That would be my opinion. The price we pay for freedom is that nasty people have freedom as well as wonderful people.
Imagine if there were a board or commission set up to prevent the publication of hate speech. How are they selected? What protection is there that they won’t exercise partisan bias? Is “Obama is a secret Muslim” hate speech? Is “Romney wants to outsource jobs to China” hate speech?
It gets Orwellian, and fast.
There is some value in permitting bigoted speech. One example: If a politician expresses hatred of racial groups I know not to vote for him or her. If he or she had to keep silent because of anti hate speech laws, he or she could get into office and start pushing a racist agenda. In other words, we know who the bigots are and can try to keep them from causing trouble.
I would also say that there is no point in outlawing such speech. There are probably going to be bigots for as long as there are humans, and keeping them quiet in public won’t make them go away.
Speech is already restricted in some areas, and that hasn’t plunged us into an Orwellian nightmare (Julian Assange’s opinion notwithstanding). There doesn’t need to be a board or commission deciding what we should be able to say. It only takes the passing of a law, and if we don’t like it, we have the chance to vote out the government.
On the other hand, trying to determine what contitutes hate speech is a good point, and that might be the biggest obstacle to forming hate speech laws. I can see the courts getting bogged down hopelessly with all kinds of suits and charges.
I’m not under the illusion that outlawing hate speech would cure the haters, no more than anti-child pornography laws cure pedophiles. The law is only an attempt to suppress their actions with threats of punishment.
While I agree that military secrets are necessary in order to defend the very rights we are talking about, I have never found a solution to the inherent paradox.
A government who wished to censor free speech might claim that the speech in question endangered giving away military secrets. We would never be able to judge for ourselves, because the very process of censoring that speech would be censored due to military secrets. And we end up with exactly the opposite of what we wanted to protect.