack of hate-speech laws but the lack of protection of the common or garden laws — against vandalism and property appropriation and suchlike. One notes, by the way, that property rights are absent from Canada’s modish Charter of Rights. The reductio ad Hitlerum is the laziest form of argument, so it’s no surprise to find the defenders of the ever-more-intrusive “human rights” enforcers taking refuge in it. But it stands history on its head. Most of us have a vague understanding that Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag in February 1933 as a pretext to “seize” dictatorial powers. But, in fact, he didn’t “seize” anything because he didn’t need to. He merely invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Republic’s constitution, allowing the state, in the interests of the greater good, to set — what’s the phrase? — “reasonable limits” on freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom from unlawful search and seizure and surveillance of postal and electronic communications. The Nazis didn’t invent a dictatorship out of whole cloth. They merely took advantage of the illiberal provisions of a supposedly liberal constitution.

Oh, and by the way, almost all those powers the Nazis “seized” the morning after the Reichstag fire, the “human rights” commissions already have. In the name of cracking down on “hate,” Canada’s “human rights” apparatchiks can enter your premises without a warrant and remove any relevant “document or thing” (as the relevant Ontario legislation puts it) for as long as they want it.

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Commissar Hall suggested that if my words had appeared on a sign rather than in a magazine article, she would be free to haul my hatemongerin’ ass into the dock. Makes sense to me. So I’ve now put the offending excerpt from my book on a placard and I’ll be in Toronto in the first week of May to drop it off at her office. I look forward to the prosecution. Given that we’ve already been found guilty, I don’t think I’ve got much to fear from the trial.

Happily, beginning on July 1, under Ontario’s “human rights” reforms, Commissar Hall will have far greater powers to initiate prosecutions against all and sundry. Under the new proposals, ” ‘hate incident’ means any act or omission, whether criminal or not, that expresses bias, prejudice, bigotry or contempt toward a vulnerable or disadvantaged community or its members.” “Act or omission”? Of course. The act of not acting in an insufficiently non-hateful way can itself be hateful. Whether or not the incident is a non-incident is incidental. I quote from “Concepts Of Race And Racism And Implications For OHRC Policy” as published on the OHRC website:

“The denial of racism used by so many whites in positions of authority ranging from the supervisor in a work place to the chief of Police and ministers of government must be understood for what it is: an example of White hegemonic power over those considered ‘other.’ ”

Got that? Your denial of racism merely confirms your racism — because simply by being a “White hegemon” (like Barbara Hall or Jennifer Lynch) you wield racist power…

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All of this is totally ridiculous. This is what happens when the insecure take over positions of authority.
Talk about taking 10 steps forward in the development of humanity just to take 20 steps back to the day where we burned witches at the stake because they dared to dance naked in the woods once or twice…which, if you haven’t tried it, you should. It’s quite liberating…almost as liberating as being able to discuss what you think without having someone threatening a lawsuit for being offended…not that I’ve tried it or anything…

Steyn says it best in his article:

I don’t have as low an opinion of Canadians as Barbara Hall and Jennifer Lynch do. I don’t believe your liberty is the conditional discretionary gift of hack bureaucrats advised by Marxist theorists. You defeat bad ideas — whether Nazism, Marxism, jihadism, Steynism or Trudeaupian pseudo-”human rights” mumbo-jumbo — in the bracing air and light of day, in vigorous open debate, not in the fetid corridors of power policed by ahistorical nitwits.

It’s not a left/right thing. It’s not a gay/straight thing. It’s not a Jew/Muslim thing. It’s not a hateful Steyn/nice fluffy caring compassionate Canadian thing.

It’s a free/unfree thing…

Value your freedom while you have it folks. There are those amongst us who would rather force us to think like them since their ideas don’t really hold up to heat when placed in the fire of honest debate.