FREEDOM OF SPEECH: USE IT OR LOSE IT
By Harmony Grant
1 Feb 07
The David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act now before the House of
Representatives assaults America. Americans have repeatedly rejected
hate speech bans, and American courts have repeatedly struck them
down as unconstitutional. But hate law advocates work relentlessly
to defy this verdict. They wish to enforce a political and social
orthodoxy, banning viewpoints they find intolerable.
Hate law advocates want to punish social and religious conservatives
as a San Diego high schooler was punished for wearing an anti-sodomy
T-shirt to his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance “Day of
Silence” in 2004. The teen’s moral beliefs were censored
while the speech of homosexual advocates was promoted. (His attorneys
are now suing the school district, and the case may even be heard
by the Supreme Court.)
Hate laws would enforce selected political expression in this way
across the nation, banning much religious and conservative speech.
Hate laws in Europe, Canada, and Australia are unevenly enforced,
utilized to silence not hurtful speech but certain viewpoints. These
laws especially target the one place where freedom of speech is now
most widely valued and used: the internet.
“Anti-hate” Laws Shatter Internet Freedom
While Dutch authorities ignore calls to prosecute Madonna for rocking
out while hanging from a cross under a crown of thorns, Amsterdam
remains home to some of the planet’s busiest speech suppressors.
They couldn’t care less about Madonna’s blasphemy. These
leftists mostly want to silence conservative Christians, racialists,
and Holocaust reductionists -- those who question the accuracy of
the 6-million figure of Holocaust dead. In the Dutch capital, the
International Network against Cyberhate (INACH), an ADL/B'nai B'rith
creation, seeks to control speech on the internet through legislation,
surveillance, and propaganda.
The ADL has explored various ways (including software and civil
suits) to control cyber speech they dislike. Their efforts have been
frustrated in the US, where the internet remains defiantly free.
But if the USA passes a federal hate law, we’ll quickly join
nations like China in censoring the internet. Like political dissidents
stolen away by police in the night, offending sites will simply disappear
from search engines. We know, because this has already happened.
In 2001, Yahoo was fined in France for offering national Socialist
memorabilia on its internet auction site and allowing users to access
Holocaust reductionism sites. Yahoo was ordered to remove the Nazi
memorabilia, and by 2005 their fine was $15 million and growing at
$15,000 a day, according to the Associated Press. Although the litigants
who originally pressed charges weren’t hurrying to collect,
Yahoo got the message. Attorney E. Randol Schoenberg (who represented
the original claimants) said Yahoo removed much of the Nazi stuff
even from their American site.
In 2002, Harvard researchers Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman
reported evidence that Google (a dizzyingly successful media giant
with shares now worth $500) engages in censorship, too. Their report, “Localized
Google Search Result Exclusions,” says Google actively removes
websites from its search engine. It lists a hundred sites that can
be accessed through Google in the USA but not in Germany or France,
nations with federal hate laws banning certain speech.
No, the removed sites don’t sell pics of naked children in
handcuffs. Apparently, it’s more important to censor racially
motivated political groups or anyone who questions the establishment's
version of the Holocaust. Google censors these sites because of French
and German government regulations about “hate speech.”
The content of censored websites like Stormfront was never debated
in court, because Google didn’t challenge the laws. They simply
acquiesced, silently deleting the sites from their search engine.
A Google user would never know his web access (and, thus, his mind)
was being controlled this way.
It’s easy to see how a federal hate law in the United States
could quickly deny access to a lot of websites. If Holocaust reductionism
became illegal as “hate speech” in America, for instance,
websites that contain that speech would quickly disappear from US
search engines. Google’s record in France and Germany shows
how much they value the free flow of ideas.
Ban Speech? Court Says No, No, No!
Hate laws subvert the precedent of American judicial history. The
US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the rights of Americans, left
and right, to make use of speech which most find offensive.
Speech ban scholar Samuel Walker names the Supreme Court’s
1931 Stromberg decision as “the first meaningful protection
of speech deemed dangerous or offensive by the majority” (Hate
Speech, p29). In this case, the Supreme Court overturned a lower
court decision indicting a 19-year-old girl named Yetta Stromberg
for her leadership at a Communist kids’ camp. The Supreme Court
said we must protect “the opportunity for free political discussion,” which
they called a “fundamental principle of our constitutional
system.”
Two weeks after the idecision, the Supreme Court came to the rescue
of free speech a second time. They upheld the right of free expression
of Jay Near, who published a small newspaper, The
Saturday Press, that attacked local officials and blamed Jews for social evils like
moonshine stills. The Supreme Court upheld Near’s right to
freedom of the press.
In these pivotal decisions, the Supreme Court recognized that freedom
of speech is essential to democracy; it is often the only recourse
for political, religious, or social minorities who want to agitate
for change. Democracies can turn into the “tyranny of the majority” unless
the expression of minority viewpoints is protected. This protection
must be extended even to those opinions considered most obnoxious,
despicable, or even dangerous to the mainstream.
In the 1940s and 50s, the American Jewish Congress was the prime
agitator behind a push for hate speech bans; the AJC called for the
criminalization of “group libel.” But their efforts failed
again.
When American courts refused to criminalize politically incorrect
speech, hate law advocates took another tactic. In the 1980s, they
moved the push for speech bans onto college campuses, blowing an
arctic freeze across the one place—the university—where
expression was historically most free. Throughout the 80s, “hostile
workplace environment” law and campus speech codes were highly
effective tools for stifling free expression in American workplaces
and universities.
In the 1990s, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League continued to work
at enacting “anti-hate” law speech bans. Avoiding the “group
libel” approach of the 40s and 50s, speech ban advocates began
to describe hate speech as a form of discrimination. They said the
expression of bias, prejudice or hatred was a “speech act” that
caused substantive damage to historically marginalized groups, like
Jews and homosexuals. They said the First Amendment must be balanced
with the 14th Amendment, which promises equal protection to all under
the law. Minorities, they said, need special protection from verbal
violence to be free from discrimination—only the shelter of
speech bans can provide them with “equal treatment.” By
2000, ADL had gotten hate laws passed in about 45 U.S. states.
If The David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007 is signed into
law, the ADL will have finally realized their dream of a federal
hate law. America will lose our unique and most precious treasure:
our right to freedom of speech.
If private companies like Google won’t protect our freedom,
we must! The time to protest hate laws is now. At this moment ADL's
federal hate bill, H.R. 254, could quickly speed through the House
Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime to a vote on the floor of the House.
Call all 40 members of the House Judiciary, available at www.truthtellers.org.
Use your voice now - before it's silenced forever.
