http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/09/how-the-pc-police-threaten-free-speech.htmlHOW THE PC POLICE THREATEN FREE SPEECHJ. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post
Today we are all Charlie Hebdo. But what about tomorrow? And the day after that?
Thats when our commitment to free expression will really be tested, and in ways that are less obvious and prone to easy, social-media heroics. Thats when the battle lines over allowable speech will really become clear and well see whos standing where. If the recent past in America is any indication, we should be worried, as free speech and the marketplace of ideas it energizes are never really popular for very long. They are always suspended over a precipice, dangling by a slender thread that shows every sign of snapping.
Dont get me wrong. Its absolutely fantastic that Twitter and Instagram are overflowing with people from all over the world publicly stating solidarity not simply with the French satirical magazine whose staff was murdered by Islamist madmen, but the larger principle that speech and peaceful expression shouldnt be subject to murderous reprisals. I think its especially great that Europeans are doing so, since that part of the world is no haven for free speech.
As the radical British Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary wrote on Twitter while the bodies were practically still bleeding out, If freedom of expression can be sacrificed for criminalising incitement & hatred, Why not for insulting the Prophet of Allah? Virtually every European nation has h**e speech laws of some sort, most of which protect against the always-poorly defined slandering or libeling of this or that religious faith, along with a million other things. For godsAllahs?sake, Austria even threw joke historian David Irving in prison for denying the Holocaust, an action that accomplished nothing other than giving him greater standing among neo-N**i i***ts and salving the historical guilt of the first nation to sign upwillingly!for Hitlers genocidal madness.
Writing in USA Today, Choudary expanded on his anti-free-speech argument, using European law and custom to justify or explain violence. Given curtailments on freedom of expression, why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk? It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the worlds population was protected.
The simple, awful t***h is that free speech has never been particularly popular in America.
Even as he ignored an unsuccessful 2007 attempt by aggrieved Muslims to sue Charlie Hebdo under a stupid French law, Choudary invoked the same sort of higher law reasoning that underwrote protests by all sorts of radicals, such as St. Thomas More, Roger Williams, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in their finest moments. Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them, says Choudary. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, Whoever insults a Prophet k**l him.
Thats a gutsy, clever, contentious argument to make in the wake of an unambiguously despicable act. Its gutsy, too, to pretend to speak for all of Islam, which like Christianity contains multitudinous interpretations of core doctrines. Choudarys obvious logical sleight of handhe conflates incitement and hatred, thereby equating action and thought so as to prohibit bothsuggests that he is arguing in bad faith. But his case founders in a specifically American context, where h**e speech is rightly protected under the First Amendment, which not coincidentally also guarantees freedom of religion and freedom of association.
Speech, religion, and association are inextricably intertwined, after all, and to try to separate them is the same thing as destroying them; it would be like trying to remove the color from a jug of paint. All spiritual obligations to Allah, Mohammed, Jesus, and Joseph Smith aside, constitutional guarantees of speech, religion, and association are precisely one of the reasons why American Muslimsand Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and othersare less likely to shoot each other here than to argue in the marketplace of ideas or, as important, ignore each other completely.
Yet we Americans shouldnt be glib or smug in our devotion and commitment to free speech. Yes, we do typically do better than Europe (and Canada, too, which is frequently awful on this score). But even if free speech is guaranteed by law, its hemmed in by countless other trends, customs, and especially mind-sets that seek to reduce, restrict, and in some cases even criminalize speech.
The simple, awful t***h is that free speech has never been particularly popular in America. When theyre not busy banning books such as the Harry Potter and Captain Underpants series (really), schools should drill into students that its pathetic that Lady Chatterleys Lover and countless other books, films, and other forms of creative expression were banned for decades.
Back in the 1980s and early 90s, it tended to be the right, especially the religious right, that sought to shut down art and expression that it found distasteful, obscene, and irreverent. That Jesse Helms harped on the minimal taxpayer funding underwriting Andres Serranos Piss Christ barely disguised conservatives larger game in shutting down art they found sacrilegious or distasteful. But it wasnt just the right, or conservatives, who were forever being literally and figuratively pissed off. In 1989, when a student at Chicagos Art Institute created an exhibit that invited the audience to step on an American f**g, the Senate v**ed 97-0 to criminalize putting f**gs on the floor or ground.
As the World Wide Web was scaling up into a true mass medium, the Clinton administration, with the backing of a Republican Congress, passed the Communications Decency Act, which would have effectively subjected the Web to the same sort of dreary content regulation that attends to broadcast radio and television. The CDA was passed not in the name of censorship but in the name of protecting children from stumbling across sexual material. Only a surprisingand overwhelmingly free-speechdecision in 1997s Reno v. ACLU saved us from such a debilitating law.
Todays threats to free speech are more likely to come from social justice warriors on the left who say they are defending the feelings of those deemed to be crushed under the weight of supposedly s******c r****m and sexism. The movement is most evident on college campuses. Twenty years ago, the ACLU inveighed against the rise of campus speech codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, g****r, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Wh**ever the intention, the ACLU argued (and still does), such rules end up policing and punishing thought, which should be anathema anywhere but especially at a university. As the student rights group (FIRE) documents on an appallingly regular basis, the ease with which colleges infringe on expression and association is unceasing.
More recently, under the guise of protecting victims of sexual assault, the federal government tied higher education funding to creating on-campus legal proceedings that stripped defendants of due process rights. The silencing of defendants rights under federal guidelines is so egregious that even the overwhelmingly progressive faculty of Harvard Law School called the governments actions beyond the pale. Then theres the move toward trigger warnings, mandatory announcements that reading and discussing material such as The Great Gatsby may cause post-traumatic stress disorders, and the creation of a whole new range of offensive and thus actionable speech called micro-aggressions.
The atmosphere on campuses has gotten repressive enough that comedian Chris Rock no longer plays colleges. Citing examples such as University of California at Berkeley students trying to bar an appearance by Bill Maher because of his anti-Muslim jokes, Rock told New York that he stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because theyre way too conservative
Not in their political viewsnot like theyre v****g Republicanbut in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody
You cant even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.
As my Reason colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown has written, progressives may well come to rue the day they signed on to laws forbidding controversial speech based on the speakers perceived motivations. A Brooklyn graffiti artist was charged with a h**e crime because her message criticized the NYPD and a professor lost a tenured position at the University of Illinois because his anti-Israel comments were labeled h**e speech.
In America, these are the sorts of incursions against free speech and a truly unregulated marketplace of ideas that will persist and likely grow long after the dead in Paris are forgotten (just as Dutch filmmaker Theo van Goghs ghastly murder has been). We will likely never face the explicit limits on speech, religion, and association imposed by European countries, but we are kidding ourselves if we think similarly effective repression cannot happen here.
In fact, h**e-speech laws may even become a reality. An October 2014 Economist/YouGov poll found roughly equal amounts of Americans supporting and opposing a law that would make it a crime for people to make comments that advocate genocide or hatred against an identifiable group based on such things as their race, g****r, religion, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation. Thirty-six percent were in favor and 38 percent were opposed. Among Democrats, 51 percent supported such laws.
Those are troubling numbers, for unfettered speech is not incidental to a flourishing society. Its the foundation upon which everythingfrom science to religion to community to politicsis built. We need to recover and grow the idea that the proper answer to bad speech is more and better speech. Or, as good, to ignore that which bothers and insults you. Tend to your own garden, to quote the great sage of free speech, Voltaire, and invite people to follow your example.
Yes, today we are all Charlie Hebdo, and thats a great thing. But its tomorrowand the day after tomorrowthat really matters.