Charles Cooke writing in NRO
* * *
* *
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never
hurt me.” Or so we were told as children.
Of late, alas, this maxim has come under sustained fire,
as the conflation of physical violence and verbal criticism has become de
rigueur. Hate-speech laws, which are now ten a penny outside of the United
States, rely heavily on the preposterous presumption that opprobrium and
disdain are equal in severity to battery and bloodshed, and that the state is
capable of sensitively superintending their use.
Once, it was accepted as a staple of the Enlightenment
that any government that attempted to closely supervise speech was destined for
disaster, if not for tyranny. Now, even the home of John Stuart Mill has slid
backwards into the mire.
* ENGLAND. HE'S TALKING ABOUT ENGLAND.
In Britain each year, as across Europe, tens of thousands
of people are investigated by the police for nothing more than being awful in
public. And the voters applaud like seals.
* I LIKE THAT LINE!
By way of sobering example, take the news that an E-list
British celebrity named Ursula Presgrave was this week found guilty in London
of “malicious communication.” Her crimes? To have written on Facebook that
“anyone born with down [sic] syndrome should be put down” before they are
subjected to the “pointless life of a vegetable,” and to have saved onto her
smartphone a series of memes that mocked the disabled.
* BEING AN A$$HOLE SHOULDN'T NECESSARILY MAKE ONE A
CRIMINAL!
When asked by prosecutors whether she accepted that she
had committed a crime, Presgrave confirmed her liability without so much as a
fight. Within the month she will be sentenced, and, depending on the judge’s
mood, required to spend half a year in prison or to pay a £5,000 fine. Another
hammer has been used to crack another nut.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
That a putatively free person so readily accepted the
prospect of being jailed for holding ugly opinions should provide some insight
into the contemporary state of intellectual liberty in Britain.
(*NOD*)
Presgrave is without doubt a fool, and her views are
morally repugnant. But that is the business neither of Her Majesty’s government
nor of those under who operate beneath its carapace. There were no threats made
here; there was no imminent danger or incitement to law-breaking; no
conspiracies were uncovered. Instead, a person of below-average intellect and
questionable ethical calibration issued an abstract opinion that both the
majority and the chattering classes found abhorrent.
In a country whose people are at liberty, this cannot be
a crime. To the contrary: Toleration of precisely this sort of culturally
egregious expression is what distinguishes free nations from tyrannies. By
prosecuting Presgrave for what amounts to nothing more than "thought-crime,"
Britain has erred badly.
Bad as they are in and of themselves, the charges leveled
against Presgrave are rendered all the more grievous when one observes that the
opinion for which she was disciplined is both culturally normal and legally
protected in Britain. Under that country’s laws, mothers who are expecting
children with Down’s syndrome and other disabilities are permitted to abort
right up to the moment of birth — months after the statutory limitation on
termination have kicked in elsewhere.
(*DEEP EMOTION-LADEN SIGH*)
There is no reasonable way to comprehend this legal
distinction other than as a reflection of the belief that disabled children are
often better off dead — the very contention, in other words, that landed
Presgrave in court.
Judging by its behavior, we have no choice but to
conclude that the British government considers not only that words can hurt as
much as sticks and stones, but that they can hurt more.
Under the current rules, the doctor who kills an unborn
child a week before his due date is worthy of praise and legal immunity, while
the minor celebrity who exalts the use of euthanasia a few days later in the
cycle is deserving of incarceration. How’s that for a rabbit hole?
* ANY THOUGHTS, ALICE, ON THE CROWN WEARING A HAT?
(EITHER YOU "GET" THAT ONE OR YOU DON'T...)
(*CHUCKLING*)
When lambasting the state’s inexorable temptation toward
suppression, it is typical to cast the censors as the villains and the people
at large as their innocent victims. In a dictatorship or a monarchy or when the
government is at a remove, this habit makes perfect sense. But in Britain, a
representative democracy, it does not.
As the Daily Mirror confirms, Presgrave’s arrest came
after a number of her fellow citizens lodged formal complaints with the police.
* UNFRIGGIN'BELIEVABLE...
(*SIGH*)
It is a regrettable fact that to read of a free-speech
outrage in England in 2015 is invariably to read of a group of vexed civilians
willfully “shopping” to the authorities somebody they dislike. Nobody, it
seems, is safe from the informants: not celebrities, not journalists, not
university administrators, not drunken social-media users, not faithful
Muslims, not unfaithful atheists — nobody. If you step out of line, somebody,
somewhere will call the cops.
Is there nobody left in Britain who will hang up with a
chuckle?
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