Lenny Bruce is spinning so fast in his grave he may have achieved takeoff velocity.
Richard Nixon Would have loved ‘hate speech’ laws in the 60’s and 70’s. Then He could have given it to those campus radicals good and hard, eh? They said lots and lots of hateful things back then,
Hate speech laws are generally advocated by people who believe they have current cultural supremacy and want laws to cement their position. When the left was outside of the mainstream, they believed in total free speech, even going out of their way to be hateful and shocking to make the point. People made All kinds of ‘shock art’ in the 70’s that their targets found hateful, The first amendment was the only thing protecting those people from government persecution.
I’m sure Andre Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ was seen as hateful and oppressive hy many Catholics. And certainly drawing a cartoon of Muhammed would be seen as ‘hate speech’ by many. So are those of you who thjnk hate speech laws are cool would be willing to have the government punish a cartoonish for drawing fhat cartoon? and if so, would you apply the same standard to Serrano, or Lenny Bruce, or George Carlin, or Howard Stern? how about Kathy Griffin holding up a model of the severed head of the president? Should she have been charged with a crime? Would you honestly prefer a world in which these people were charged with crimes for saying what they did?
I prefer a world in which Illinois Nazis only have to worry about Jake and Elwood Blues, not government stormtroopers shutting them down because they engage in badspeak. And I would say the same for Illinois Communists.
Here’s a modest proposal: Any party that wants hate speech laws can have them if they allow their opposition to define what is and isn’t hateful. After all, if it’s so clear cut and non-partisan, that shouldn’t be a problem, right?