Low Hanging Fruit

Speaking in Klingon At a Federation Conference

The social ethic of free speech can only flourish within a broader, deeper religious context.  It is always messy.  Those who desire a utopia on earth, created and sustained by law, end up destroying the liberty rights of free speech. 

The problem lies here.  Free speech ends up tolerating evil as well as good.  Worse, it ends up fostering evil.  Because all men are evil, born in sin, free speech necessarily gives opportunity and, therefore encouragement, to evil thoughts, sentiments, words--and eventually acts.  Language is powerful.  Language and human thought motivate to action.  Evil speech, therefore, always ends in propagating evil acts in a community.  The ethics of free speech argue that such bad consequences are a worthwhile trade-off in order to be free and live in a free society.

Secular society, however, knows only the dead weight of the law, administered by the State, when it comes to controlling free speech.  In the secularist utopia, the law establishes the right of free speech.  The law defines, rules and regulates free speech.  But the State is also the agent of punishment for crime.  The law ends up crushing free speech because the secularist law refers only to itself as the highest ethic when it comes to deciding what speech to tolerate and what speech to repress and punish.  Secularist utopias have no centre beyond the law of the State: therefore, in the end, liberty of conscience and the ethic of free speech cannot survive. Everything kind of speech becomes constrained by the demand to submit to the law.  

We have been afforded a real life example of the unsustainable tensions over free speech in a secular society.

Social networks across France responded angrily to the news a 21-year-old woman was beaten up by a gang of girls and young women for the crime of wearing a bikini in a park. Authorities are yet to have identified the attackers but The Independent reports commentators assume they were Muslims.

According to police the young victim was sunbathing with two friends in the Parc Léo Lagrange in Reims, northern France, last Wednesday when one of her five female attackers verbally abused her for “immorally” exposing so much flesh in a public place. The sunbather shouted back at which point the other girls and young women moved in, slapping and punching her.  Passers-by intervened to protect the badly bruised victim.

The attackers, aged 16 to 24, were soon arrested. The three oldest were remanded to appear in court in September, the remaining two girls, aged 16 and 17, face further questioning.  Authorities have not named the assailants but have said they all come from housing estates with large Muslim populations. Although police told L’Union newspaper that the victim was unable to confirm her assailants were motivated by “religious opinions”, bloggers in France have cited the incident as the latest example of the radical Islamic threat to French values.

The mayor of Reims, Arnaud Robinet, said: “We have to be very careful not to jump to conclusions. All the same, I can understand why people have assumed that this attack had religious motives. If that turns out to be the case, it is a very serious incident.”  [Breitbart News]

In this incident, the State is deciding issues of dress and wardrobe--which is to say it is regulating free speech. What the girls were doing by sunbathing in bikinis was officially tolerated speech.   The five females were also exercising authorised free speech when they verbally abusing the sunbathers for "exposing so much flesh in a public place".  One sunbather also used authorised free speech when she argued back.  No doubt both parties engaged not in reasoned argument, but verbally hurled insults and imprecations at one another. But so far, all falls within free speech laws.

So far, so good.  But free speech rights in this case were laid aside: the five physically attacked the three.  At that point the law against assault was breached and criminal acts took place.  Now, things grew more sinister.  At that point, it was observed that the five attackers were almost certainly Muslim girls, because of nearby contiguous housing estates with large numbers of Islamic residents.  The attack likely had religious motivations.  The mayor of Reims said, "if that turns out to be the case, it is a very serious incident".  Why?  Because in a secularist society violence arising out of religious motives is placed in a different category.  It is much worse than ordinary common garden violence. 

Secular ideologies view arguments over religion as nonsensical.  They have no more meaning or significance than people arguing over whether Spock should be made to speak Klingon when addressing a Federation court.  Actually to fight over such trifles in the real world reveal the perps as particularly depraved.  They are clearly prone to violence and lawbreaking.  Their inconsequential, nonsensical religion should be banned.

For the State it would be a small thing to ban discussions of Star Trek minutiae--they are irrelevant and of little meaning or ultimate value in a secular world.  Similarly, in the secularist world arguments over religion and religious values are of little concern.  It is all nonsense at the end of the day.  Therefore, if it is going to lead to public thuggery, better to ban the religion, and proscribe it as being a form of hate speech.  Better to prosecute the believers in order to preserve public peace.  After all, the free speech of the religious amounts to little more than fighting over ignorant superstitions. 

In a secular State, prohibitions on religious expression become low hanging fruit when it comes to maintaining law and order.