John O’Sullivan notes in the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. and Britain have long considered themselves the standard-bearers for freedom of expression. Can this proud tradition survive the idea that ‘hurtful’ speech deserves no protection? Today, hurtful speech is more likely to be political speech than obscene speech.
Yes, and that is a huge problem. I (O’Leary for News) am old enough to remember when offensive speech meant obscenity and “Kashtan the Communist” lost his deposit every local election.* Of course he was free to run, five decades ago. But his platform just didn’t sell.
How things have changed. Now porn is freely available, but it a writer must say things such as these – which would have been obvious to people bored by Kashtan decades ago:
Hearing criticisms of your own convictions and learning the beliefs of others are training for life in a multifaith society. Preventing open debate means that all believers, including atheists, remain in the prison of unconsidered opinion. The right to be offended, which is the other side of free speech, is therefore a genuine right. True belief and honest doubt are both impossible without it.
It isn’t just some Muslims who want the false comfort of censoring disagreeable opinions. Far from it. Gays, Christians, feminists, patriots, foreign despots, ethnic activists—or organizations claiming to speak for them—are among the many groups seeking relief from the criticism of others through the courts, the legislatures and the public square.
England’s libel laws—long a scandalous system for enabling the rich to suppress their scandals—now have imitations in Europe and the U.S. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice created “the right to be forgotten,” enabling those with ugly pasts—a fraudster, a failed politician, an anti-Muslim bigot perhaps—to delete their crimes, misdemeanors and embarrassments from Internet records so that search engines cannot find them.
Surely such things can’t happen in the land of the First Amendment? Not in quite the same way, perhaps, but a libel suit brought by the climatologist Michael Mann against the opinion writer Mark Steyn, National Review magazine (with which I am affiliated) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for their criticism of his temperature projections still poses a chilling threat to free speech and scientific debate. Even if the case is ultimately resolved in favor of Mr. Mann’s critics, they will have suffered a considerable loss in time and money. “The process is the punishment,” Mr. Steyn has said of such trials. It is also a deterrent to future critics.
Nor are conservatives free from sin on this issue. …
The only people who really want free speech are those who consent that speech be used against them. In the same way that a fair contest means our opponents have the same tools we do.
* Deposit: He (and all others) had to put down $500 for the intention to run in an election. But he would lose it if he did not get a stated number of votes. That helped prevent mere attention-seekers running for office in a multi-party system.
Note: First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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