Nicholas Smallwood

In today’s New York Times Adam Liptak has an insightful article on the unique treatment of free speech in the U.S. vis-a-vis, well, every other country in the world (there’s also a good little audio interview of Liptak on “radio New York Times,” which you can reach from the first page of the article and is worth a listen). Unlike fellow Western countries like Germany, Canada and France, American constitutional law has time and again struck down laws that impinge on the rights of people to express themselves, even if their expression is extremely hateful or offensive to other people or groups of people. There are certainly limits on free speech in the U.S., but they are far fewer than anywhere else.

I think our European friends deal with a lot of issues better than we do back here in the ol’ U.S. of A., but our treatment of Free Speech is something I’ve long ranked way above the rest of the world. Hate speech is awful, but as soon as you start passing laws disallowing people from expressing themselves in certain ways, you’ve thrown le bébé out with the bath-water. Free and open democracies run, among a couple of other things, on ideas, and when you allow for the centralized control of the expression of certain ideas, you’ll be putting a small number of people (judges, committees, tribunals, etc.) in charge of deciding what ideas are better than others, instead of leaving that up to the machinery of time and open discourse.

A great illustration of this problem is mentioned by Liptak, where he notes that Brigitte Bardot was recently fined (for the fifth time!) for provoking discrimination and racial hatred when she was speaking out against Muslims for the public sheep slaughtering that takes place during Eid al-Adha. Now, Bardot was probably not very tactful in the way she expressed her protests, but what she was doing was standing up for an extremely deeply held belief she has in support of the rights for animals not to needlessly suffer. This is a belief millions of people around the world support, and I personally know numerous intelligent people who honestly believe animal rights is the next big civil rights movement. You may agree or disagree with this view, but should disagreement with that view be enough to publicly silence it? By continuously punishing Bardot, the French government has officially deemed her cause not properly worthy of public expression.

Do we really want that sort of discretion in government hands? Glenn Greenwald said it very well, in an article criticizing just such laws:

Just like Bush followers who bizarrely think that the limitless presidential powers they’re cheering on will only be wielded by political leaders they like, many hate speech law proponents convince themselves that such laws will only be used to punish speech they dislike. That is never how tyrannical government power works.