Criminalizing speech is stupid

I've argued against hate speech laws before, not on the basis that I want to hear more of it, but that I distrust the government with the power to tell me what I can and cannot say. Kate has a different reason for being concerned about this:

I do care that "truly marginal and deeply resentful fools" get caught in the HRC web as much as I do the unsuspecting restaurant owner wanting to keep his doorway free of pot smoking loiterers.

I don't need to share their marginal views or resentment to defend their right not to be harrassed by a bureaucracy that defaults to "guilty until proven innocent".

Why? Because, it's the truly resentful who are most likely to carry their frustrations beyond verbal release into murderous violence when backed into a corner, and doubly so when those doing the backing trade in provocateurism and injustice. When the unbalanced finally snap, it's rarely the bureaucrat behind the machinery who endures their wrath — it's the innocent at their workplace, or the police officer who pulls them over for speeding who finds themselves in the crosshairs.

It's a tricky enough business dealing with these individuals within the justice system proper. The last thing we need are the thumbscrews of the human rights racket being applied to such cases.

Hate speech is a form of aggression, but it is not the same as physical assault. We have laws against the kind of behaviour that causes physical harm, but attempting to quantify certain forms of speech for the (potential, perceived) harm they may cause is the wrong way to produce a more tolerant, peaceful society.

As Mark Steyn has noted, it's one thing to attempt to muzzle neo-Nazi/KKK/holocaust deniers, but there is no legal reason why the muzzle can only be applied to far right/anti-semitic whackjobs. As our society becomes more multicultural, there are plenty of ways to offend lots of different groups of people. Just noting the facts can be enough to "harm", and the HRC model is tailored to allow perpetual offence-takers free rein.

All I'd need to say is that people from the country of Absurda commit a certain crime out of proportion to their representation in the general population, and I could be accused of hate speech against the Absurdian-Canadian community. If offence can be taken, offence will be taken . . . and with the various HRCs around to provide both a stick for beating on the "offenders" and a financial carrot for the "offendees", there'll be more folks looking for things to get offended about.

If you're a glass-half-full kind of person, you could see it as a strong positive for our culture that we haven't already been overwhelmed with bogus human rights cases. But the incentives are all stacked to create a less-free society through the enforcement of our expanding definitions of what hate speech actually is.