Nobody can choose to live without limits. Anybody who tries just ends up crashing into them. Eating without limits will make you too sick to eat at all. Gas guzzling without limits will end in no gas — or enough global warming to make the whole thing moot. (That’s not an exclusive “or.”) Too much information causes overload, not wisdom. There are always limits.

Too much information

(Illustration: John Tenniel)

The only real choice is whether to recognize the constraints instead of crashing into them and whether to find optimal ways of working within them instead of suffering through constant crises.

In that spirit, I want to discuss the First Amendment, the right to free expression. It has limits — such as not falsely yelling “Fire!” in crowded theaters and requiring tiny dollops of truth in advertising — but somehow only the old limits are okay. Updating the limits to deal with updated technology is out of bounds. It’s as if, when it comes to free speech, the most liberal among us all subscribe to a doctrine of Original Intent.

That blinkered view has worked well enough in the past because past problems were small enough to be kept at bay with small fences. Broadcasting at one time was limited by lung power, and only the immediate circle of a loudmouth had to put up with their constant blather. The change began with the printing press, sped up with radio, ran away with television, and is now screaming up the exponential part of the curve with the internet. There are more and more loudmouths to shut out. Ads. Insults. Bullying. Harassment. Grossness. Drivel. Lies. Politicians. The problem is getting so bad that more and more voices are being raised saying it’s time to do something. Most people aren’t sure what.

I’m not sure either, but what I am sure of is that we absolutely must get out in front of this. The only people who are sure of the solution are places like Saudi Arabia, and nobody (except the Saudi Arabian government) wants them deciding on the limits of speech.

The sorry piece of work known as “The Innocence of Muslims,” better titled “The Nastiness of Christians,” has led to a recent spate of shouts for censorship. One example:

In Saudi Arabia, the government demanded that Google block its citizens’ access to the video. Google complied on Sept. 19; it had already done the same for Libya, Egypt, India and Indonesia. …

This Internet censorship is [in] line with the kingdom’s muzzling of its national media. Overall restrictions have worsened since the Arab Spring popular revolutions of 2011. …

“Bearing in mind that countries cannot apply their own laws to acts in another country, there is a crying need for international collaboration to address ‘freedom of expression,’ which clearly disregards public order[.]”

Saudi Arabia is not an outlier in this case. Pakistan would like the UN and the Organization for Islamic Cooperation to start enforcing international anti-blasphemy laws. The Prime Minister of Egypt said that we all should “take the necessary measures to ensure that insulting … belief in their Prophet, that should not happen, and if it happens people should pay for what they do.” Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister says the anti-Islam film must be blocked and that is not censorship, but says nothing about why it differs.

It’s easy to feel sympathetic when the trigger is something as revolting as the Nastiness of Christians.

Then I read that the Turks are putting an internationally renowned pianist, Fazil Say, on trial for insulting Islam on Twitter. The “insult” was poking fun at a cleric for being in a hurry: “Say tweeted: ‘Why such haste? Have you got a mistress waiting or a raki on the table?’ Raki is a traditional alcoholic drink made with aniseed.”

The real problem isn’t even the possible 18 months in jail. It’s the hassle, expense, time, and stress of dealing with the legal battle. Even if he and everyone like him were always ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing, the possibility of legal harassment would stop most people from saying anything, just in case.

The West is not immune to calls for some kind of action. In Britain, a new Public Order Act (it’s interesting how these things always seem to be justified by “order”) — has made “insults” illegal.

Section 5 of the Act … outlaws threatening, abusive and insulting words or behaviour….

What constitutes “insulting” is not clear. It has resulted in a string of controversial arrests.

They include a 16-year-old boy being held for peacefully holding a placard reading “Scientology is a dangerous cult”….

These and similar flailings toward a solution prompted Jonathan Turley to write,

The very right that laid the foundation for Western civilization is increasingly viewed as a nuisance, if not a threat. Whether speech is deemed i[n]flammatory or hateful or discriminatory or simply false, society is denying speech rights in the name of tolerance, enforcing mutual respect through categorical censorship.

As in a troubled marriage, the West seems to be falling out of love with free speech. Unable to divorce ourselves from this defining right, we take refuge instead in an awkward and forced silence.

Turley doesn’t actually say so in that piece, but I get the impression also from his other writing that he feels there is no way to stop the bad without also destroying the good. In general, the majority response to calls for limiting free speech is that any limits, beyond the old ones we’re used to, will put us on a slippery slope to losing the vital right entirely.

I don’t see that. If the old limits on free expression enhance the right for everyone, and they do, then new limits applied in the same spirit won’t end in censorship either.

The vital point about the old limits that work is they are based on balancing other rights with the First Amendment. There’s no right to cheat people out of money. Stealing by using words is still stealing, which is clear to everyone on an individual basis when con artists try it. It’s no less true when it’s broadcast as advertising, and hence we have (minimal) truth-in-advertising laws. Those aren’t based on censorship. They’re not favoring a message. They’re recognizing that the expression involved is not being used to communicate, but as a tool of burglary.

The same goes for false shouts of “Fire!” in crowded theaters. The intention of the speech in question is not communication but a specific, and potentially dangerous, effect. People are terrified for nothing except somebody’s sick idea of a joke, and could even get trampled and hurt because of it. Again, it’s not censorship because what is being suppressed is not one message as opposed to another, but the use of any words purely as a tool to harm people.

Those examples point up the difference between a rights-based approach and censorship. Censorship favors some messages by suppressing others, whereas rights must be equally applicable to everyone. Any inequality favoring some over others is a privilege, not a right. In a rule-based system, everyone can apply the rule and the results are the same no matter who does it. It is a government of laws, not of “men,” to use the old phrase.

Censorship cannot be applied by everyone equally, and that’s why it cannot be a valid tool to serve free speech. As it’s commonly understood, it refers to some authority, usually governmental, deciding what can be said and what cannot. It is asymmetrical by its very nature. Only a few people can decide what’s acceptable, If everybody did it, the whole system would break down instantly.

I suspect it’s that sense of asymmetry that makes so many thoughtful people adamantly opposed to any new rules regarding free speech. Turley, for instance, in the piece quoted above, mentions the pitfalls of the government deciding what people can and cannot say. I would add that it’s not much better when any other institution does it. A rule-based system that applies to everyone equally can’t allow any subset of people to make those decisions, whether it’s the movie industry, the recording industry, the search engine industry, or even the association of university professors.

We have several types of censorship already operating now. The music and movie industries enforce warrantless takedown notices against content they don’t like. Search engines refuse to be transparent about criteria and thus effectively censor lowranked results. Companies control app stores with a significant user base and decide without transparency or right of appeal what those users can see. There’s not much worry about these new forms of censorship because it’s not The Government doing them and because profit is assumed to take precedence over free speech. (Nobody agrees with that last when it’s stated plainly, but it is how people behave. “It’s their app store. You don’t like it, go somewhere else.”) Even though we’re not worrying about private censorship, it’s still censorship.

The practical implications of real free speech rights mean that the likes of Google must be globally regulated to make their rules for selection of information known to all. They mean that copyright law can’t be used in the service of industry business models. They mean that trade treaties, which should have no impact on basic rights, cannot have an impact on basic rights. Right now, for instance, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is being negotiated in secret. On the basis of leaks, “The ACLU claims that the copyright provisions in the TPP are ‘the biggest threat to free speech you’ve never heard of.'”

While we’re worrying about government censorship, other forms of suppression are compromising our rights as we speak. That’s another reason why new rules to limit and protect freedom of speech are essential. What is and is not acceptable in the public square has to be explicit and must apply equally. An open legal system accessible to all is another foundational principle of Western civilization, together with freedom of expression. By ignoring that, and by refusing to even think about new explicit limits made necessary by modern technology, even censorship is starting to look good. Refusal to contemplate constraints, for fear of losing the right to free expression, is itself destroying the right. That is foolish.

The first step in dealing with any problem is to acknowledge that it exists. And it does. Cyberbullying has poisoned countless children’s lives. Certainly, non-electronic bullying has, too, but that doesn’t make the electronic version less damaging. Creepshots are just one of many internet phenomena that make living while female a punishable offence. Tracking has become so pervasive and entrenched it’s becoming hard to imagine any response other than pretending it doesn’t matter. Levels of disrespect for the dead that would be unacceptable on a battlefield, let alone outside it, are being justified in the name of free speech. One of the laws of war, at least as old as the Old Testament, is that opposing sides must let each other bury their dead in peace. The list could go on and on and on. Many people see a problem. It’s not limited to tetchy Muslims.

That millions, even billions, of people feel abused by free speech suggests there is some deficiency in our interpretation of it. It’s especially likely given that the unhappy people are as different as atheist feminists and religious fundamentalists. It’s also possible they’re all wrong, but the size and diversity of the group who feels harm means it makes sense to examine the merits before deciding that the current status quo is the only possible one.

The symptoms of unhappiness all trace back to the same larger problem: that time and space are no longer enough to filter out the loudmouths among us. Technology, by taking away some limits, as it has also for instance by enabling birth control or environmental impacts, makes us bump up against limits in our own understanding and behavior.

However, although there’s a common element to the causes, the resulting harm can be very different. Annoyance at a spammer is not the same as the violation caused by creepshots or the real world consequences of voters fooled about climate disruption or the totalitarian potential of minute knowledge about every detail of everyone’s life. Expression may be the problem, but the answer may or may not be silence. I’ll try to lay out some of the separate strands.

Freedom of speech has so far been asymmetrical. Freedom of motion, for instance, doesn’t give you the right to walk into someone. But freedom of speech is missing its matching right, the right not to hear.

The inability to refuse to hear is at the root of many emerging problems: telemarketers who used to call during dinner (in the days when people still sat down to eat dinner), spammers, demands to censor sex “for the sake of the children,” and demands to censor all religiously objectionable expressions everywhere. That last, in particular, makes me think of the story about the king who wanted his land paved in leather because it was nicer on the feet, until a sage pointed out he could wear shoes instead. A right not to hear implies ads should not be seen or heard unless you request them. Imagine that world for a moment. No wonder nobody even mentions the right to silence.

Then there is the increasing problem of offensive messages. They’re not a problem for the originator, who doesn’t find them offensive, but for the subject, who does. The offended people may not even be the target audience — usually they aren’t — but that doesn’t lessen the offense for them. Here again, the missing right is being able to avoid those messages. Mass media have started to take baby steps toward giving people some control by flagging particularly gory news images before the reader sees them. But we need vastly expanded abilities to control how much and how badly the rest of the world can step on our toes. Judicious tagging that coordinates with filters could go a long way toward removing sexism, violence for entertainment, impiety, religiosity, or whatever other criteria the user wants. Yes, that would require the creators to help people avoid their content. If there was the same level of respect for the right not to hear as there is for free speech, there’s no reason why people of good will would not cooperate. And, as with free speech, there are remedies in law for those who violate rights. Note the important point that the user decides what to filter. Since it’s the user who has the problem, the user should control the solution.

I realize this whole zone of offensiveness is rife with contradictions, over-reach, and over-reaction. I realize I’m suggesting something like parental controls on steroids with the one enormous difference that it is under the control of the user. The difficulties of limiting offensiveness don’t change the fact that we need some replacement for the old rules of politeness which kept people from being rude to each other’s faces. Those rules were there to reduce the murder rate. They are necessary. I don’t know the best ways of implementing a right not to hear. What I’m saying is that we need to explicitly acknowledge the existence of that right, and that it is not enough to give up simply because the solution isn’t obvious.

To the extent that effective countermeasures against offensiveness have already been taken, they’re generally the wrong ones. The rules against offense in private life emphatically do not extend to politics. Expressing political opinions on political occasions is just about the whole point of free speech. Yet the only real limit on “offensiveness” seen recently has been on the expression of political opinions that inconvenience the powers-that-be during political events.

Security at George Bush’s events in the mid-2000s became notorious for removing any visible dissent. Even wearing the wrong t-shirt was enough to be expelled. Political t-shirts might be inappropriate at a summer picnic, but they cannot be inappropriate at a political speech. It’s also become customary to contain protests at political events in very small free speech zones. The justification, as always, is order.

The limits to limiting free speech

(Illustration: Joel Pett)

 

In a praiseworthy attempt to avoid the travesty of little “free speech” pens, the Supreme Court recently fell into the other error: removing all limits from offensiveness. The case involved anti-gay fanatics who disrupt funerals to insult the dead person being honored. The Supremes held that the fanatics had a right to express their opinion, which they do, and that they therefore had a right to express it anywhere. They don’t, not at funerals. (I know that officially the justification is that they had a right to use the public sidewalk for their demonstration, but that’s nonsense. If it was about the sidewalk, they could use any other sidewalk they wanted. They wanted to use the one that interfered with the funeral.)

It is not essential to the preservation of free speech rights that people be allowed to express absolutely all opinions absolutely anywhere in any way they please. Congress wouldn’t tolerate a rock concert on the floor of the House during a debate. There are other places to hold rock concerts. A kindergarten class doesn’t need to take place in church during Sunday service. Demanding silence for a tea ceremony would be stupid in the stadium during a football game.

It actually seems rather easy to come up with a rule of thumb that both preserves free speech and appropriate behavior. Limits on expressing opinions should be the rarity, not the rule, and should require valid justification. When there is justification, small spaces can be preserved as islands of controlled speech. Outside of them, control violates free speech rights. Free speech pens are unacceptable because they invert the proper size relationships and, when in a political context, because they also limit political statements at political events. Nonviolent political speech at political events can never be inappropriate. It might be disruptive, but disruptive is not the same as inappropriate in politics.

Offensive speech shades into hate speech. There is no absolute line between the two, but there is a difference. Offensiveness is a by-product of some other goal. The content is not produced in order to offend. When it is, then it becomes hate speech. The difference lies in the intent of the speaker, and when there’s an intention to be hurtful, then it’s run over the line into hate speech.

The recent revoltingness with the Innocence of Muslims / Nastiness of Christians is a good case in point. It is unquestionably offensive. What makes it hate speech is the fact that when it did not generate enough attention, they paid for a translation into Arabic. They wanted to be sure that as many Muslims were insulted by it as possible. That is hate speech.

It may be necessary to point out that the motive for wanting to hurt people doesn’t matter. It’s the harm that matters. Profit, for instance, is not a better excuse than hatred. Producing, posting, or linking to hateful garbage because it brings in clicks and revenue is still hate speech.

Hate speech is not about ideas, not even primitive ones. It’s about using expression to do harm. That is the vital point to remember because it clarifies why hate speech has no business finding protection under the First Amendment. It’s intention is harm, not communication. It is using speech as a weapon and the words or images are just ammunition. That’s a fundamentally different category than anything covered by free speech protections. The First Amendment protects expressions, not weapons. Just because hate speech uses expression to cause harm doesn’t change that. It only camouflages it.

That’s just as true for private hate speech as public because one’s right not to be harmed by others doesn’t depend on quantity. Robbery doesn’t have to be a group activity to be illegal. Cyberbullying, for instance, is a subset of hate speech that can be private. It’s the use of speech as a tool of harm.

It’s probably also worth pointing out that private speech generally, when it’s not hate speech, should be as unregulated as it is now. Nobody wants a world where you can’t yell at your own TV. There again, though, the essential difference is that nobody is trying to harm another person when shouting at TVs, whereas in hate speech, they are.

As with any other activity whose purpose is to harm others, society’s response has to be to prevent it, or failing that to shut it down and to punish it. Hate speech is one case where silencing is not only justified, it is the only valid response.

Does that mean I’m advocating censorship? I say no because I think it is useful to distinguish between favoring some communications over others (censorship) and stopping harm to fellow citizens. Those two are not the same, and that should be recognized by using different terms. Maybe we could call it hate speech disarmament.

If the suppression of hate speech is to differ from censorship, then it must be based on rules equally applicable to everyone. Its distinguishing feature is an insistence on humiliating and otherwise harming its targets. Detecting intention always requires judgment calls, but that’s not something new for the legal system. The complexity of determining hateful intent is not that different from estimating intent generally. It’s difficult, but not always impossible. In gray areas, the accused gets the benefit of the doubt, as usual, but when it is possible to make a determination, then the hate speech involved should be shut down.

Another rule that could be applied without discrimination is a prohibition against all suggestions of violence. Criticism of governments, businesses, individuals, ethnic groups, religions, of anything at all, never requires advocating physical harm to people. I realize that if that rule was applied strictly, it would silence a majority of comments on the web. For me, the price of having to find new insults is worth the benefit of more easily distinguishing hate speech. If we’re serious about silencing hate speech then any speech which is indistinguishable from it except in the stated intent of the speaker has to be silenced, too. Claiming it’s just an expression or a joke or a mistake isn’t good enough because the same claim is made by anyone caught being hateful.

The distinctions between hate and harmless but offensive speech isn’t easy, but it’s something that needs attention before all the people infuriated by hatred sabotage free speech itself. To say that people (usually other people) should suffer hate speech because it’s too difficult to come up with a solution is an excuse, not an answer.

Privacy is yet another area where actions justified under First Amendment rights sometimes trespass. First, let me define terms. I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about the concept of privacy. It’s assumed to be about specific types of information, and which are acceptable to publicize. There are some quite exhaustive studies discussing where to draw the line. Whether insurance companies can share certain types of medical information with employers, whether it’s acceptable for robots to read emails and use that information, who can publish your address and where, whether publishing people’s faces or car license plates on Google Streetview is okay, and so on. They miss the point.

Privacy is about control of one’s own information. If you and I are both on Facebook and you want your contacts to know you’re now the proud owner of an iphone, then you won’t feel a loss of privacy when Facebook’s Beacon publishes that fact. I, on the other hand, might live in the sort of neighborhood where I don’t want word leaking out that I have eminently resaleable electronics. Same data, different priorities, and different reasons for those priorities. So long as what we each care about stays private, neither you nor I feel there’s any harm done. It’s the control that matters.

If privacy is about control rather than specific information, then the right response to violations of it is to give that control back to the person from whom it was taken. The balance is not between free speech and censorship. It’s between free speech and privacy.

(I realize there are technical issues with getting rid of data once published, but I’m just trying to discuss the rights involved. Once those are clear, then we could go about figuring out which technical issues need enforcement and how to go about it.)

Tracking for marketing purposes is one near-universal invasion of privacy. It’s taking information about you and using it without your permission. If tracking respected the right to privacy, it would have to be opt-in and never opt-out, always and everywhere. Furthermore, when there’s a right to control your own information, the permission would be revocable at any time. As with opt-in advertising, just imagine that world for a moment.

There’s a tangent about privacy that perhaps needs to be explicit. Privacy rights may not be in the Magna Carta or the US Constitution, but that’s only because, once again, technology has removed limits that protected us from our own bad behavior. As I’ve said elsewhere:

[C]ontrol over one’s own information is necessary if other rights are to have any meaning. The only reason that hasn’t always been obvious is that we haven’t had the technical capability to spy on each other 24/7, or to retain every whisper forever. When anyone on the internet — including, for instance, your boss — can look over your shoulder and examine where you live, which plants grow in your window boxes, which gym you visit, who you have sex with, and how you looked in your baby pictures, there will effectively be no freedom left. Everything will have to be hidden if everyone can see it. What you can say will depend on what others approve of being said. Where you can go will depend on where others approve of you going. Old-fashioned police states, which depended on limited little human informants to keep people in line, will come to seem like desirable places with a few minor constraints. The logical conclusion of no privacy rights is no [meaningful] freedom of speech, movement, or assembly.

“Free speech” violations of privacy can be much worse than supposedly trivial tracking. The internet phenomenon of creepshots is another invasion of privacy, among many examples of pornographic violation on the web. Few things could be more private than sexual photos of oneself, and they fall unequivocally under a right to privacy. There’s nothing wrong with sexual photos when they’re under the control of the individual involved. They’re very wrong otherwise. Sexual humiliation using free speech as an excuse is not merely rude, unfortunate, gross, obscene, or annoying. It’s a violation of the fundamental right to privacy. Violations of rights are crimes, not minor annoyances.

I started with the goal of examining free speech rights given modern technology and have ended with a world we don’t live in. One where we have real privacy rights, even when it bothers Google’s bottom line. One where content providers have to make it easy for people to avoid their content. One where hate speech is not a joke. It’s hard to feel such a state could be more than a (fever) dream precisely because it is so alien.

The rights being ignored for the sake of free speech vary from the clearly recognized one of not suffering physical threats to the more recently recognized right to privacy and to the still-unrecognized right to silence. Solutions have to vary, too, if they’re to deal with the actual cause. It’s not a simple matter of being for free speech and against censorship.

A rights-based system has a characteristic that may be worth mentioning as an aid to differentiating it from not-as-good substitutes. Equality implies that maximum control compatible with equal treatment of others must always be vested in the individual. Individuals decide what to say, what not to hear, what to keep private, what to broadcast. Equality also cannot coexist with censorship, even in good causes such as public order or profit.

The government does have a role in free speech. It’s the same one it has now. Rules, including those formal ones called laws, need enforcement, which is a function of government. But state powers do not decide what the rules are. When the goal is rights rather than privileges, what’s acceptable is what works when everyone does it. What’s not acceptable is what doesn’t work when everyone does it. The rules, not any person or group of people, define some behaviors as allowable and others as not.

The hard part is fine-tuning those rules so they get better and better at hitting the target — preventing free speech from encroaching on other rights — without opening the door to prosecuting pianists and peaceful demonstrators.

Difficult as the hard part is, and it is ferociously difficult, we can’t go on pretending that the problems of free speech can be solved with more free speech. We’re going to have to do something about the way it damages other rights or we’ll lose free expression itself. No democracy could survive that loss. It’s not an optional quest.

Update: Every time I think I have the last paragraph written, yet another news item comes along as an example of what I’m trying to say: 19 year-old jailed for overstepping the bounds of good taste.

Everyone agrees that his “jokes” making fun of two kidnapped girls crossed the line. Matthew Woods swiftly became an object of contempt after he posted the crude and offensive comments on his Facebook page.

But did he deserve to be locked up for them?

A judge thought so, and ordered the 19-year-old to spend 12 weeks in jail, essentially for overstepping the bounds of good taste.

With a right not to hear and adequate filters, the doofus could be crude without going to jail and the rest of us wouldn’t have to pollute our minds with his garbage. We really need that right recognized.

Angry responses streamed in almost immediately after he pressed the “send” button. Public vitriol escalated to the point that a mob of about 50 people reportedly gathered outside Woods’ house, causing police to take him into custody for his own safety.

As I said, the old rules against offensiveness were there to reduce the murder rate.

Just no. I’m not sure what is so hard about that concept.

Muslims are upset about some non-Muslim’s pictures somewhere. Again. This was the result in that case. (Via BBC, Day in Pictures, Oct. 2, 2012.)

Buddhist monk leafing through burned book in a burned building

It has, apparently, escaped the rioters that these are Buddhists. Not Muslims. Muslims do not get to tell Buddhists how to live their lives. Nor do they get to tell Christians. Or atheists. Or, for that matter, even other Muslims except on a voluntary basis.

So just get over it. There may be pictures out there your religion forbids. Too bad.

There’s one thing you can do: don’t look at them.

There’s one thing the rest of us can do: make it easy for you not to see them.

The mistake we make is not making it easy enough. There’s a lot we could do there. The freedom of speech enthusiasts haven’t yet realized that it’s matched by the right not to hear. Just like freedom of motion is matched by the right not to have people walk into you.

You’re within your rights to insist on not seeing what hurts you. You’re way outside them when you hurt others.

No. No, no, no. This is not about free speech as opposed to beliefs. It better not be. If it is, we’re headed straight for holy wars.

I’m talking about this sort of thing: BBC News – Film protest: Egypt PM urges US to end ‘insults’.

“At the same time we need to reach a balance between freedom of expression and to maintain respect for other peoples’ beliefs.”

There is no way to “respect beliefs” and have freedom of speech. It’s impossible. Think about it, Minister Qandil, for a microsecond. If my belief is that you speak drivel and should shut up, you can say nothing. If your belief is that I speak drivel and should shut up, neither of us can say anything if we’re both going to be “respectful.” Or, if we both talk and infuriate each other, then the only way to get “respect” is to silence the other. And only the dead are silent.

The malicious film is not a problem because it insults a religion. It’s a problem because its whole and only purpose is to inflict hate on people. It is not making a political statement, it is not arguing about anything. It’s trying to spit in the eye of people it hates. That is hate speech. It is incitement to riot. It is already illegal. It is an abuse of free speech. It is not protected under free speech laws.

The only problem is the growing US inability to understand that religion is a belief system, not an excuse. We should not lose all ability to tell right from wrong just because somebody hangs a judeochristian religious label on crap.

(Although when it involves a Muslim, the FBI seems to see “material support” for terrorists where only criticism exists. One example: Glenn Greenwald on the arrest of a person expressing outrage over the Abu Ghraib atrocities.)

We should take a deep breath, take our courage in our hands, and actually be responsible for some judgment calls. Avoiding responsibility with wishy-washy excuses about not having any right to judge anyone means only handing a blank check to the biggest bully to do their worst.

It’s pretty obvious where that leads. Haters incite hate and before you know it, real people with real families and real friends have died.

That’s why there are laws against hate speech. That’s why there are laws against incitement to riot.

By understanding the real reason why that sort of crap has to be squelched, it becomes clear that it is not criticism of religion which is the problem. Nobody can tell anybody to stop expressing their thoughts on a religion. They can insist on not hearing them. It’s the same as the idea behind the brown paper covers on porn mags. I don’t want to know what’s going on in the sewer of your mind, and you don’t have to tell me.

It becomes hate speech when you insist on rubbing my mind in your hated message. Then the intent is to hurt. Not to communicate. Then it’s hate speech.

That revolting film wasn’t noticed by anyone but the revolting people who made it. Pathetic, but not a huge issue. They didn’t like that. So they paid to have it translated into Arabic. That is hate speech, pure and simple.

We don’t have to slavishly avoid offending every bizarre — or even ordinary — belief system on the planet. We have to enforce our own laws against hate speech and incitement to riot. As a matter of fact, the solution is to be more willing to offend beliefs. When somebody’s beliefs result in hatred and harm we have to be ready to stand up to them and say, “NO.”

I haven’t closely followed the story about male circumcision in Germany. A judge ruled that as an elective surgical procedure with permanent effects, it required the informed consent of the patient. Just about the most basic right is control over what gets done to your own body, and the ruling makes every kind of sense. Newborns can’t informedly consent, so suddenly circumcision of male babies was illegal.

Cue indignant protests by observant Jews. But it’s part of our religion. Cue protests by others. The Germans! Are telling the Jews what to do! Or rather not to do! Besides, circumcision helps prevent Aids.

Christ on a bike, people. You either agree to the principle that others can’t mess around with your body without your consent, or you don’t. If you do, there’s no difference — except that we in the West are used to it — between generally minor mutilation of male babies for the sake of Judaism or medicine, hacking away at the genitals of female children as is done in parts of Africa, or performing cosmetic surgery on a six year-old so she can win perversions such as Toddlers in Tiaras.

The judge was right the first time on this. Parental rights should not extend to reshaping the physical bodies of their children. Parents don’t own their kids. They take care of them. Or they should.

And religious rights can not trump human rights without running smack into a complete utter idiotic logical absurdity. What if my religion was to kill your religion?

The two headlines below appeared in Memeorandum (May 23rd, 2012, at 10:23 AM).

On one side is the most basic right of all, control over your own self, over what can be done to your body. Without it, there’s no freedom, no rights, nothing. Without it, you could, for instance, be compelled to donate a lobe of your liver because somebody else would die without it.

On the other side is giving more people the legal benefits associated with marriage. That is a good thing. But it amounts to nothing in a world where anyone could be violated whenever it served someone’s purposes. Marriage would be worth as much as it was for black slaves in the old South.

So which one do people see as more worthy? Why, marriage equality, of course.

This is what happens after thirty years of hearing politicians say women have no rights compared to a fetus.

This is what happens after a few years of leaders and voters saying that marriage rights are for all, not just for some.

This phrase set me off: “a UK initiative established to raise awareness of the plight of workers trafficked into the sex industry.” (1)

Why “trafficked”? What’s with this terminology? You see it all the time. “Tantamount to slavery.” “Conditions indistinguishable from slavery.” Why “tantamount”? Why “indistinguishable from”?

It IS slavery. It is slavery of the worst and most disgusting sort. Even hard labor does not involve body invasion. It is slavery with every possible revolting humiliation included. It is slavery with physical torture, disease, and early death, just like “real” slavery. It is human beings carrying a price tag, bought by men. That isn’t “tantamount” to slavery. It IS slavery.

Why do so many people work so hard to call it something else? Look at the terminology in that first sentence: “workers,” “trafficked,” “industry.” Workers is what we all are. Nothing special there. Traffic is just a term for buying and selling stuff, with connotations of a busy bazaar, borderline deals, and smuggling. Maybe bricks of cocaine are being moved around. And “industry,” well, that’s positively good. Hard work, salt of the earth. Admittedly, it’s qualified as being the “sex industry,” but still. It feels like they’re talking about regular economic transactions.

What they’re talking about without euphemisms is the plight of women and children sold to men.

Slaves aren’t “workers” unless workers are now locked up and beaten. The women aren’t bricks on a conveyor belt, shunted to new buildings. Lies and kidnapping keep the pipeline full of new slaves, just as they did in the bad old days. Unless you want to call selling organs an industry, that’s the wrong word for it. It’s a crime.

In our free and enlightened time, there are more people enslaved than ever before. The estimate is some twenty seven million living in slavery (1999). That includes only forced labor, not workers struggling with appalling conditions. Of those 27,000,000, over 70%, three quarters, the vast majority, most, are women or girls. Fifty percent of all slaves are children, most of them girls. Female slaves are generally violated, even when suffering sexual torture isn’t their primary function.

Slavery is no longer focused on a class or a race. Now it’s not whites who think blacks don’t feel pain the way real people do. Now it’s men who think buying women is okay because who cares what they think and anyway they like it.

Slavery is not okay. Everybody knows that. Maybe, if we called it by its right name, there’d be no way to continue pretending it is.

The Prop. 8 stuff here just goes on and on and on. The anti-gay marriage crowd is using the law to delay civil rights as long as possible, and the courts let them get away with it because due process is more important than the rights the process is supposed to protect.

It would take any normal human being outside the law about a quarter of a minute to figure it out:

• 1. Are all people considered equal before the law? Yes. Go to point 2.
• 2. Can some people get married? Yes. Go to point 3.
• 3. Therefore: all people can get married.

That’s how it works with civil rights. Very simple.

Religions, of course, can be much more complicated. If you deeply believe same-sex marriages are wrong, there is something you can do. Don’t marry someone of the same sex.

The discussion about the birth control pill fiasco has boggled my mind. I’ll explain the title toward the end, but let me start with my bogglement. There are whole swathes of blogland who feel that so long as the pills are available, it’s all good. They don’t see a problem with the fact that, as Charles Pierce puts it:

The Church has claimed — and the president has tacitly accepted — the right to deny even its employees of other faiths the health-care services of which it doesn’t approve on strictly doctrinal grounds. That is not an issue of “religious liberty.” That’s the enshrinement of religious thuggery in the secular law.

That’s also a remarkable departure in a country founded on the separation of church and state, a country where as recently as twenty years ago even the most conservative of Supreme Court justices asserted that religious practices cannot conflict with the law of the land. Dakinikat quoted a few days ago:

The free exercise [of religion] clause and its meaning is well established. There is very little ambiguity about what it is and what it is not.

“In 1878, the Supreme Court was first called to interpret the extent of the Free Exercise Clause in Reynolds v. United States, as related to the prosecution of polygamy under federal law. The Supreme Court upheld Reynolds’ conviction for bigamy, deciding that to do otherwise would provide constitutional protection for a gamut of religious beliefs, including those as extreme as human sacrifice.”(1)

The Court stated that “Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious beliefs and opinions, they may with practices.”

Or, as the Reclusive Leftist says:

“[I]n 2000, the EEOC ruled that employers who failed to include birth control coverage in their prescription healthcare plans were in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That’s because the Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination on the basis of sex. The EEOC allowed no exceptions for religious institutions.

What the Obama Administration has done now is to basically reverse that. They’ve said, “You know what? Never mind. That clause in the Civil Rights Act about discrimination on the basis of sex? Forget it.”

So, yes, the pills will still be there for women who need them. But not because the government says women have the same right as everybody else to make their own decisions about their own health care.

The pills are still there, but not because you have a right to them. It’s because nobody has taken them away yet.

Losing your rights is not a win. Getting birth control pills by the grace of Obama is not a win. Unless you mean a win for him. Now this is something that’s his to bestow … or for those bogeyman Republicans to take away. Or, given Obama’s past actions in non-election years, his to bargain away.

That is why rights are important. Having rights means people who violate them can be held accountable. Receiving dispensations means constantly asking (begging?) for what you need, and tough luck when you don’t get it.

We’ve seen that movie play out in abortion rights. Riverdaughter summarizes:

The same thing happened with abortion. It was merely a few workarounds, a few inconveniences. If you really need an abortion, it will still be there for you. You just need to assuage the consciences of a few religious people. That’s how it started. But how has it ended? In some states, there is only a single provider and women have to risk losing their jobs to get an abortion. It’s no longer just a few workarounds. Now, it’s a major ordeal.

And that progression happened because for too many people it wasn’t about the right to decide your own medical procedures. So long as they still had some kind of escape from forced pregnancy, it was just too difficult to argue about rights. The result is that here we are. Too many people are just glad they can still get birth control pills. Arguing about rights is divisive, difficult, aids and abets Republicans (see above, re “bogeyman”), and time-consuming. And it’s physically nauseating to realize that you’re not a human being in other people’s, including the President’s, mind.

Because the subhuman status of women is an unavoidable consequence of not acknowledging their right to make their own medical decisions. It’s a logical consequence of putting a religion, any belief, ahead of the civil rights of citizens, any citizens.

I’ll go through the steps. There aren’t many. Read more »

There’s a bit of a flap going on because a famous person named Cynthia Nixon said she’s gay by choice. (Full disclosure: I’ve never heard of her. I only visit this planet now and again)

Saying it’s a choice is supposed to be very bad because it falls into a “right wing trap.” Everybody must say gays are born that way, that they can’t help themselves, that it’s-not-their-fault-they-found-it-that-way. Otherwise wingnuts can insist that re-education could work.

Bullshit.

Any kind of sex between any kind of people who can freely and knowledgeably consent is nobody’s business but their own.

The point isn’t whether you have a choice or not. That has nothing to do with it. The only point that matters is that nobody gets to tell you what kind of sex to have. Or not to have.

The only real “right wing trap” is granting the crazy premise that it’s okay to meddle in somebody else’s sex life if you can. Because that’s what the Aravosises of the world are doing. They’re saying it’s genetic, so they can’t help it, so give up already. Which means that if they could help it, then meddle away.

Again: bullshit.

People who freely and knowledgeably consent and are doing nothing to hurt others have a right to do anything they damn well please. Genetics and choice have nothing to do with the basic right to mind your own business.

Just because some gay people have made their stand on illogical ground is not Nixon’s fault. All she’s done is shine a light on it.

(I’d tell you to go read my chapter on Rights, but you know that already, don’t you?)