A commenter on the New Jersey parental profanity ban thread writes:
Geez, they didn't even bother to criminalize "offensive speech" yet, going directly from "hate speech" to "abusive to your own d*mned kids" speech.But, hey, it's all for the children. The Village has to start raising them sometime, and you might as well not let a good crisis go to waste.
The trouble with this argument is that there's no "going directly from 'hate speech'" to punishment of vulgarities around one's own children here. The punishment of vulgarities long preceded the modern attempts to restrict "hate speech." This particular statute was enacted in 1915; the slightly musty language of the full statute, to which my post linked, might have suggested the same thing. (Consider, for instance, the clause about "performing of any indecent, immoral or unlawful act or deed, in the presence of a child, that may tend to debauch or endanger or degrade the morals of the child.")
Even if one looks way earlier than the modern "hate speech" movement to "group libel" statutes, the earliest such statute I could find was from 1917, two years after the New Jersey statute. And even if there were some earlier ones (there was a 1913 statute in New York banning advertisements that stated that people of certain races or religions weren't welcome in places of public accommodation, though that's pretty far removed from modern proposed "hate speech" bans), there's no reason to suspect any causal connection between the two.
The fact is that throughout much of American history, there were all sorts of restrictions — on vulgarity, on harsh criticism of religion, on speech that had the tendency to encourage people not to register for the draft, and much more — that would be pretty clearly unconstitutional today. They didn't come from the modern multiculturalist left, or from any discernible predecessor of it. Many, perhaps most, of them came from what would probably today be seen as the right, though it's sometimes hard to tell for sure.
I've often criticized many speech restrictions and proposed speech restrictions that have come from the left (as well as many from the right and from other places). I'm certainly happy to condemn many of the left's attempts to restrict speech (again, alongside others' attempts). But let's not lightly assume that past restrictions, or for that matter current restrictions, stem, directly or not, from the left's proposals. That just isn't what American history, or the present state of American politics, suggests.
For more on my general point here, see here. Such overattributions of speech restrictions to the left are, unfortunately, not just isolated incidents, which is why I thought they might be worth publicly correcting.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Oddly Enough, Speech Restrictions in America Did Not Begin with the Modern Multiculturalist Left:
- No Habitual Swearing Around Your Kids in New Jersey:
True enough. But, wasn't all that focused on public behavior? Would government ever have sought to criminalize cursing in the privacy of your own home before the vary recent past? Much less reach into your home to try to so profoundly interfere in the way that you choose to raise your child?
I would also like to support punishing Eugene for his co-conspirators speech by pooing all over his thread. No rest while someone is wrong on the internet!
Yes I should have included blasphemy as an exception to my observation.
We now have political speech under attack to a degree I have never seen before. Laws against "racism and xenophobia" are found throughout Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia and headed towards our shores in the form of the anti "hate speech" movement. We have speech restriction policies in most of academia, even in state run schools. Like Europe, the movement is selective about who they want restricted.
A good example is La Raza (the Race). This organization advocates curbing speech they don't like "as hate speech." But in 1994 they gave their "Hispanic of the Year" award to José Ángel Gutiérrez who has himself engaged in the the most virulent sorts of hate speech as when he saidNote Gutiérrez is a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. FIRE gives a "red light warning," to UT at Arlington. No doubt a student who made even a mild comment against Mexicans would suffer the wrath of UT speech codes, but but somehow Gutiérrez get a pass.
Members of the La Raza organization now hold positions in the Obama administration. SCOTUS nominee Sotomayor is (was?) a member of La Raza. I'm afraid free speech is headed for a fall here unless we get rid of Obama.
How about my earlier question regarding "profane" and whether that is problematic because it must reference an "established" religion? Do you think that would be another grounds on which to challenge?
Nothing at all "odd" about it.
I can easily think of situations where a parent's swearing in a child's presence would lead me to conclude that the parent ought not to have custody of a child. Particularly when swearing at the child. But some where it's not directed at the child.
Anon Y. Mous: I'm puzzled by your post -- I thought the law I cited was an example of an old law that at least purported to apply to habitual swearing around one's child, including in one's home.
The early 20th century Progressive Movement also had a very strong evangelical Christian component: look at the Anti-Saloon League, for instance. This tends to get forgotten in the revisionist history I see conservatives here and elsewhere pushing.
The point here is simply that applying modern partisan divisions to the past simply makes no sense. History is much too complicated for every ideological conflict in the past 300 years to come down to an unchanging division between left and right. And that, dare I say, was also the point of Eugene's original post.
Speaking for myself only - I dislike the conflation of PC-ness with restraint, modesty, class, appropriateness. Does being politically incorrect require one to abandon one's brain-mouth filter and blurt out every thought one has without regard to whether one should or not? To call Letterman's "joke" un-PC makes it seem that his vulgar insinuations broadcast on national TV about the sexual activity of a 14-year-old whom he doesn't know, and who has never done anything to him, are somehow a daring blow struck for freedom of speech and thought.
Sorry for the OT.
Next we'll hear from a defender of all this saying that we should get over it - they won, after all.
On the face, and thanks to our very strong free speech traditions, we have not had to deal with the types of pure speech-act tribunals plaguing Canada and some European nations. But hate crime laws do punish speech and (more troublingly) alleged speech through the back door of bias crime charges. The construction of our bias-crime policies are also extraordinarily selective, targeted, and politicized, as is the vast "anti-bullying" movement that has grown up from the same non-profits that advocated for these laws in the first place and have enormous power in elementary and secondary schools.
So we have a bureaucracy in place that is regulating and punishing expression through both legal and administrative measures, and they are all of a piece, quite powerful, and very difficult to challenge, reign in, or even define.
Years ago, when I was researching the application of the "gender-bias" category in state hate crime protocols (nine-tenths of these laws exist in protocol only: there is no other body of law that is so intentionally subjective in enforcement), a trainer from the Simon Weisenthal Center told me that whenever they trained (at taxpayer expense) police and prosecutors on the enforcement of bias crime laws, questions would be raised about counting rape, or certain rapes, as gender-bias hatred. This was a very controversial subject, as "counting rape" and other violence largely targeting women would turn the hate crimes movement into an anti-violence-against-women movement, something no movement leader wanted. Consequently, the "gender bias" category was quite a hot potato, necessary for feminist support of these laws, but never intended to do what it was purported to do: actually punish gender bias crimes. Nowadays, with absolutely no public acknowledgment, the "gender bias" category is presumed to apply to non-biologically born women, for lack of a better term -- people like transvestites and the trans-gendered, but not biological females.
The SWC trainer told me that they did not put their policy on rape in writing but only addressed it at the end of the meetings, during "Q &A" (and why did they have a policy, rather than state legislatures having a policy?). She seemed to think this was a delightful solution: I was quietly aghast, even moreso after we ended our call and the woman's supervisor immediately called me back and informed me that the trainer had not been given appropriate permission to tell me what she had told me, so I was not to presume the accuracy of or discuss the "unwritten rape" rule in my research. It certainly reflected everything else I had learned about the laws, the activism to quietly restrict the "gender bias" category, and reports from state bureau employees responsible for gathering the statistics for the feds.
So we have a giant, unelected, private bureaucracy, officially endowed with vaguely defined powers to steer police and prosecutorial actions regarding speech acts, about which we are not allowed to ask questions and receive answers.
There is more than one way to regulate speech, and the hate crimes industry is implicated in most of it today. Yet, oddly, this arouses little interest.
The Progressive Movement supported the "melting pot" theory of immigration, which is pretty much the exact opposite of multiculturalism. The Progressives were also unconcerned about matters of race, and had no problems with racists in their mix (Woodrow Wilson being a prime example).
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