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In anti-hate speech laws, the basic contradiction of liberalism is revealed
The BBC headline says:
Speech row rocks multi-ethnic CanadaThe story concerns the highly publicized human rights case brought by Muslim students and the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean’s magazine and Mark Steyn over a 2006 article by Steyn that said negative things about Islam. Under section 13 of the Canada’s Human Rights Act, the human rights commissions are authorized to hear complaints about material “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of race, age, gender, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, religion, etc.” The language is similar to that of the various anti-hate-speech laws in Western Europe which make it a crime to “stir up hatred” against any group. This is where the rubber of liberalism hits the road of reality. Consider the BBC’s quotation of the offending language in Steyn’s article:
Mr Steyn summarised the presumed global advantage of militant Islam with a stark equation: “Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.”Muslims are a “disaster” for us. That’s what Steyn said. Now, if it is an illegal act of hatred to stir up animosity against a group, then to say that a certain group represents a “disaster” for us would certainly seem to fit that description. To state that Muslims are a disaster for “us,” meaning us Canadians, is to call on Canadians to view Muslims as a threat and even as an enemy. Certainly that seemed to be the drift of Steyn’s argument. If there is any legitimate scope for anti-hate laws, statements such as Steyn’s would seem to come within it. The problem with the anti-hate laws is that they assume that no group can be bad for us, that all groups are good for us. That is of course the very belief that makes it wrong to stir up hatred or opposition against anyone. It is a core premise of liberalism that all men are naturally good, that unregenerate evil and unappeasable enemies do not exist. But what if the liberal premise is not true? What if certain groups are not good for us, but bad for us? What if there is a certain group that is in fact a disaster for us? In that case, a law forbidding us to argue that the group is a disaster for us would render us helpless to defend ourselves from it. If the group represents a danger to our society, then our safety requires that we speak frankly about that group. But how can we allow such frank speech about that group if its members are already living among us? How can we, as decent people, allow it to be said that a religious group that makes up a significant part of our own population is a “disaster”? Is that not to make them disliked, to make them objects of contempt, to make them objects of fear and repulsion? How can we allow legal citizens and residents of our own country to be treated in such a way? What the above considerations illustrate is that there is no middle course. Either we continue with the false liberal philosophy which welcomes the mass immigration of alien groups that are a disaster for us and which forbids our saying that they are a disaster for us, thus destroying our ability to defend ourselves and giving the aliens the power to take us over; or we adopt a non-liberal philosophy which allows us to identify groups that are a disaster for us and to prohibit their entry. Either we permit ourselves to speak freely about the disastrous Other, and exclude them from our society; or we permit the disastrous Other freely to enter our society, and silence ourselves.
Jeff in England writes:
Great points. You cut to the core of this issue like no other writer does. Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 25, 2008 10:12 PM | Send Email entry |