[From article]
Do liberals actually believe in the right to offend? Their attitude seems to me to be ambivalent at best. And this equivocation was apparent within hours of the attack, when news outlets censored or refused to publish the images for which the Charlie Hebdo editors were killed. Classifying satire or opinion as “hate speech” subject to regulation is not an aberration. It is commonplace.
Indeed, the outpouring of support for free speech in the aftermath of the Paris attack coincides with, and partially obscures, the degradation of speech rights in the West. Commencement last year was marked by universities revoking appearances by speakers Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for no other reason than that mobs disagreed with the speakers’ points of view. I do not recall liberals rallying behind Condi and Hirsi Ali then.
Nor do I recall liberals standing up for the critics of global warming and evolutionary theory, of same-sex marriage and trans rights and women in combat, of riots in Ferguson and of Obama’s decision to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants. On the contrary: To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too.
Brendan Eich donated a thousand dollars to Proposition Eight in 2008. Six years later it cost him his job. In 2014, when Charles Krauthammer merely stated his agnosticism on the question of what causes global warming, liberals organized a petition demanding his removal from the Washington Post. A rather touchy climate scientist named Michael Mann—subtly parodied in Interstellar—has sued National Review and Mark Steyn for disagreeing with him. Last May, after some sensitive souls complained, the Chicago Sun-Times removed from its site a column by Kevin D. Williamson critical of transgender activism. No one wept for Kevin.
The liberal desire to regulate speech, especially political speech, is overwhelming. The Democrats’ ideal campaign finance regime is one in which speech would be closely regulated by bureaucrats and courts. The left was apoplectic in 2010 when the Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision overturned, on First Amendment grounds, parts of McCain-Feingold. Citizens United, remember, had sued the FEC because its film critical of Hillary Clinton had been deemed an illegal instance of “electioneering.” The nerve.
A campaign finance system designed by Lawrence Lessig and Harry Reid would suppress opposing viewpoints and use disclosure as a cudgel by which to impugn and ostracize would-be Brendan Eichs. In 2010, Ohio Democrat Steve Driehaus filed a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission against the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. Driehaus charged that the nonprofit had posted an offensive billboard in his district—and that this advertisement violated a state law criminalizing “inaccurate” statements about candidates for office.
This inability to distinguish between statements of fact (2+2=4) and statements of opinion (Steve Driehaus is a jerk) is a testament to the liberal confusion and irresolution towards free speech and the right to offend. Last year the Driehaus case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices dismissed the complaint. Unanimously. The Court’s decision was not surprising. What was surprising, shocking, was that the now-overturned Ohio law existed in the first place.
http://freebeacon.com/columns/blasphemy-for-me-but-not-for-thee/
Blasphemy for Me, But Not For Thee
Column: Do liberals actually believe in the right to offend?
BY: Matthew Continetti
January 9, 2015 5:00 am
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