Tanya Cohen. You remember her, don’t you? (Turns out she’s Australian.) Well, everybody’s favorite speech-banning, intolerant fascist now wants to move beyond banning “hate speech” (roughly defined as anything she or her fellow “progressives” don’t like) to banning “anti-choice” speech, because real freedom of speech consists of no freedom of speech, or something like that:
Before moving to the United States to work with human rights organisations there (because, let’s face it: the US needs human rights activism far more than Australia does), I worked for many of the most prominent human rights and civil liberties groups in Australia… and, in one particularly memorable case, the Human Rights Law Centre campaigned successfully to have anti-abortion protests banned in Australia.
This brings up a question worth asking: should Australia go beyond banning anti-abortion protests and ban all anti-abortion speech? First off, let’s consider the nature of freedom of speech. Not only do people have freedom of speech, but people also have freedom from certain kinds of speech (for example, racism). Freedom of speech is not absolute, and nobody believes that it is. We all learned in school that freedom of speech does not protect hate speech, and this is not something that’s even up for debate. Even the most hardcore and dedicated ultra-libertarians and free speech fundamentalists still universally agree that things like racial vilification, incitement to hatred, and Holocaust denial should be subject to legal sanctions. Nobody believes that racial vilification should be legal, or that it should be legal to deny the Holocaust. Freedom of speech does have limits, and freedom of speech does not – under any circumstances – permit expressions of hatred.
“Freedom from speech” — there’s the “progressive” mindset in the tiny nutshell into which the average progressive brain like Tanya’s fits snugly.
If freedom of speech does not protect racism – which everyone agrees that it doesn’t – then why should freedom of speech protect anyone trying to argue against a woman’s human right to make decisions about her own body? Freedom of speech should never be a license to oppose human rights, to spread lies and ignorance, or to argue against the common good. To quote the prominent theology professor Neil Ormerod: “Free speech for racist bigots, free speech for climate denialists. Where will it end? Free speech for the tobacco industry to deny smoking causes cancer? There is a value in free speech to promote reasoned discussion and deliberation. And then there is obdurate and at times willful ignorance…”
There are certain things that, in a free and democratic society, are simply not up for debate. Racial equality is one of those things, hence why we crack down hard on anyone attempting to spread racial hatred. Vaccines are another one of those things, hence why we’re now passing laws to ban anyone from spreading anti-vaccine lies. A woman’s uterus is also not up for debate. By opposing a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, one is essentially saying that women are not equal to men and thus do not have human rights. How is this any different than racism? Why is this something that should be legally permissible?
Read the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it. Many thought Cohen’s first piece was simply a parody of Leftist hate-babble, but it seems that she really does exist. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss her as a garden-variety kook, an intolerant radical scribbling on an obscure, amateurish web site. But no idea — no idea — is too stupid for the Left to entertain, and what seems crazy today bears the force of law tomorrow. Or haven’t you noticed?
I speak for all Australians when I say that, in Australia, it is just common sense that freedom of speech doesn’t give anyone the right to offend, insult, humiliate, intimidate, vilify, incite hatred or violence, be impolite or uncivil, disrespect, oppose human rights, spread lies or misinformation, argue against the common good, or promote ideas which have no place in society.
If that’s true, then I certainly never want to visit Australia. And Ms. Cohen is one Australian import we don’t need.
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