By “Ridiculous” interpretation you mean “actually read the words that make up the 1st amendment in the order the are written”. There are NO interpretations of the 1st Amendment that could possibly be interpreted to ban offensive speech, and that is EXACTLY what the European and Canadian hate speech laws you quote. They are only allowed in Canada as the part of the Canadian constitution concerning free speech has a huge “except these kinds of free speech…” clause. This makes it objectively INFERIOR to the US 1st amendment, as it has no such loophole. You have clearly said Fred Phelps style hate speech should be illegal, that would required gutting the first amendment and adding just such a “free speech is protected, except these kinds of free speech …” clause.
Again these are not abstract hypotheticals about an alternative reality where Hitler won WW2, these are actual real laws in other liberal democracies that violate the heart of what freedom of speech means. The fact other countries constitutions DID NOT protecting their citizens from these kinds of infringements shows this…
And yes US states had blasphemy laws, and they WERE found in violation of the 1st Amendment (the last prosecution for them was in a state that had not yet ratified the bill of rights)
Agreed and it should be noted the case that Wolfpup is referring to never declared that burning a cross on someone’s lawn was protected speech, but merely struck down an overly broad city ordinance which allowed for the prosecution of people for having such symbols on their own property. I.E. Having a Nazi flag in your own room.
In fact, the court even noted there were numerous laws that are constitutional they could still be prosecuted under.
This is probably about the fifth or sixth time Wolfpup’s rather questionable explanation of the decision has been corrected. I invite all to read the link.
[Emphasis mine.]
Maybe you should invite readers to read the correct link. :rolleyes: The one that says:
… the Court struck down that statute to the extent that it considered cross burning as prima facie evidence of intent to intimidate. Such a provision, the Court argued, blurs the distinction between proscribable “threats of intimidation” and the Ku Klux Klan’s protected “messages of shared ideology.”
There are two key cases that I’ve been discussing with reference to cross burning, and though they are related they are different. The above ruling was Virginia v Black, not R.A.V. v City of St Paul, and that’s the one that, as I’ve clearly mentioned several times, ruled that cross burning, in plain English, falls under the Ku Klux Klan’s protected ‘messages of shared ideology’." Please stop misrepresenting my arguments.
No. There have been numerous prosecutions since, some of which resulted in convictions that were upheld on appeal. Like this guy.
I’m not sure why you find it significant that Massachusetts hadn’t ratified the Bill of Rights in 1838. It had been passed by more than enough states to take effect long before that.
And they were right to do so. If I burn a cross on someone else’s lawn, that’s a threat. If I burn a cross in my backyard, where its visible to no one but myself, that’s not a threat. The law failed to make a distinction between those two situations, and so was justifiably struck down.
Perhaps you’re not aware that the subject of constitutional interpretation is a perennial one that has been raging for hundreds of years, and possibly no constitutional amendment has been subject to more varieties of interpretive scrutiny than the First. If you have an infallible objective interpretation please present yourself to the Supreme Court and the nation and by all means let the infallible wisdom be heard. Until then we will have to make do with the best interpretations that constitutional scholars and the justices of this or any nation are capable of.
That is exactly what Canadian hate speech laws are not. You clearly don’t understand them. Your own example proves that, as I note below.
Please point me to where the Canadian constitution enumerates the kinds of speech that are not permitted.
I’m not going to try to address whatever may be happening in the UK because I don’t know enough about it and, for all I know, there may indeed be insufficient fundamental safeguards on speech. But you cite the Whatcott case in Canada so I’ll talk about that. I know about it and already mentioned it here.
You claim that Canadian hate speech laws ban offensive speech. From ***your own freaking link *** it’s clear that the opposite is true; in ruling on the Whatcott case, the opinion stated that:
… “hatred” should be interpreted as “extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification’”, a threshold which would not include merely repugnant or offensive expression, and that tribunals should consider the effect of the expression, not its inherent offensiveness
Which is exactly why some of Whatcott’s convictions were overturned, as offensive as the material was.
IOW, offensiveness is not “hate speech”; to be hate speech, it must be incite actual effects – it must be the kind of speech that promotes social turmoil in forms like hostility or violence toward specific identifiable groups. It must pass a threshold, IOW, where it promotes the kind of society that neither I nor you, I’m sure, would want to live in – the kind where the KKK burns crosses and lynches black people from lamp posts. And that’s why we have laws against hate speech.
Both of the cited cases involved burning a cross in someone else’s yard, and Virginia v Black involved both a case of a burning cross in someone else’s yard and a case of burning a very large cross at a KKK rally that was clearly visible from a public highway and was part of a rally that featured death threats and racist rants against blacks and Mexicans.
I understand your point but don’t agree with it. Both the St. Paul and Virginia laws were premised on the belief that the KKK symbolism of the burning cross that has been so intricately associated with the most horrific violent racism had no merit or claim to legitimacy in a civilized society and deserved to be banned outright. I agree. I see no societal benefit to regarding it as a “message of shared ideology” and no “slippery slope” to banning it. The Supreme Court disagreed, a decision that could only have been reached in the throes of American constitutional absolutism, and so racism continues to fester. We are in a clash of values here, we apparently value different kinds of society. Since I don’t suffer from an extreme distrust of government, I’m happy to let the laws, limited by the constitution, and the interpretations of the courts, define a more just and peaceful society than would otherwise be possible.
That is the gotcha that makes the Canadian constitution objectively worse at it’s job than the US one.
That section shows EXACTLY my point. The right of free speech INCLUDES using bad scary words ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification’. Unlike the Canadian constitution which has the catch all “we can ignore these rights if we don’t like them” clause, there no reasonable interpretation of the 1st Amendment which does not include the right to use nasty works like that. The ONLY way that speech could be banned in the US is if the 1st Amendment was gutted.
And that is EXACTLY the kind of speech that the 1st Amendment can and does protect. You or I (or the POTUS) don’t get to outlaw someone else’s speech because we think it might “promote the kind of society that neither I nor you, I’m sure, would want to live in”.
Huge part of the US would not want to live in an Atheist society, but your right to say society should be atheist is protected. Arsehole racists and homophobes have that same right.
Not in America you don’t unless you gut the 1st Amendment. Fortunately the 1st Amendment protects all of us from being prosecuted because we use words that people think are “hateful”. People who aren’t so fortunate are actually getting their right to free speech infringed, not hypothetically, they actually are, right now, in a concrete way.
Again I am not actually American and don’t sign up for American exceptionalism bullshit, but in this case the US actually has something damn good going for it. My fundamental human rights are protected by the US constitution in ways they are not in other countries inferior constitutions.
So you consider speech that promotes social turmoil in the form of hostility towards specific identifiable groups to be “hate speech”. Criticism of PETA (insert identifiable group) where there is much disagreement (social turmoil) that is hostile to them could be banned. I see where you’re going with this!
I don’t want to live in the society you are advocating for. It sounds terribly authoritarian.
You use the phrase “not trusting the government” - Damn straight. I don’t trust the government. I think this is an attitude that should be adopted universally. You use the phrase “constitutional absolutism” - Damn straight. That’s how things should be. Don’t like it, change the constitution. As long as it says what it says, that’s the rules we have chosen to live by.
No. You stated that there was a “except these kinds of free speech…” clause – your exact words. There is not. Every constitution on earth has implied limits to every right that it enumerates, and it’s the job of supreme courts to rule on where those limits may lie. The US Supreme Court has ruled on such limits hundreds of times, often in divided and contentious decisions. The relatively modern Canadian Constitution sets it out explicitly.
As for being “objectively worse at its job” (its, not it’s) that depends on what you consider its job to be, and it’s hardly objective. Perhaps one might consider that the job of all laws, of which the constitution is the supreme over-arching authority, is to engender and maintain a peaceful and just society rather than one in which, for some ideological reason, anyone gets to engage in hate speech because they feel like it. You might want to look at some of the polls and statistics comparing US and Canadian societies and many European ones in terms of racism and bigotry against minorities, racially motivated crime, discrimination, comparing them in terms of general diversity and immigration patterns, or in terms of acceptance of gay rights and SSM, and then tell me again which one is “objectively worse”. Then tell me again what criteria are really and truly important in public policy, and whether the unbridled right to hate speech is really the best measure of civilization.
Right, you now wish to assert that the court’s ruling that hate speech does not include merely repugnant or offensive expression actually means that it does include merely repugnant or offensive expression. This is no longer a meaningful debate, it’s a denial of English comprehension.
Nope its laid out right there at the top “Congress shall make no law” its job is to stop the government from passing laws that infringe its citizen’s basic rights, which it proceeds to lay out. As demonstrated by all these cases it is objectively better at that job than other constitutions.
Fortunately for all of us the 1st Amendment unambiguously does just that, the ideological reason being it is a fundamental human right to say things some people might think are “offensive” or “hateful” (which are synonyms BTW).
Thankful you are not going to be able to change the 1st Amendment and add “unless the speech is nasty and horrid” clause any time soon (or add a “unless their free exercise of religion includes weird foreign looking head scarves” clause), so it will carry on doing its job and protecting us for the foreseeable future.
I’d be perfectly fine with a hate speech law that functioned exactly the way the rule in the Pit does. Namely, that I’m the single authority on what is and is not hate speech. Without that particular feature, I’m a’gin 'en.