It was no April Fool’s joke.
Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.
Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.
Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.
The problem with your attitude is that, by definition, free speech is only a useful right when it protects unpopular speech. The law at hand here isn’t a surprise (the UK hasn’t got free speech as an enshrined right), but it is certainly a particularly glaring red flag that there is absolutely nothing stopping them from e.g. passing a nearly-identical law copying Thailand about the royal family and putting in prison anyone who calls Prince Andrew a pedophile.
The vast majority of important free speech cases throughout history have involved the most deplorable people making the most deplorable kinds of speech, but e.g. American free speech would be nonexistent if the KKK hadn’t won their landmark case.
No. That’s your problem with my attitude.
“Free speech” absolutists don’t convince me with their hypotheticals.
Believe it or not: absolute free speech is not the end goal and not as valuable as you all believe.
Forbidding some kind of speech can be okay.
Because not forbidding it creates an awful lot of very real and very current pain. Somehow the theoretical pain that a similar law could create is more important for your argument, than the real and avoidable pain thatthis law is attempting to prevent.
And I say that the specific American flavor of free speech is not very valuable at all.