Antidotes to Bigotry and Hate Speech

More Free Speaking, Please

There is a controversy broiling in Australia over free speech.  That country has moved radically away from free speech rights in recent years.  The present government, under Tony Abbott is seeking to redress the balance.

The issues are now familiar to us all.  Advocates of spurious human rights have promulgated the radical curtailing of free speech by proscribing "hate speech", otherwise known as bigoted speech, offensive speech, racist speech, anti-Islamic speech, and so forth.  In reality all these proscriptions seek (and achieve) curtailing certain kinds of speech.  The Commentariat is agog and aghast in Oz over the government's intentions to reform the current anti-free speech regime in Australia.  Consider the umbrage taken by a Sydney scribe, printed in the NZ Herald:

It's all part of Tony Abbott's vision of a new Liberal dawn. The Australian Prime Minister's conservative Government intends to dilute racial vilification laws to enshrine the right of Australians to be bigots.  Amid fury and concern even within his own party, Abbott has invoked the greater goal of free speech to amend the Racial Discrimination Act to allow offensive, insulting and humiliating abuse so long as it does not incite hatred or violence.

Do people have a (freedom) right to be bigots?  Of course.  To be ignorant?  Of course.  To be a venter of spleen?  Of course.  Everyone has a right to go down to the pit in their own way.  It's called freedom.
  But, says the caviller, there are always limits upon freedom.  Too right--for the purpose of protecting the freedom rights of others.  Curtailing so-called "hate speech"  does not fit into that category.

The fundamental flaw in anti-free speech laws springing up like mushrooms all over the place is that free speech is deemed (or imagined) to be in the ear of the hearer.  Hate-speech, bigoted speech, offensive speech is "proven" to be such if the hearer finds it to be hateful, bigoted, or offensive.  If the hearer takes offence, the speaker is thereby proved guilty. 

Imagine a parallel.  It is a crime to act with murderous intent.  A thug loses it, and hits his wife.  The state prosecutes and the courts convict with the crime of acting with murderous intent.  What was the evidence and proof of the intent to murder?  The wife believed it to be the case.  Or worse, the court rules it was likely the wife believed it to be so.  Therefore, the thug is guilty beyond doubt. 

The situation in which Australians now find themselves with respect to speech, (as do citizens in the UK, and much of Europe, and Canada), as bad as  the parallel cited above.  Andrew Bolt, a columnist in Australia, was found guilty in 2011 of "race hate speech" because of

his ''offensive'' 2009 article accused ''fair-skinned'' Aborigines of choosing their racial identity to get certain benefits. [Sydney Morning Herald]

A judge decided that some folk would likely take offence, and hey presto, Bolt was convicted of hate speech.  

The right to freedom of speech took something of a battering today after Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was found guilty of breaching the racial discrimination act.  Bolt's crime was to suggest that some people of mixed racial heritage, whom he described as ‘fair skinned aborigines’, only declared themselves as such in order to claim govt benefits.

Justice Mordecai Bromberg, who presided over the case, found that such a statement was likely to cause offence to those at whom it was aimed, and were not made in ‘good faith’.  This judgement was probably inevitable because of the manner in which Victoria’s Racial Vilification Laws were drafted. Because they proscribe statements that might cause offence, it’s now very difficult for anyone to debate the issue of race without getting themselves into trouble. [Tom Elliott, 3A Radio commentary.  Emphasis, ours.]

One struggles to imagine how folk can endorse and champion free speech rights, on the one hand, and yet applaud such censorious law and decisions, on the other.  Free speech rights in the West have rapidly devolved into free speech for moi, and curtailment of everyone else who offends moi.  It is this travesty which the Abbott government is seeking to redress and reform.

A victim of this infamous curtailment of free speech, Andrew Bolt has written the last word on the matter:

But is a law against free speech really our only and safest recourse [against racial hate speech]? Six years ago The Sydney Morning Herald allowed Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, then Mufti of Australia, to peddle a bit of denialism himself: “I, like many researchers in the world, shy off the number of innocent victims that had been estimated at six million.”

Hilali already had a disgraceful record of hate speech. He’d called women who wore no hijab “uncovered meat’’ for rapists.  He'd accused Jews of using “sex and abominable acts of buggery, espionage, treason and economic hoarding to control the world’’. He’d praised suicide bombers as “heroes’’ and the September 11 terror attacks as “God’s work against oppressors”.

How did Hilali get away with that when we’ve had the RDA for two decades? Answer: because we had failed to use our free speech.  SBS journalists actually filmed Hilali praising the September 11 terrorism but destroyed their tape to avoid giving the “wrong idea”. Other journalists, likewise cowed by social and threatened legal sanctions against criticising Muslims, looked the other way until the radical threat became too obvious. Even today, news reports often delete ethnic descriptors such as “Middle Eastern appearance” from police appeals to help identify wanted men.

Even so, what muzzled Hilali since has been not the law but public opinion.  Media and talkback criticism finally became so much that the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils dropped him as Mufti.  Yet again, the best antidote to bad speech was free speech and the worst has been the law.

The proof is in. Australians can be trusted to maintain the moral code. Say no to racism, yes to free speech.

The best antidote to bigotry and hate speech is more free speaking.  The alternative is too ruinous to contemplate.