A call to arms against the Hate Speech Bill

The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 (aka The Hate Speech Bill) is back in the Irish Seanad today (Wednesday 16 October). Senator Rónán Mullen issued this call to arms today on X today:

“We need to hear more from free speech activists on this Hate Crime Bill. The manipulation of definitions is the ultimate attack on freedom of expression.

Opposition to this Bill is not about letting real hatred escape punishment. That is achievable without (a) conflating ‘gender’ with ‘gender identity’ or (b) allowing the ‘progressive’ Gardai PULSE definition of hate (which is based on ‘perception’ and not on objective facts) to become the de facto understanding of what ‘hatred’ is.

Be quite clear, the proposed conflation of wording has as its fundamental objective to stop you saying that men cannot be women. Punishing hatred can be achieved by using a legislative based definition, not one that was thought up in a garda backroom.

It is legislators, not Gardai who make the laws, and the Gardai enforce them. This is not an upside-down, Alice in Wonderland democracy.”

The debate is currently underway in the Seanad. We will post updates here.

Update 20.00 on 16/10/24 (from Senator Rónán Mullen)

This Bill is being guillotined tonight for no good reason. The Dáil will have another final vote in the coming days. Tell your government TDs how serious you regard this matter and decide accordingly on election day if they pass this Bill. The expansive definition of gender will now impact on many other existing criminal law acts.

No Justification for Hate Speech Laws

Tim Crowley, convenor of the Dublin Universities’ AFAF Branch, challenges a common ‘justification’ for hate speech laws:

A justification we often hear for the need for hate speech laws is the fear of the growth of far right extremism. It is often put in these terms: to prevent something like 1930s Germany happening again we need to censor hateful and offensive speech. In other words, the thought seems to be that speech restrictions—hate speech laws—would have stopped the Nazis. We have heard such rhetoric from our own politicians. Fianna Fail senator Lorraine Clifford Lee made this point in June 2023 during Second stage debates over the Hate Speech Bill: ‘It is acknowledged that the Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum, and that hate speech led to the Holocaust. Speech leads to physical attacks on people. We need to make sure we do not allow anything like that to ever happen again.’ We do indeed need to do our best to make sure this doesn’t happen again: but restricting hate speech isn’t the way to do it. Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech–laws that have been compared to contemporary hate speech laws. These laws did not prevent the Holocaust. On the contrary, when the Nazis came to power, they were able to use the hate speech laws on the books to their own benefit. As Greg Lukianoff points out, ‘the Nazis used these pre-existing means of censorship to crush any political speech opposing them, allowing for an absolute grip on the country that would have been much more difficult or impossible with strong legal protections for press and speech.’ There is nothing in the claim, then, made unchallenged by Clifford Lee in our Senate, that suppression of speech would have stopped the Nazis—well, nothing other than ignorance. If only more of our politicians could appreciate the words of Aryeh Neier, executive director of the ACLU in the 1970s, and someone with direct experience of Nazi Germany—who indeed lost many members of his family to the Holocaust: ‘the chances are best for preventing a repetition of the Holocaust’, he writes, ‘in a society where every incursion on freedom is resisted. Freedom has its risks. [But] suppression of freedom, I believe, is a sure prescription for disaster.’

Photo Credit: CraftyCaedus (2018) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International