I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it…somewhere else.
I’m just going to put it out there: I hate free speech debates.
One side is all “you shouldn’t say that, it’s awful.” The other side fires back with “STFU, I’ll do what I want”. Everyone starts jabbering, think pieces are written and both sides won’t give any quarter to the other. Inevitably, someone forces me into the conversation, and the only thing I can respond with is a weak “yeah, that sucks.”
It’s not that I don’t care about free speech. I’m very grateful that I live in a country where I can do things like mouth off to a guy in public for saying something shady to me and not have to worry about acid being thrown in my face because I have a uterus, or make fun of Stephen Harper’s Lego-man hair as loudly as I want to without the worry that I’ll mysteriously disappear. I appreciate that I have the right to this— it’s just that the nitty-gritty of the subject is frustrating as hell.
What are the limits of free speech? When does free speech transition to hate speech? What do we censor? These are just a few questions out of many that we have to ask ourselves every time anyone opens their mouth on a controversial subject, and thinking about it has become draining. For example, someone is booked to give a talk on his belief that abortion is wrong, a mob shows up to shout him down, and they don’t allow him to speak. My initial reaction to that is “Ha! Fuck that guy, he deserved it.” And maybe he does, but I’m letting my very liberal views get in the way of the fact that the same rights that allow me to say I’m pro-choice were denied to another human being. What happened to agreeing to disagree?
Freedom of speech shouldn’t only apply when it is something you completely agree with. At the same time, there are very convincing arguments for any of a thousand different scenarios in which free speech can be harmful, and censorship might be desirable. But who gets to decide which of those scenarios are worth enforcing? And don’t we start down a slippery slope when we start creating new taboos?
When some (overpriced) hot-dog-grilling asshole makes ‘jokes’ on their Twitter about burning Jews in ovens, my instinct is to say “get rid of him”—I don’t care about the half-assed “sorry you were offended” backpedaling; the jokes were gross. Then someone else raises a point about the right to share personal beliefs on Twitter, however crudely and ineptly, and it gives me pause. I hate when things give me pause, because then I have to think everything over, and spin in circles comparing the damage speech can cause with the dangers of censorship.
There are no clear lines when it comes to the limits of free speech. It’s all a murky gray area that we are struggling with, and years of being dragged into that argument has left me feeling tired. I present you with the only solid piece of advice I’ve learned: try not to be too much of an asshole. Free speech seems to work best when we fire up more than two brain cells before exercising it.
That is it. The rest of you can get back to explaining to each other what Voltaire ACTUALLY meant. I’ll be in my room listening to Janelle Monae with my bra off while my cat chases a laser pointer, because I don’t have the answers and I doubt I ever will.
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