- Everybody, all together now: Iran's Holocaust conference
is bad, bad, bad! This is something that can get even Bill O'Reilly and
Kofi Annan to beat the same drum. Hey, they'd probably march shoulder to
shoulder in the same parade.
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- But what should we be saying about Iran's conference?
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- Whether you agree that questions should be raised about
the Holocaust, we should defend the rights of everybody who wants to ask
them, or write books or talk about them. O'Reilly and others worry about
the threat to Western civilization posed by Muslim extremists. But in their
concern, they themselves put one of our most important values at risk:
freedom of speech.
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- In 1986, the Supreme Court severely restricted workplace
speech with their definitions of an illegal "hostile work environment."
Thousands of subsequent lawsuits compelled employers to enforce all kinds
of rules about what could be said at work. Crude jokes and sexual come-ons
weren't the only kinds of speech banned from places of employment; Christians
quickly learned to shut up, too, when they might have shared the gospel.
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- One company, for example, was indicted for "harassing"
a Jewish employee by printing Christian-themed verses on its paychecks
(David Bernstein, You Can't Say That! p. 27). Courts refused to let employers
use the first amendment as a defense against hostile environment charges.
Employers who were leery of being sued were quick to write rules way broader
than what the Supreme Court had actually demanded.
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- A major constitutional problem with hostile workplace
laws, like hate laws, is that they discriminate based on viewpoint. "For
example, hostile environment law potentially penalizes expression of the
viewpoint that "women are stupid and incapable of being physicists,"
but not that "women are brilliant and make excellent physicists.""
(Bernstein, 31)
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- Both hate laws and workplace laws end up persecuting
specific kinds of speech, based on the damage claimed by favored groups.
This gives the government (meaning, whichever fallible, biased human beings
are in charge) the power to decide whose feelings to protect and whose
speech to silence. If you've read any George Orwell, you know this is not
a good situation.
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- Employers' quick compliance with speech laws was motivated
by self-interest, of course, just like Google's belly-up complicity with
internet censorship in Germany and China. Google just deleted banned sites
from their foreign search engines, without a whisper of protest. The censorship
was never debated in the courts, nor were the offending site-makers able
to defend themselves. Businesses can't realistically be expected to do
battle for things like freedom and justice.
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- But public opinionmakers should. If neocons like Bill
O'Reilly really loved Western civilization, they'd use the Iran conference
as a chance to stand up for freedom of speech, even for those whose speech
we hate. They would challenge the federal hate laws that criminalize many
kinds of speech, including Holocaust reductionism, in Europe, Australia,
and Canada. After all, the radical Muslim agenda that they fear is set
against the very freedom of speech they're failing to champion. Isn't lack
of freedom the very reason we don't want to turn into a Muslim state? Arabs
set fires in the streets after the publication of those Danish cartoons
of Muhammed, and a third Yemeni editor is facing prosecution for republishing
them. Totalitarian regimes require stitched-shut mouths, which is one reason
Stalin was so quick to shoot all the intellectuals.
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- To save Western civilization, we need one of its most
essential stays: the free and open exchange of ideas, including rotten
ones. This is the only hope for our civilization. It's our only hope because
government can't be trusted to create our social, political, or religious
orthodoxies or to protect our interests. Freedom of dissent is one of the
checks on power. If it weren't for freedom of speech (and people who used
it despite the cost) whites would still own slaves and England would still
own the States.
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- Our founding fathers knew that the nature of power is
to increase and to oppress. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison said
one reason for the right to bear arms is that we may someday need to take
back our freedoms by force, from a government grown large and despotic.
He was comfortable with the image of armed patriots storming the streets,
because he'd lived painfully through the need for such a revolution.
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- Today, we hardly guard our right to bear ideas, let alone
bullets! You'd think the twentieth century would've taught us to be even
more leery of government power than Madison was, but it seems we've forgotten
the lessons of our own history.
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- Let's try to remember these lessons. Try hard. When you
get locked up for politically incorrect speech, you won't be able to forget
them.
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- Harmony Grant is a staff writer for the National Prayer
Network, a Christian/conservative watchdog group.
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- DON'T LET THE FEDERAL HATE BILL END FREE SPEECH!
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- Come to <http://www.truthtellers.org/>www.truthtellers.org
to print out a powerful flyer warning about impending federal hate crimes
legislation.
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- TALK SHOW HOSTS: Interview NPN director Rev. Ted Pike
on the danger of the federal hate law. Call 503-631-3808.
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- NATIONAL PRAYER NETWORK, P.O. Box 828, Clackamas, OR
97015
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