Hate Register?
In my policy analysis “Attack of the Utility Monsters,” I wrote that one problem with hate speech laws is that the longer they stay on the books, the more they can encourage outrage over increasingly petty offenses. Here’s a story from the United Kingdom I’d certainly have included if I were writing that paper today:
A ten-year-old boy from Weston Super Mare has been put on a school “hate register” after he allegedly made a homophobic insult in the playground.
Peter Drury, a pupil of Ashcombe Primary School, is believed to have called one of his friends a “gay boy,” according to his mother.
The boy’s mum says she was called into her son’s school to be told by head teacher that another mother had heard him using homophobic language.
She claims she was told the incident would be registered and his file monitored while he was at the school.
“He doesn’t even understand about the birds and the bees, so how can he be homophobic?”
Schools are reportedly being given advice that offensive comments made by children as young as five should be recorded and kept on record until the pupil leaves secondary school.
Kids can be incredibly cruel, in both word and deed. But if we were to put every child who ever said something hurtful on a “hate register,” just how many kids would we have to register? All of them? What good would that do us?
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Law and Civil Liberties
Obama, International Law, and Free Speech
Stuart Taylor has a very good article this week about the Obama administration, international law, and free speech. This excerpt begins with a quote from Harold Koh, Obama’s top lawyer at the State Department:
“Our exceptional free-speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet.” The Supreme Court, suggested Koh — then a professor at Yale Law School — “can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation” that he espouses.
Translation: Transnational law may sometimes trump the established interpretation of the First Amendment. This is the clear meaning of Koh’s writings, although he implied otherwise during his Senate confirmation hearing.
In my view, Obama should not take even a small step down the road toward bartering away our free-speech rights for the sake of international consensus. “Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech,” as Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, wrote in an October 19 USA Today op-ed.
Even European nations with much weaker free-speech traditions than ours were reportedly dismayed by the American cave-in to Islamic nations on “racial and religious stereotyping” and the rest.
Read the whole thing.
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