Machan's Musings - Free Speech Unsafe with both Left and Right
by Tibor R. Machan
Do you remember Joe McCarthy? Well, you’d have to be old by now to do so, but the Wisconsin Senator remains in focus in the media because there is still a lot of debate about whether his tactics to harass Stalinist communist sympathizers bring to mind some current problems we are having with ferreting out terrorists. McCarthy was notorious for wanting the Feds in on dealing with admittedly rotten opinions on the Left. So was the Un-American Activities Committee, which hauled people before Congress to demand they tell on friends and colleagues when those held questionable opinions.
It is a principle of the free society that opinions—indeed, all peaceful actions—cannot be crimes. Unless there’s a threat—a serious promise—of assault, words are not legally actionable. Nor can their expression be, which is why talk of suing Michael Moore, however much one may find the jerk a nuisance, ought to be tempered.
In the United States it has often been those on the Left who stood up for the right of freedom of speech and expression of opinion—political, artistic, even racial or ethnic (just remember Skokie, Illinois, where the ACLU defended the Nazis who provocatively marched in a Jewish neighborhood).
North of the border, however, the weakness of commitment to the right of freedom of speech is coming into view good and hard. There were, of course, intimations of this close to home aplenty, when University of Michigan Professor of Law, and ardent radical feminist, Catherine MacKinnon, came on the scene with her little book, 'Only Words' (Harvard University Press, 1993), claiming that ill-willed speech is no different from out-and-out assault, so there should be no fuss about lifting legal protection for it. Indeed, it was MacKinnon who traveled to Canada a decade or so ago to advise the courts there of why it’s OK to prosecute incorrect speech, at least when it targets women.
Now we learn that Quebec's Human Rights Commission has ordered someone to pay a $1,000 fine because he referred to another man as a "fifi," the French equivalent of "fag." Actually, the comment wasn't even addressed to the person who complained, but to a companion. As the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports, the "Rights Commission ruled that the term was an inappropriate way of referring to homosexuals and adds to the disgrace and lack of respect of human dignity people are entitled to."
Punishing an "inappropriate way of referring"? It is fantastic—there is a whole lot of that going on among people everywhere, so if the courts and jails are full now, think what is coming!
Some see this as a fairly radical turn of events in Canada, although there is ample similar movement in the good old USA. The view that there exist hate crimes—which means when someone commits violence against another there can be additional culpability for the antagonistic belief that goes with or even motivates the action—is a clear case in point. This is actual law in many parts of the US now. And various measures to curtail politically incorrect speech, usually confined to public spheres where government rules (yet, ironically, including public schools, colleges and universities, supposedly bastions of freedom of expression), are afoot in the country.
Not that because the USA is joining Canada in this detestable trend should one remain silent about Canada taking further steps to curtail individual liberty. Nor should the fact that the curtailment targets people who do themselves exhibit detestable traits of character, such as gay-bashing, allay worries. The threat to liberty is always the greatest when accompanied by cries of necessity and special pleading.
It is instructive, of course, that this time the apologia does not come from the right, which thought the specter of communism or Stalinism in the USA—no small menace, mind you—necessitated clamping down on freedom of opinion and association. It comes from the Left, which has tended to be successful in promoting itself as the exclusive champion of the right of free speech and opinion and is still pretending to care about profiling and such in the War on Terror. Kerry v. Bush is illustrating this as we speak.
Just goes to show you—neither Left nor Right can be counted on for a principled defense of individual liberty, anywhere, anytime.
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