The point being that the government killing all homosexuals could be done in a legal fashion. And you would view calling for that as different. Now though you seem to be saying they would be liable, but less liable. The thing is, I am not sure the distinction really works for you…
For example, if you have a preacher callign in his sermon for the government to put all homosexuals into extermination camps, and that is what God wants, and it is a tragedy that our government is too in league with Satan to do so, then I don’t know if there is a major difference between that and him saying “homosexuals should be killed” if one of his parishioners goes out and shoots up a gay bar. I wouldn’t find liability in either case, because I think it is way too attenuated there. It strikes me that this avoids placing the liability on the person actually responsible - the person who did the shooting. Now if said Minister points out a specific person, and encourages their death, it is a different matter. There’s a sliding scale of responsibility.
Banning speech is censorship. Putting penalties on speech is also censorship. Not all censorship is bad, but it should be limited as much as possible.
As I said at the beginning, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of an action against Rush, or Savage, or Coulter, succeeding on the facts here. “Liberals should be killed” is WAY too attenuated to tie to the death of a particular liberal or attack on a particular liberal institution. Nobody has been arguing that in the cases of a close link, there should be no liability (that’s a position I am willing to consider, however, but I flip flop on it). What I am disagreeing with you over is that there SHOULD be liability in this case, for the “wingnuts” who were being discussed earlier. Extending liability that far would have an incredibly chilling effect on free speech, IMHO. Try to bring a case on these facts, and the defense would win on a motion to dismiss or at least on summary judgment. You wouldn’t get NEAR a jury.
The liability still exists though, and is the award is determined (excluding any concept of punitives for the moment) by the harm caused to the person defamed. It is certainly true that generally speaking, the harm caused by a falsehood from a newspaper is greater, but that does not impact the liability. It’s also a lot easy to prove the necessary requirement that the statement be publicized if it is by the media. But private individuals can and do defame other private individuals, and are found liable for it, and are forced to pay damages.
I did not say it was different, you did. I assumed extra-legal killing and stated definitively when you asked that extra-legal killing is what I was talking about. Legal killing is not something you can punish someone for advocating. You’re conflating what I did say with what I am not at all saying. For instance in this:
You seem to be assuming that i don’t rest ultimate responsibility with the person committing the crime, which is also not true. I think some responsibility rests with those advocating murder, as well as 100% with the person committing murder.
Be that as it may - I agree that there is a sliding scale. The preacher calling for the deaths of all homosexuals is responsible to a greater or lesser degree for every hate crime against homosexuals committed by one of his or her parishioners. Whether they’re legally liable is a question I can’t answer, but they are responsible and I want them held responsible to the degree their words influenced action.
Agreed. This is an instance where I think a line should be drawn. Eviscerate someone’s beliefs to your hearts content, and say what you like about their character. Calling for their death because you disagree is beyond the pale.
I happen to agree it would likely not succeed, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t have merit or that it’s a flight of complete fancy. Failing that, I believe forcing these idiots to defend their over-the-top rhetoric would be enough for some amount of justice and perhaps a return to civility in political discourse, which is really what I am after in the long run anyways.
I understand your disagreement; I just don’t think it’s that much of an issue. Speech of this type is already restricted; I am not even advocating changing the law. And whilst it may be a Quixotic quest for apparent justice, I don’t think it’s that far out of the park from a legitimate need to punish people for violent and reprehensible threats made against any group. Hate speech is hate speech. Just because the target is liberal white folks doesn’t mean it should be tolerated, even more so if the hate speech is calling for the destruction of that group of people.
Yes, based on the relative damage of their action. A person starting a whispering campaign against someone is nowhere near as damaging as a newspaper article calling someone a paedophile, and the damages reflect that altered responsibility based on impact.
What he said. If the Klan tells people to kill me, and someone tries, I’ve got a very good case against the Klan.
If the Klan tells people to kill people like me, and someone tries to kill me, I’ve got a very good case against that person, but not against the Klan.
You’ve conflated individual and organizational responsibility a bit, too.
Organizations are usually only liable for actions performed by members or employees while acting as agents of the organization.
You might have been in England long enough to have heard or read of Enoch Powell; would you have held the Conservative Party responsible for the dozens of racially motivated attacks which took place after the “Rivers of Blood” speech?
I am not taking away personal responsibility in any way shape or form. The person who attacks you is absolutely liable.
And I disagree I am casually giving away my freedom. I’m not stopping anyone from saying anything.
But if you yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, or if you tell a group of people that someone should die then one of them goes out to kill them, you bear a degree of responsibility for that murder. Claiming no responsibility because of freedom of speech, and protecting someone’s right to advocate the murder of others, is just plain counter-productive to a society as a whole and I am sure the founding fathers never would have envisioned hate speech as protected.
Well, here’s the thing. The Founding Fathers were pretty civilized guys, but they very definitely were thinking in terms of protecting the discussion of things like revolution - not sure about the armed part. And I’m not in the least sure that a fair number of them wouldn’t have considered it perfectly acceptable to discuss a slaughter of Indians in, say Kentucky or Ohio territory at the time.
ETA: Even if the group decided not to act, if some slob in the back row then decided to go out to Ohio and kill himself some Injuns, I don’t know whether or not that would have been considered free speech or not, I don’t know if anyone would have blinked an eye. I can’t imagine that the original group, no matter how influential, would have been prosecuted. “Hate speech” as we know it today just wasn’t really a concept.
And this is my primary problem with strict ‘textualists.’ Things have changed considerably in the over 200 years since the Constitution was written. Not just the technology, but the viewpoints we hold. The over-arching principles still hold true, just as those of the Declaration of Independence do. But the devil is in those details. We have since determined that women are people, and people of color are people. We now have the idea that landowners are not automatically better qualified to vote than people who don’t have real property. We now have a stronger sense of democracy and a weaker sense of replubic. We now have a stronger view of ourselves as a nation and a weaker sense of ourselves as a confederation of nation-states. You may or may not agree with these changes, but these are changes that not only have occurred, but have so deeply sunk into the national consciousness that most people don’t even know they haven’t always been the case. Courts that depend on strict textualism and even strict case law may not reflect any kind of social reality. Sometimes judges and/or justices have to willing to stand up and say “Wait, this is stupid.” The problem, of course, is who decides?
The ACLU’s boilerplate response is: “The antidote to bad speech is more speech.”
The other cliche is, “We should remember that when somebody advocates murder in a public forum, that there very well may be some vulnerable people who decide to act on those words.”
My solution is self-policing. Too many lefties of the 1970s tolerated those who used or advocated violence, which reflected poorly on their character. Today, the violent crazies on the left are pretty throughly marginalized. Not so on the right: Coulter regularly practices hate speech. Nontrivial portions of the modern conservative movement need to take a hard look into the mirror.
In a similar vein, I recommend that SDMB lefties lampoon and otherwise push back on Der Tris’s poor behavior in appropriate forums, subject to the rules of this board.
I agree, Measure, we’ve perhaps been remiss in not calling DT on this more when we’ve seen it, although I will note he’s been met with a lot of skepticism and ballyhoo when expressing sentiments of this nature. We can’t prosecute him, because it’s an anonymous message board, and, well, he’s a fan of Honor Harrington!
An atheist answers that this is the eternal question that has troubled religion throughout it’s history, hence: God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.
And an atheist and a UU answers: I don’t believe in a all-merciful skygod and don’t consider the building where my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship meets to be “his” building (and I feel comfortable in saying that neither do most of my fellow congregants). TruthSerum, please educate yourself on what Unitarian Universalism is before you start with the anti-Christian rhetoric. It would be inappropriate had this shooting occurred in a Baptist church, but it’s irrelevant in this case.
