A hate speech law is no more a prevention of speech than a fraud, conspiracy, or defamation law is a prevention of speech. Nobody is arguing that under a hate speech law, that the government may exercise any prior restraint or engage in any “pre-crime” enforcement – just as the case is with fraud, conspiracy, or defamation.
Now, just like any other crime, the existence of punishment for certain behavior may deter that behavior. But your statement about “preventing speech” indicates that either you’re pressing your case too far and trying to poison the well, or you seem to be misinformed about the nature of such laws.
Remedying past wrongs is what our judicial system does, whether its shoplifting or slipping and falling on icy steps. The existence of our judicial system does not affect any other salutary actions you may propose to tackle problems in society; and just because people are working to prevent future wrongs through whatever means does not replace the role of the judicial system.
I asked this before and didn’t see an answer. Since Trump has been President, has there been some sort of abuse of our laws prohibiting defamation? Like, has Trump engaged in a plot to punish his detractors by using existing defamation laws? I’m not aware of such a thing, and if Trump seems unable to silence his critics using defamation laws, I can see no way that he could abuse hate speech laws that are similar in construction.
How did you forget the case of David Ahenakew? He was tried and convicted as well. The conviction was overturned on appeal, but the man was in fact tried and convicted.
Maybe someone can walk me through this. This person said that Jews were a disease that Hitler needed to get rid of. (But this was in the context of an argument with a reporter, which courts apparently gave him leeway on.)
I think people who are against hate speech laws would be totally fine if this bigot lost his job, roundly criticized in the media, and generally became persona non grata in society. But, the fact that he had to spend money in his defense before being convicted and later having that conviction overturned is portrayed as a vast injustice.
I don’t get it. Why are things like losing one’s job and becoming a social outcast a fair outcome, but spending money on lawyers is not?
More like speaking in alternate dimensions it seems to me …
A law prohibiting defamation with consequences for breaking the law is intended to prevent defamation. Any law defining something as a crime and proscribing a punishment for the crime is intended to deter/prevent the behavior, be the illegal behavior murder, cheating on taxes, or speech. No precognition needed. The complete idea of hate speech laws is to deter/prevent such propagandizing behaviors. It is setting up the good fence to make good neighbors. That concept is not poisoning the well in this dimension anyway.
Only in some cases, too few IMHO, is our legal system about restorative justice. Or even rehabilitation. More often the emphasis is on punishment as justice and as above as deterrence. Even in civil cases this is often the case, and are not talking about the civil side of things in which damages for the harms from dangerous and reckless speech are being awarded.
Not at all understanding what point you think you are making with your Trump comment.
Do you have ANY doubt that if our laws allowed Trump to prohibit and punish speech that was critical of him or his positions that he would do so? The current system does not allow it. He’s bemoaned that on many occasions and certainly threatened to sue CNN and the New York Times. He’s denied press access to reporters who he felt were being “unfair” to him. He’s threatened to sue Schiff and Pelosieven! The attempt to bully critics into silence goes back to before his being president. Here’s 538’s list.
Florida wanted to criminalize doctors asking about gun ownership and safety (before Trump). It took a Federal court ruling to protect physicians (mainly pediatricians who commonly ask about guns and safe storage practices) speech in doing their job. The rational was not that there could be no restriction on doctors’ speech but that such restrictions had to have adequate justification for the higher level of scrutiny. Gun owners feeling … offended? harassed? discriminated against? … was not enough of a harm.
If the standard was that offense was enough of a harm, that and concern that such speech was laying the groundwork for other things (in this case more restrictive gun laws and a registry of gun owners to facilitate confiscation later) then Florida would rightly had won.
Heck under that standard religious fundamentalists should be able to prohibit a bunch of speech about things that offend them and that they are scared may result in societal changes that they feel threatened by.
Grant the state broader powers to declare harms based on offensive speech with no clear and direct connection to substantial harms and you are back to the Schenck case (again that show I linked to).
If you “intentionally damage or cause the loss of any property (including animals or records) used by the animal enterprise”, you’re not engaging in free speech, you’re engaging in the destruction of property.
However, let’s consider for a moment what the OP is about; it’s about law. We are specifically discussing the power of the state to punish people, with all its immense power, resources, and legal monopoly on the use of force. If some dickhead can’t get a reservation at his favourite restaurant because of his dickheadedness that’s one thing; having the state pound on you, though, is something quite different, and creates a precedent we would be really, really well advised to be extremely cautious about.
DSeid has provided examples of free speech being rather outrageously violated with the imprimatur of the courts in the USA, supposed free speech king of the world, and one can find similar things in most any free country’s history. Sam Stone’s hypothetical of a USA where anti-Christian blasphemy is illegal is not an absurd idea at all; it is not likely, but it’s something that could happen with Republican governance and courts stacked with Federalist Society types. I could see an evangelical Christian governor signing such a bill.
In Toronto just last week or the week before, a feminist author named Meghan Murphy spoke at a library; Murphy is a feminist author who believes it is not right for trans women to be in spaces previously reserved for biological women, like sports or women’s shelters. Actual politicians, including the mayor, opined that Murphy was spreading hate speech - I have to stress she has never said anything even approaching the legal definition of hate speech in Canada, or even really hateful at all, which is not to say I agree with everything she says - and should not be permitted to speak, something in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (The city’s head librarian refused to cancel the event, and apparently, the head librarian’s decisions cannot be overturned.) There is a really significant portion of the population that genuinely thinks Murphy should not be allowed to say what she thinks, and a not insignificant percentage of Canadians think she should be physically hurt or arrested for saying things they disagree with. Several hundred protesters came to the library and shouted threats at attendees. Murphy got to speak, but we live in a society where a lot of people want dissenting opinions - not just hate speech, but just opinions that are presently unpopular - to be literally illegal, and letting down the Constitutional safeguards against that run a very real risk of that happening, as we’ve seen in the past.
The idea that free speech absolutism has become entrenched in US jurisprudence is meant to denote a particular approach or philosophy that is rather uniquely American rather than the word “absolutism” being taken literally. That approach is one that I think I pretty much spelled out in post #336; to reiterate the key point:
The premise of hate speech prohibitions is that there are certain views that are so vile that objectively no civilized person should or would agree with them. This would include things like advocating genocide, or advocating violence against minorities defined by race, ethnicity, or gender-related attributes, or dehumanizing those minorities in a vile and hateful fashion by suggesting that they’re something less than human, because those views are fundamentally inconsistent with a civilized and peaceful society. This is the basic sticking point in hate speech debates, that opponents of hate speech laws refuse to recognize the primacy of peace and social order. The result of this – as shown in all those country rankings – is that you get less peace and social order than other societies with no corresponding benefit, except the ability for hateful sociopaths and demagogues to spout hate.
Sure, Brandenburg allowed restrictions on speech if it could definitively be shown that violence would likely be imminent, but to me that isn’t the remarkable thing about that ruling. The remarkable – and shocking – aspect is that hateful speech explicitly calling for violence against a minority group was deemed to be protected. R.A.V v City of St. Paul which protected cross-burning on a black family’s lawn should be equally shocking to civilized people everywhere. So should the Charlottesville march of white supremacists, or the despicable protests of the homophobic lunatics in the Westboro church. All of these forms of “speech” are quite literally toxic: they are vile beyond redemption, they poison social discourse, they are hatefully divisive, and that hate and divisiveness corrupts the society in which it festers and sooner or later leads to social disruption, great injustices, and systemic violence. In Charlottesville it happened sooner rather than later, and the orange moron who empowered these white supremacists then used the opportunity to fan the flames even further by blaming both sides.
Hate speech like this is anathema to the existence of peace and social order and a cohesive society. In the final analysis the only reason in my view that such practices are protected in the US but almost nowhere else in the civilized world is that uniquely American obsession, a fundamental distrust of government (which is probably why conservatives tend to be the strongest opponents of hate speech laws). The feeling seems to be that if today you can prohibit the KKK from burning crosses and advocating the murder of black people, then tomorrow the government might come to your door and prohibit your speech. This is abject nonsense because hate speech laws are – and must be – crafted to be carefully limited in their scope to the kinds of speech that I described above, that we can all agree have no place in civilized society, not now and not ever. Indeed I would posit that it’s the existence of such laws and the values that they represent that ultimately does more to prevent such slippery-slope abuses than anything written in the constitution ever could; the First Amendment didn’t prevent McCarthyism and the Red Scare and the thousands of lives that it ruined, because those things tend to happen when society is deeply divided and in turmoil and its moral fabric is broken.
This is no exaggeration. I was just skimming the latest news on CNN and three stories on the front page got my attention. One, a US citizen of Peruvian origin who has been in the country for 19 years had acid thrown in his face and told to go back to where he came from. Second, two doctors of Cuban origin who have been held at a privately run ICE detention center for more than a year described the appallingly inhumane conditions under which asylum-seekers are being held. Three, white supremacists in Mississippi descended once more on the Emmett Till memorial, which has been so frequently vandalized that it now has to be monitored by security cameras and alarms and was recently made bulletproof. Everyone probably knows the story of why there’s an Emmett Till memorial in the first place. Someone please explain to me how more hate speech is going to improve any of this.
This is a silly red herring. If you think any law against hate speech, as we’ve been discussing it here and as implemented in other democracies throughout the world, would allow Trump or any government bureaucrat to silence his critics, then you really and truly don’t understand what hate speech laws are.
Hadn’t heard of it before but the one that goes like this?
I’ve no problem with it. Not vague at all.
It is staying within what I feel are the guardrails there should be. Damaging property is not protected speech. Threatening people to cause them to reasonably fear for their safety is not protected speech. Picketing, protesting, boycotting, and so on, are.
I have the impression that the transgender community in the area harbors a small core of particularly strident activists who always seem to show up at these sorts of protests, and that might be what you’re seeing here. There may have been hundreds of protestors but I very much doubt that hundreds were shouting threats, or that there are genuinely significant numbers that want to ban speech that they don’t agree with. Canada does have a robust Constitution and exceptions to freedom of speech guarantees are carefully circumscribed and not taken lightly. There are always going to be stupid people wanting stupid things, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to happen. The existence of our criminal hate speech laws is certainly not a path to that in any way shape or form. Some of the idiotic human rights laws might be, along with the tribunals that administer them, but I’m opposed to most of that, and that’s an entirely different discussion and an entirely different aspect of law, for one thing being civil and not criminal law.
Your definition of hate speech seems to reference “minorities” a lot. Do you think that advocating violence against a majority, or “dehumanizing” a majority “in a vile and hateful fashion by suggesting that they’re something less than human” is hate speech too, or is that a designation only reserved for speech against a minority?
I’m just curious if his view is that hate speech is only hate speech if it’s directed at a minority / if it’s impossible (in his view) to say anything directed towards straight white males that would be “hate speech”. It’s just a request for clarification on his view / position.
I’ve referenced minorities because they tend to be the usual targets. The laws that I know of don’t make reference to minority groups, but rather just to identifiable groups in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression. Majority groups are obviously going to be far less vulnerable, but are equally protected under law. For instance, a Muslim calling for violence against Christians would risk running afoul of federal hate speech laws in Canada. I tried to find an example of that in Christian-majority western countries but, funnily enough, all I could find was anti-Muslim speech. Still, that’s how it would work, and likewise with a black writer, say, calling for violence against white people. I don’t know how you could think otherwise.
Responding without the unnecessary snark, laws are literally written to provide punishment for an offense. Just look at any provision of title 18 of the US Code. To the extent that you consider the words “deter” and “prevent” interchangable, fine, I now understand your position.
If the current system allows for restrictions on speech not to be exploited to serve a repressive, partisan, authoritarian agenda, then why can’t one additional restriction also function in that same “the system can’t be abused” way?
For example, lying to business investors is prohibited, and so is Holocaust denial. Not sure why the first one is on such safe ground, and the second one sets off a slippery slope of authoritarians sending people to jail (with the implication of no due process to make the threat more scary). I don’t get it.
Are you of the opinion that judges and juries are unable to distinguish between words that call for ethnic cleansing of some group, and words that others simply disagree with?
if anything, I think juries might end up divided on close cases of hate speech, probably leading to prosecutors favoring to take only clear-cut cases (if indeed such a law were to include criminal penalties, as opposed to maybe a version that focuses on civil matters).
" Lying to business investors is prohibited" because that is *fraud. *
What is “Holocaust denial”? I mean you and i think we know what it is, but someone saying that the death camps didnt kill as many as the concentration camps did, or that maybe it was *five *million Jews, or that besides the Jews there were also millions of gays, gypsies and other people killed? Are those Holocaust denial? And on one board I was accused of being a “denier” as I did point out that Gays & Gypsies and other people were targeted also.
So you see- one is fraud. There is hundreds of years of case law and etc as to what is fraud and it causes immediate *provable economic harm. *
Fraud isn’t covered by freedom of speech because society has just waved a magic wand and determined that this kind of speech isn’t a true Scotsman. The boundaries of what speech doesn’t count as speech is this entire debate, and I welcome you to it.
The other? The other is denying and distorting an unprecedented crime against humanity, and accusing the historic victims of fabricating it. This is rather more significant than lying to investors and causing economic harm, because Holocaust denial is one of the pillars of anti-Semitism. Like all historic events, lack of knowledge or, worse, outright denial, carries the risk that in some form it could happen again. Which is exactly why anti-Semites engage in it, and why most countries consider it a flagrant form of hate speech. That there are variations on exactly what is being denied doesn’t make it any more ambiguous or less hateful; the general theme is always that much or all of it was fabricated by the Jews themselves and the Nazis are being unfairly maligned. It’s hate speech at its worst and ugliest: