Progressives show their inner Stalin.

Last month, the Nanaimo city council voted to ban Christians from using publicly funded facilities.




More information here:

Officials in the Canadian city of Nanaimo issued a statement Monday affirming the rights of “men and women of all faiths” to rent government-owned venues after the same council members recently raised the ire of Christian pastors for banning a public venue from being used for an event because it was sponsored in part by Chick-fil-A.

Council member Fred Pattje last month blasted fast-food owner Dan Cathy’s “history of homophobia” and introduced a measure to bar the streaming of an annual conference called “Leadercast.”

The event, which took place May 8 in Atlanta and was streamed to 800 cities in North America, is aimed at providing thought-provoking speakers who can help build up a generation of viable leaders; the conference does not explicitly address controversial subjects like homosexuality, based on an analysis of its website.

But Pattje took issue with Chick-fil-A’s sponsorship of the event, saying that it made it ethically impossible for the city to allow it to be simulcasted at a local convention center.

Letting their inner totalitarians out to play.

I've been in a long debate with an atheist "free-thinker" on Unbelievable over the Eich issue, and it is amazing how deeply he is into justifying the principle that people who hold bad opinions deserve to be punished for those opinions

David French at NRO writes:

No, the radical Left isn’t just “ceding” the free-speech high ground to conservatives, it’s deeding it over — a free gift of one of America’s most important cultural and legal traditions. This is a high-stakes gamble — one apparently built on the idea that generations of leftist-dominated education and pop culture have sufficiently changed our nation so that we’re willing to turn our backs on pluralism and religious tolerance (not just tolerance of other religions but also tolerance of religion itself). It’s an idea born in Leftist urban and campus enclaves so walled-off from the rest of American life that many of these people could honestly declare they don’t know a single conservative Christian.

But this new intolerance — as it directly confronts orthodox Christianity — is now colliding not just with free speech but with millions of Americans’ source of deepest meaning and purpose. 

.

What the Hell happened?

Obviously, the left doesn't find free speech useful any more.

Meanwhile, some liberals are making the predictable narrowly legalistic point that freedom of speech has only to do with rights held against the government. This is a point I've strongly objected to over the years, most obviously, in debating the liberal Bob Wright (see "When did the left turn against freedom of speech?" and "[W]hat free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News"). Why is the left taking the narrow view of the concept of freedom? It's a general principle, not something you save for your friends. Like Paglia, I remember the broad 1960s era commitment to free speech. There was a special zeal to protect those who said outrageous things. Today, we're back to the kind of repression that in the 60s seemed to belong to the 1950s. What the hell happened?//

QED

Thou shalt not blaspheme Caesar.

Euro court outlaws criticism of EU:

THE European Court of Justice ruled yesterday that the European Union can lawfully suppress political criticism of its institutions and of leading figures, sweeping aside English Common Law and 50 years of European precedents on civil liberties.
 

The EU's top court found that the European Commission was entitled to sack Bernard Connolly, a British economist dismissed in 1995 for writing a critique of European monetary integration entitled The Rotten Heart of Europe.
 

The ruling stated that the commission could restrict dissent in order to "protect the rights of others" and punish individuals who "damaged the institution's image and reputation". The case has wider implications for free speech that could extend to EU citizens who do not work for the Brussels bureaucracy.
 

The court called the Connolly book "aggressive, derogatory and insulting", taking particular umbrage at the author's suggestion that Economic and Monetary Union was a threat to democracy, freedom and "ultimately peace".
 

However, it dropped an argument put forward three months ago by the advocate-general, Damaso Ruiz-Jarabo Colomer, which implied that Mr Connolly's criticism of the EU was akin to extreme blasphemy, and therefore not protected speech.
 

Well, as long as they didn't call it blasphemy.

Make a joke about redheads...

...got to jail.

Reasons points out:

What country has just sentenced a man to eight months in prison for wearing an anti-police t-shirt, and another man to three months in prison for telling an “abhorrent” joke on Facebook? Iran, perhaps? China? No, it’s Britain.

And:

On October 8, Matthew Woods, a teenager from Lancashire, was jailed for three months for—get this—writing jokes on his Facebook page.

Currently, a five-year-old Welsh girl called April Jones is missing. Woods decided to make some jokes about this, writing on FB stuff like “Who in their right mind would abduct a ginger kid?” and “I woke up this morning in the back of a transit van with [a beautiful girl] — I found April in a hopeless place.”

Funny? No. Criminal? Apparently, yes. For telling these tasteless jokes to the infinitesimally small number of people who can see his Facebook page, Woods was found guilty under the Communications Act 2003 of sending “a message or other matter that was grossly offensive.”

The judge described Woods’ “crimes” as “abhorrent.” I find the state’s imprisonment of a teenager for telling jokes infinitely more abhorrent than Woods’ sad stab at creating lolz.

Another reason not to emulate the Europeans.

Tolerance and Free Speech: The Moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

In this case, the latter is a weird mix of multiculturalism and victim identity politics and Islamic vitimo-triumphalism.

Disturbing Calls For Censorship In America By Professors, Journalists, U.S. Diplomats, And Egyptian Government:

In response to a film that mocked Mohammed, journalists on MSNBC, a professor, and the Egyptian government called for punishment of the film’s producers. Prominent left-leaning law professors have similarly advocated that such speech be restricted, citing customary international law. Their position, if accepted, would seriously menace free speech in America, and harm the publishing and film industries. (At the UN, the Obama administration has also lent qualified support to restrictions on “hate speech” and speech that incites hostility to Islam and other religions.)

The Egyptian government said, “We ask the American government to take a firm position toward this film’s producers within the framework of international charters that criminalise acts that stir strife on the basis of race, colour or religion.” In a commentary yesterday, Prof. Peter Spiro, one of the leading international law scholars in the country, cited international norms as a justification for banning such speech: “The deplorable killing of Chris Stevens in Libya suggests a foreign relations law rationale for banning hate speech. Remember, the Benghazi protests were prompted by this film depicting the prophet Mohammed in not very flattering terms. The equation from the protesters at the US consulate in Benghazi: this film was produced by an American; we will hold America responsible for it.” Earlier, he wrote, “an international norm against hate speech would supply a basis for prohibiting it, the First Amendment notwithstanding.” State Department legal advisor Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School, has also suggested that such international norms provide a justification for restricting such speech.

Similarly, journalists and a professor argued that the film’s producer should be prosecuted. The professor’s USA Today op-ed is entitled “Why Sam Bacile Deserves Arrest.” Law professor Eugene Volokh quotes them as follows:


[Professor Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania]: “Good Morning. How soon is [producer] Sam Bacile going to be in jail folks? I need him to go now.When Americans die because you are stupid…” “And yes, I know we have First Amendment rights,but if you don’t understand the Religion you hate, STFU about it. . . . people do jail for speech. First Amendment doesn’t cover EVERYTHING a PERSON says.” “[T]he murder of the Ambassador and the employees is wrong, wrong. But Bacile will have to face his actions . . .”

[MSNBC's Mike Barnicle] “Given this supposed minister’s role in last year’s riots in Afghanistan, where people died, and given his apparent or his alleged role in this film, where, not yet nailed down, but at least one American, perhaps the American ambassador is dead, it might be time for the Department of Justice to start viewing his role as an accessory before or after the fact.”

[MSNBC's Donny Deutsch]: “I was thinking the same thing, yeah.”

In reality, the minister that the MSNBC commentators blamed for the film depicting Mohammed does not appear to have been involved in its production, and the attack on our embassy in Libya that left our ambassador and three others dead appears to have been preplanned, and not inspired by recent outrage over the film after it was publicized in the Islamic world.

Nevertheless, prior to the attacks, the U.S. Embassy in Egypt not only condemned speech offensive to Muslims such as the film, but also apologized for the “abuse of free speech” in the United States. “Abuse of free speech” is a phrase used by lawyers and diplomats to mean speech that can be banned as unprotected. For example, many state constitutions contain an “abuse” exception in their free-speech clause. For example, California’s Constitution says, “Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right.” These constitutions were written mostly at an earlier time when free speech was construed narrowly to ban prior restraints on speech (one example of a prior restraint is where a government censor reviews speech before it can be published), but not to prevent criminal punishment after-the-fact for speech deemed “bad” by the legislature. Similarly, in other countries, where freedom of speech is typically narrower than in the United States, legislatures are often authorized to pass legislation prohibiting and punishing “abusive” speech.

This is one of the most amazing developments in my lifetime.

When I was in college and law school, free speech was as close to sacred as a secular society could make it. Free Speech was lauded in terms that would have made patriots blush. Political speech, most of all, was enshrined as the beating heart of all that was good and holy.

Things began to shift with the rise of the racialist left. One of my professor at UCLA School of Law, Richard Delgado, published a book entitled "Must We Defend Nazis?", where he argued that the answer was no because "racist speech," meaning, eventually, anything that the racialist left disagreed with, was uniquely bad compared to blasphemy, subversion, pro-communist exterminationist rhetoric, etc., etc. (I vaguely remember tht the book was co-written by a feminist, and, so, the feminist hobbyhorse that pornography should be banned as hate-speech against women may have been flogged around the track for a few laps.)

And, now, after 30 years, here we are.

The Soft Fascism of Kindness - Canadian Content.

Michael Coren discusses criminal actions in Canada and France against offensive speech.

When did the intellectual class stop believing in free speech?

Probably around the time that the intellectual left realized it had lost control of the valves of public discourse.

The American Sociological Association calls for Fox News to censor Glenn Beck for pointing out that Sociologist Frances Fox Piven had called for violent riots along the line of the violent riots in Greece:

As officers of the American Sociological Association, we express outrage at the attacks made on Professor Frances Fox Piven by Glenn Beck in his political opinion show on Fox News.


Dr. Piven, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center who holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, is “widely recognized as one of America’s most thoughtful and provocative commentators of America’ social welfare system…equally known for her contributions to social theory and for her social activism.” [Smith College, Sophia Smith Collection] She has been recognized by her colleagues around the country, who have elected her President of the American Sociological Association, as well as Vice President of the American Political Science Association, and President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Scholars of her caliber, intellectuals of her stature, and especially those who tackle social conflicts and contradictions, mass movements and political action, should stimulate equal levels of serious challenge and creative dialogue. Being called by Glenn Beck one of the “nine most dangerous people in the world,” and an “enemy of the Constitution” is not a credible challenge; it is plain demagoguery.

Despite its lack of substance, Beck’s attacks have resulted in a flood of hate mail and internet postings attacking Professor Piven, including a series of death threats. While it is true that death threats are generally only a form of extremist rhetoric, they indicate an overheated emotional atmosphere that researchers on collective violence call “the hysteria zone.” It is a zone in which deranged individuals can be motivated to real violence against those targeted by demagoguery. History tells us that such things as the attempted assassination of Representative Giffords that resulted in six deaths in Tucson, Arizona can be examples of how abundant, polarizing rhetoric by political leaders and commentators can spur mass murder.

We call on Fox News to take steps to control the encouragement of violence that has run rampant in recent months. Serious and honest, undistorted disagreement and public debate on unemployment, economic crisis, the rights and tactics of welfare recipients, government intervention and the erosion of the American way of life should be supported. We in no way advocate restricting the freedom of speech of political commentators. They in turn should recognize the right of social science researchers to gather and analyze evidence related to controversial topics and to reach conclusions based on evidence, even if such conclusions disagree with widely held beliefs. Where we all should draw the line is at name-calling and invective rising to the level of inciting others to violence.

As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” Thus, the right to free speech does not ever include rhetoric that encourages violence against one’s opponents, especially in the current atmosphere of heated political mobilization. We call on Fox News and other responsible media to set the appropriate standards of accurate and honest debate.

Except, you idiots, that Holmes was talking about immediate call for an immediate violent response, such as, "let's go lynch this person now."   Beck's language is no more - and far less - a call for immediate violent action than was the call of leftist demagogues for an violent overthrow of the government.  Or for that matter, it's no more - and far less - a call for immediate violence than Frances Fox Piven's call for Greek-style riots.

Professor Anne Althouse properly points out the class bias in the ASA's statement: Beck is just not the right sort of person to engage in a debate/discussion about Dr. Piven's call for violent riots:

So vigorous debate about Piven's ideas is really important, but it better be the right kind of debate by the right kind of people and most certainly not that terrible, terrible man Glenn Beck. She's very lofty and serious, so, while she should be challenged, she must be challenged only by lofty and serious individuals, and of course, Glenn Beck is not one.

Exactly.  The job of the intellectual class is to lead the unwashed masses into the progressive utopia.  The job of demagogic members of the unwashed is to shut up and listen to their intellectual betters.