Censorship of hate speech is an unconditional surrender to hate. [View all]

[True Blue Door]

Hatred is an emotion that happens to human beings, and like all emotions it has exactly the power over us that we allow it to have. Do you think men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. chose the path of peace and justice because they had no hate in their hearts, or because some authority would have punished them for it? Quite the opposite: They were both tempted by hate, both could have delivered a message of hate powerfully and persuasively, and in Gandhi's case had plenty of people trying to pull him in that direction, but they chose a better way. They chose it - it wasn't imposed on them by threats from the state.

History is brimming with examples of the folly of trying to legislate the human heart, not least the fact that the most vehement and consistent advocates of political censorship are precisely those who want to protect lies from the truth. How is "hate speech" not an infinitely corruptible concept as a legal standard? Gandhi said the British were oppressing Indians - there you go, "hate speech," calling the British oppressors. Saying that proponents of segregation were bigots - "hate speech," they frequently insisted. Please, Mr. Government Man, Sir, tell me what is and is not true, and punish me for saying anything you deem to be outside that box.

How many more people on the streets of Baltimore would have been arrested if the police had the authority to judge the moral content of signs and chanted slogans? How about anywhere, ever? Oh, some jerk has a picture of a pig eating donuts - HATE SPEECH! Arrest him! And of course since they now have the power to do that, resistance to the arrest becomes grounds for violence. At that point it's just a short hop, skip, and jump to summary execution because someone "disrespected" authority on the streets - a common enough problem without giving it the imprimatur of defending morality.

The evil inherent in political censorship is so profound I have to question the motives, if not the sanity, of anyone who sees it as a valid option - let alone one that serves the values of liberal democracy. At absolute best, it is an admission of a crippled society so completely infested with hate and so incapable of rational self-governance that it needs the medical device of such methods to survive at all. And since the case I'm thinking about when I say that is Germany, whose brief initial experiment with democracy led to genocide and global war costing on order of 50 million lives within a couple of decades, any comparison with the United States and its problems is so irrational that it must be driven by some level of hateful viewpoint itself.

The long and short of it is that advocating de jure censorship of hate speech is an authoritarian hypocrisy by people who would loudly denounce any such imposition against their own expressions - even if they legitimately rose to the level of hate speech by rational standadrs - while passionately seeking to wield that power against others. This is just common sense, and basic moral foundation stuff to a liberal and progressive mind: You don't demand to limit other people in ways that you yourself are not willing to be limited, and I for one have no intention of surrendering my liberty and human autonomy for the sake of anyone else's feelings.

I do not surrender my weapons of fact, logic, argument, and yes passion. If I hate something or someone, and I allow that emotion to overtake my reason in how I express opinions, then I am in error - certainly not a criminal. And if I am genuinely in error, then someone else can show me that error through conversation, and either (a)persuade me toward a more constructive viewpoint, or (b)discredit me as someone who does not listen to reason, and whose views should not be influential.

This is so fundamental to basic Enlightenment concepts of liberty and ethics that I shouldn't even have to argue for them. They should be obvious to any remotely decent and intelligent person. But that doesn't mean I would censor those who advocate censorship: Because unlike them, I can win arguments.