N.J. Stat. Ann. § 9-6-1 provides that, "Abuse of a child shall consist" of, among other things, "the habitual use by the parent or by a person having the custody and control of a child, in the hearing of such child, of profane, indecent or obscene language." § 9-6-3 makes such abuse a crime.

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.