It's a tough time for freedom of speech. Not only here in the US, but in many places around the world.
The blog Ornicus passes along an interesting story from Colorado. A Denver woman, with a 'F--- Bush' bumper sticker on her car, was in a shopping mall. A man confronted her at the mall saying the bumper sticker was objectionable
Now this would ordinarily be a case of one person's speech countering another's.
Except the man then flagged down a police officer. The police officer "said, 'You need to take off those stickers because it's profanity and it's against the law to have profanity on your truck,' " according to the woman. "Then he said, 'If you ever show up here again, I'm going to make you take those stickers off and arrest you. Never come back into that area.' "
A journalist who happened to witness the altercation said the officer wrote down the woman's license plate number and then told her, "You take those bumper stickers off or I will come and find you and I will arrest you."
What about this 'freedom' President Bush keeps talking so breathlessly about?
Then in Zimbabwe, a man was convicted for 'denigrating the president.' His crime? He'd said the country's dictator Robert Mugabe had "printed useless money." At a Christmas party, the man apologized to his staff for not giving them bonuses because of the dictator's policies; inflation is 149% and unemployment around 80%, according to the BBC.
The man pleaded guilty to a violating a law which bans insulting the president. This is apparently an actual criminal offense in Zimbabwe, rather than implicit one as in Denver.
Yet freedom of speech is also under threat from well-intentioned, but misguided, proposals. Take France, for example.
According to the UK Guardian the country's center-right government is proposing legislation that could lead to year-long jail terms for anyone found guilty of insulting homosexuals or women.
Adding that Proferring an anti-gay insult, including any remark "of a more general nature tending to denigrate homosexuals as a whole", in public - meaning on air, in print or at a public meeting - is also an imprisonable offence, while private sexist or homophobic taunts between individuals could incur fines of up to €375 (about US$490).
There are people with the inexplicable belief that homosexuality is wrong, but they should be free to believe whatever they want. No one benefits from thought control. That's the stuff the Theocracy Brigade and Patriotic Correctness crowds advocate.
The incredibly vague definition of 'denigration' is no help either.
Gay rights' and women's groups applauded the move, noting that the number of violent acts against gays doubled to 86 in 2003.
Yet, aren't there already laws in place to deal with violence against anyone? Homophobic speech may be morally wrong, but only certain actions should be criminalized.
Besides, the way to fight homophobic and misogynistic mentalities is not through legislation but education and social pressure. Making the bigots into martyrs will only make things worse.
Still in L'Hexagone, the French justice minister called for a preliminary criminal investigation into comments by far right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The leader of the neo-fascist National Front said* "In France at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were some excesses, inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometers."
[*-"en France du moins, l'occupation allemande n'a pas été particulièrement inhumaine, même s'il y eut des bavures, inévitables dans un pays de 550 000 kilomètres carrés".]
Perhaps what remains of the country's Jews might take issue with Le Pen's comments, though that would hardly be a first. But are his comments criminal in anything other than their insensitivity?
But before anyone gets smug in their France-bashing, our buddies in Britain aren't much better. Tony Blair's government is proposing to scrap the country's ancient blasphemy laws while creating a new offense of incitement to religious hatred. Another deliciously vague crime.
"It will have a high threshold and we envisage that it will only capture a very few cases a year because it prohibits stirring up hatred against people defined by reference to their religious beliefs (not the religion itself), and not simply causing offence or hostility," said a spokesman for the British Home Office (which is a bit like the US Department of Homeland Security but more powerful and without the florescent magenta alerts).
But comedians, such as Rowan Atkinson, have suggested films like Monty Python's Life of Brian would not have been made had the laws been in place at the time.
Some aren't waiting for the abolition of the blasphemy law. A Christian group is to bring a private blasphemy prosecution against the BBC after the corporation screened Jerry Springer - The Opera on Saturday... The musical, which has been in London theatres for three years, features Jesus, Mary and God as guests on Springer's TV show and up to 300 swear words.
Christian Voice national director Stephen Green said: "If Jerry Springer - The Opera isn't blasphemous then nothing in Britain is sacred."
"[Jesus] proclaims he is a bit gay, he has this shouting match with the devil - it's just foul-mouthed tirades against the devil and against his blessed mother," Mr Green said. "The damage that must have done to impressionable young people is incalculable."
Incalculable damage? Oh dear.
Worthy of condemnation? Perhaps. Worthy of legal proceedings? Give me a break.
And finally, these things always come back at some point to America's Theocracy Brigade.
An Alabama legislator introduced a bill that would ban the use of state funds to purchase any books or other materials that "promote homosexuality". [State legislator Gerald] Allen does not want taxpayers' money to support "positive depictions of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle".
Which begs the question: if a legislator, whose salary is paid by tax dolars, makes a "positive depiction" (another fantastically vague phrase) of homosexuality, is he or she violating Allen's legislation?
A Guardian journalist writes, I asked Allen what prompted this bill. Was one of his children exposed to something in school that he considered inappropriate? Did he see some flamingly gay book displayed prominently at the public library?
No, nothing like that. "It was election day," he explains. Last month, "14 states passed referendums defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman". Exit polls asked people what they considered the most important issue, and "moral values in this country" were "the top of the list".
In other words, he's proposing a law to rectify a 'problem' that doesn't exist.
But ultimately, Allen wants to "protect Alabamians."
Which is odd because I keep being told it's the LEFT that supposedly treats people like children and it's the right who trusts people to make their own decisions.
The journalist persists: I ask him [Allen], again, for specific examples. Although heterosexuals are apparently an endangered species in Alabama, and although Allen is a local politician who lives a couple miles from my house, he can't produce any local examples. "Go on the internet," he recommends. "Some time when you've got a week to spare," he jokes, "just go on the internet. You'll see."
The journalist did. Since Allen couldn't give me a single example of the homosexual equivalent of 9/11, I gave him some. This autumn the University of Alabama theatre department put on an energetic revival of A Chorus Line, which includes, besides "tits and ass", a prominent gay solo number. Would Allen's bill prevent university students from performing A Chorus Line? It isn't that he's against the theatre, Allen explains. "But why can't you do something else?" (They have done other things, of course. But I didn't think it would be a good idea to mention their sold-out productions of Angels in America and The Rocky Horror Show.)
And as if trying as hard as possible to conform with every northerner's cariciature of Alabama: Cutting off funds to theatre departments that put on A Chorus Line or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof may look like censorship, and smell like censorship, but "it's not censorship", Allen hastens to explain. "For instance, there's a reason for stop lights. You're driving a vehicle, you see that stop light, and I hope you stop."
Huh?
The journalist did a great job letting Allen show himself for the fool he obviously is. Allen claims he is acting to "encourage and protect our culture". Does "our culture" include Shakespeare? I ask Allen if he would insist that copies of Shakespeare's sonnets be removed from all public libraries. I point out to him that Romeo and Juliet was originally performed by an all-male cast.
"Well," he begins, after a pause, "the current draft of the bill does not address how that is going to be handled. I expect details like that to be worked out at the committee stage. Literature like Shakespeare and Hammet [sic] could be left alone." Could be. Not "would be". In any case, he says, "you could tone it down". That way, if you're not paying real close attention, even a college graduate like Allen himself "could easily miss" what was going on, the "subtle" innuendoes and all.
But this is merely a warning shot about what the Theocracy Brigade wants to ram through. So he regards his gay book ban as a work in progress. His legislation is "a single spoke in the wheel [emphasis mine], it doesn't resolve all the issues". This is just the beginning. "To turn a big ship around it takes a lot of time."
[...]
Forty years ago, the American defenders of "our culture" and "traditional values" were opposing racial integration. Now, no politician would dare attack [U. of Alabama dance professor] Cornelius Carter for being black. But it's perfectly acceptable to discriminate against people for what they do in bed.
"Dig a hole," Gerald Allen recommends, "and dump them in it."
Of course, Allen was talking about books. He was just talking about books. He never said anything about pink triangles.
Or about gays. He didn't need to.
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