Two people are dead and one wounded because a bunch of dumbass macho yahoos down in Texas (who could have been so much more) thought it’d be cute to have a ‘draw the prophet’ contest…to prove they weren’t afraid of Sharia law and shit.
‘Hoo boy! Look at us! We ain’t afraid of no durned Muslims and we ain’t ashamed of being dumber than fucking dirt. It’s our RIGHT!’
Hateful, ignorant and proud of it, what could be more American than that?
Mrph. Suggesting that they – that is, the American Freedom Defense Initiative – should not exercise their Constitutional Rights because it might offend someone strikes me as toleration gone too far.
Consider: the various religious sects existing within the USA are expected to tolerate each other and to concede to the government supremacy in the law of the land, just as the government does not meddle in theology. As part of this and other concerns about government, we concede full speech rights to one and all, with minor restrictions. We do NOT suggest that folks be reasonable and not exercise some right, because reasonableness is not necessarily an objective term, but a subjective term.
For example, to me, it’s sweet reasonableness that there is no evidence for a God and we should live by a secular moral code that explores rationality, rather than mystical spirituality. In full analogy mode, I should then propose that all Bibles be burned because they offend me. (Actually, they don’t, but that’s another discussion.) Should I expect cooperation?
Of course not. Reasonableness depends on your frame of reference.
The importance of this incident is not that a bunch of folks who may be Islamophobes decided to bait the Muslims. It’s not that a couple of Muslims lost their temper and rose to the bait. The importance of this incident is to clarify the primacy of free expression – not reasonably free expression. It’s important that liberals, conservatives, Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians – and agnostics – all understand that.
And about those minor restrictions? The eponymous attorney & UCLA professor at the Volokh Conspiracy checks in on hate speech and the First Amendment:
I keep hearing about a supposed “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech,” or “When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam — or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens — as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans.
To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with “hate speech” in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for “fighting words” — face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isn’t limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible. (And, notwithstanding CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s Tweet that “hate speech is excluded from protection,” and his later claims that by “hate speech” he means “fighting words,” the fighting words exception is not generally labeled a “hate speech” exception, and isn’t coextensive with any established definition of “hate speech” that I know of.)
In another post, he states:
“Incitement,” of course, isn’t just a lay term (like offensiveness or blasphemy) — it’s well-known as the name of a First Amendment exception, a category of speech that can be restricted. What’s less well-known is the precise definition of incitement: advocacy intended to, and likely to, persuade people to engage in imminent illegal conduct. “Imminent” here means that the speaker is trying to persuade people to act in the coming hours (think the classic example of someone speaking to a mob assembled in front of a particular building), not at some time in the indefinite future.
