We have been discussing the crackdown on free speech in the West, particularly in England, France, and Canada. It is a rising concern that seems to be lost on Montana legislators and prosecutors who want to follow the path of speech criminalization. The Montana criminal defamation statute criminalizes speech that exposes religious, racial, and other groups — “to hatred, contempt, ridicule, degradation, or disgrace” — an absurdly broad standard that would make a Sharia judge blush.
I have long been a critic of the criminalization of symbols and gestures, even deeply offensive symbols like Nazi gestures. Europe has plunged into speech regulation and criminalization – showing that such laws create a slippery slope for the criminalization of unpopular speech. This course inevitably leads to increasing — and increasingly absurd — speech crimes. For example, I fail to see how arresting a man for a Hitler ringtone is achieving a meaningful level of deterrence, even if you ignore the free speech implications.
The problem is trying to draw such lines rather than embracing free speech as protecting not just popular but unpopular and even hateful speech. Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. We have been following (here and here and and and here and and here and here) the worsening situation in England concerning free speech. As noted in a recent column, free speech appears to be dying in the West with the increasing criminalization of speech under discrimination, hate, and blasphemy laws.
My friend Eugene Volokh has a good piece on the Montana law. It includes a type of group libel claim that has always been problematic in torts. Criminal defamation and hate crime cases have presented the greatest threat to free speech. Indeed, Muslim countries that have long fought for an international blasphemy standard has latched on to the same approach as Montana to criminalize anti-Islamic speech. Unputting aside the questions constitutionality of such laws, Montana seems utterly unconcerned about the implications of this criminalization effort.
Source: Washington Post
@RandyJet
Sooo, the Brits built the Berlin Wall, and tried to put nuclear missiles in Cuba??? Oh, and I noticed that you didn’t answer the questions the second time, either, sooo I will repeat them for you. I am sure that you just got so worked up that you forgot:
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
SFrom, The fact is that FDR did nothing at all to those in Hollywood who were against him or pro-Nazi. Since much of Hollywood was Jewish, there weren’t a whole lot of people who were pro-Nazi. FDR also did nothing to those who committed treason during WWII such as McCormick who was the owner of the Chicago Tribune. They committed treason twice. The first time when an anti-FDR person in the Pentagon leaked US War Plans that had been agreed to with Churchill at the Acadia meeting and published them. The second was when the same paper published the fact that the US Navy had broken the Japanese purple codes. They decided not to prosecute and hope the Japanese did not read the paper, rather than bring attention to that article.
Since the whole point of making movies is to make money, the politics of the people doing it are irrelevant as long as the movies do well. It is supposed to be the virtue of capitalism that the market place is supposed to be the determining factor as to what does well. Instead, YOU decide who gets to make movies based on their politics and not on the merit of their work. I guess that I should hate Clint Eastwood movies since I hate his politics. I see that is your criterion, not mine.
As for nuclear missiles in Cuba, the US put the same kind in Turkey where I was stationed before the Soviets did their stupid move. The US agreed to get rid of those missiles in Turkey as part of the deal. Of course, you forget that the US INVADED and was fighting the Soviet Union at its beginning. So just WHO is the aggressor? How many dead Soviet soldiers are buried in the US from fighting here? There are hundreds of US troops who are still buried there.
randyjet – the US was support the Whites but also trying to get its supplies back and try to shore up the Eastern Front. You have to blame Wilson for the invasion, buddy.
The American Taliban is alive and well………..
I guess, the desire to criminalize speech, whether it’s prohibiting questioning of Holocaust in Europe or whatever words they want to ban in Montana, occurs only when the offended party feels that it’s actually the truth.
“Truth needs no law to support it. Truth is self-evident to all. Throughout history, only lies and liars have resorted to the courts to enforce adherence to dogma.” — Michael Rivero
A high school principal in Florida, loved by his minority students and parents, just lost his job for making a respectful Facebook post saying he supported the cop in Texas. The Education Industry has no tolerance for anything not in the PC manual.
Don’t call a baker a homophobe for refusing to bake a gay wedding cake…
… It’s offensive to their religion.
I have long been saying, let the fundamentalist Christians usher in Sharia style laws…
… Then let’s talk about these ‘deeply held religious’ views.
Montana is a red state which makes this surprising. I thought Republicans hate everyone except white, male, Christians. Both the House and Senate are Republicans. It’s 59-41 Rep to Dem in the House and 29-21 in the Senate.The fact that this is a red state is what got our pilot dropping bombs. This is an aberration. PC is a liberal characteristic, but it appears to be contagious.
When did Montana pass this legislation?
Who was in control of each side of the legislature–House and Senate– who meaning what party?
What party did the governor belong to — the governor who did not veto this law?
Who was the sponsor and what was his/her party affiliation?
We need to know these things and then we can chime in an accuse the right or left or whoever is in between.
I wonder if bam bam will offer her opinion. If memory serves, she takes great offense if people are said to be racists or homophobes. Indeed, she condemns ‘name-calling’ in general.
Spinelli is clear he has no problem with calling a Jew a kike and lord knows Squeeky Simon Legree is good with ‘drooling feral blacks’.
Me? I love it when people let their hate hang out there for all to see.
Kudos to JT for giving a shout out to Eugene Volokh. I read his blog and find it informative.
Isaac is a European body trapped in the USA. He does not understand the US Constitution, and has derision toward much this country stands for. When he talks about “the extremes” in speech being the problem in need of censorship he shows his ignorance. The extremes are what need protection by our Constitution. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theatre. But you can say “Hillary Clinton is a lying, fat lesbian married to a sociopathic sex addict rapist.” Political speech is the most protected. You can also say “I hate kikes, niggers, beaners, dagos, shanty Irish[I am the last two epithets], bohunks, japs, chinks, krauts[my wife is one], pollacks, Canucks, frogs.”
Now, JT is conflicted on this topic. He is part of the Education Industry and works on a very PC campus which has recently picked on a student on PC grounds. He has a speech code here which may cause my comment to be deleted. But, it was written righteously, trying to show the uninformed what the speech that needs protection looks like. Pretty speech needs no protection. Ugly speech does.
Consider the mouth. Tongue in mouth is like rudder of big ship.
Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! Think before you speak.
A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds.
A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything – or destroy it!
A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation,
send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell.
To deny that it is the liberal agenda that wants to apply PC to the laws of the land is INSANE. PC was started on college campuses and that is where it reigns supreme. Jerry Seinfeld speaks out on PC because comedians are our last line of defense. He and many comedians refuse to appear on college campuses because they will not have their acts censored by the Education Industry. Seinfeld called out the editor of the New Yorker on a talk show. David Remick said they would not lampoon Bruce Jenner. Seinfeld was sitting next to him and JUMPED on Remick. Then, Remick backed off and said they might in the future.
Our bomb dropping pilot is an angry man who just flies in on occasion, drops bombs, and then leaves. He has been caught dissembling in the past. I ignore him. Just Sayn’.
I wonder they Montana would pass a bill that on the face of it is unconstitutional. Of course, the left is all for this, they’ve been the enemies of Free speech ever since the won the culture war in the 1970s. Before that they were all for Free Speech, but that was before the Left had power. The left’s attitude toward free speech is summarized by a Sontag comment: “They don’t need free speech in Cuba, they have socialism”.
How much longer before we have Cops knocking on our doors because we “insulted” Gays or Israel or Blacks on the internet. Believe it or not that happens in England now.
randyjet, Lois Lerner, enough said.
What liberal folks do is try to destroy businesses or have people fired who do not toe the line on gay marriage. Talk to the bakers or pizza parlor sort chicken franchises or Modzilla executives they tried to destroy.
Colorado repealed criminal libel after being hauled into court for violation of the first amendment…libel should be a civil matter…in Colorado it used to be a felony!…just a couple years ago
Don de Drain
I get sucked in every now and then but eventually I ‘got out the popcorn’ and read for amusement. Lately I’ve just been skipping over the drivel. It seems that some of our more interesting contributors have since drifted away, too bad.
All priests in Montana are Pedophiles. All Baptists in Montana pork pigs. All Methodists in Montana are gay.
Would someone on the blog please print my comment and mail it to the prosecutors in Montana so they can file charges against me. I want to challenge this on First Amendment grounds, right of privacy grounds and impose the defense of Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Woff. I am a dog and I cant mail things.
Europeans have made their own decisions about what they criminalize and what they don’t. How they treat their citizens and what they believe is best for their future. If America was the imperialist nation that you suggest after WWII things would be very different. As to the Marshall Plan and the rest I am glad we did it but we hardly amassed an Empire. We, the US, are flawed but Europeans are independent thinkers.
The US has never been very good at the Empire building. It usually messes it up and does nothing more that create more black holes in which we pour money that would be better spent at home.
Holmes, I agree with much of your post. I think that the European bans on some things relating to the Holocaust, Nazism, etc.. had a legitimate function after WWII. There were plenty of Nazis still alive and well after WWII, and so the bans made sense to force them underground or renounce their past allegiances. Right after the Civil War, reconstruction did many of the same things which were justified at the time. Now, while most of that generation are dead, I think that such bans have outlived their purpose and should adopt the US standards.
As for empire building, you are right that the US has not amassed a colonial empire as the Brits, French, Belgians, and Dutch did. The only major land the US had under colonial rule were the Philippines, which the US had slated for independence prior to WWII. The US still has Puerto Rico as a colony, and in fact used armed force to supress the independence movement back in the 1930s. They have the distinction of being the only US territory the USAAF actually bombed in combat with the exception of Alaska.
The Marshall Plan was designed to forestall a communist government from taking power in Italy and France and other countries which were still starving after WWII. The US did not have to do that, and was an outstanding bit of charity that also served out interests. It was so popular that Poland, and Czechoslovakia wanted to get that aid. Stalin promptly vetoed that idea and lead to the takeover of those governments to be more reliable.
I agree that the US troops make lousy Nazis, and that our one foray into typical colonialism in the Philippines was accomplished with the all volunteer force of the US Army during the insurrection. The average American would not put up with the kind of brutality that was required to put down such things. One of the good things about the draft.
Perhaps we should all check ourselves. I have read from regulars on this blog who take offense when someone uses language or symbols that insult their personal agenda.
However, it’s mostly our liberal friends who started and insist on political correctness vs. our “free speech.” It’s the liberals who develop their own brand of vocabulary and terminology regarding various social issues and take offense to others who express their views in less PC ways. It’s the liberals who then turn around and defend free speech.
I have a liberal friend who puts her left sided comments on FB, but when I or someone else responds and debates the point, she gets flustered and tells us to keep our comments to ourselves–even though it comes up on my FB page. Where’s the free speech in that? What hypocrisy!
At least your liberal folks don’t put those who they disagree with in prison, or blacklist them, “investigate” or throw them out of their jobs for their views, which is what conservatives have done in the past.