Tag Archives: Topic: Hate Speech

The New American: As for Eurasia, its Ministry of Truth’s latest handiwork is the arrest and punishment of an American street preacher who dared speak of sin in that land once known as Scotland. The victim is 47-year-old New Yorker Shawn Holes, who was on a U.K. tour when he was arrested in Glasgow after running afoul of U.K. hate-speech laws.

MBD.Scout.com on MSN: According to the Power Point presentation, obtained and posted online by legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, the Army Reserve in Pennsylvania considers evangelical Christians, Catholics, and Mormons as dangerous as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and Hamas.

allAfrica.com: The Media Monitoring Committee together with the Communication Commission of Kenya are working to have a law that will require internet service providers to install ISP addresses to all computers to help in monitoring the origin of inappropriate messages.

ABC (AP): Polish prosecutors say they will not charge former President Lech Walesa with hate crimes for recent remarks deemed offensive to gays.

Nathan Cherry at Engage Family Minute: The Alliance Defending Freedom records a small victory for free speech in light of this case as it appears at least one statute was struck down in Canada’s Human Rights Code. But it is indeed a small victory as the overall tenor of this case is foreboding at best. The takeaway from this is that events like this are happening right now in America. There is a concerted effort to not just limit free speech and religious freedoms, but to elevate the “rights” of minority groups like homosexuals and transgender people above all others. This is the ultimate end of “anti-bullying” laws that equate changeable aspects of a person, such as sexual orientation, with permanent aspects such as race or nationality.

Washington Post: Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled that two anti-gay words commonly used in Mexico are hate speech and not protected as freedom of expression under the country’s constitution, allowing those offended by them to sue for moral damages.

Canadian Constitution Foundation: Last week, in an unanimous decision in the case of Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott, the Supreme Court of Canada struck a blow against freedom of speech.

Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review: If the Canadian Supreme Court is happy to indulge the prosecution of those whose speech apparently “opposes the targeted group’s ability to find self-fulfillment,” then I wonder if it wouldn’t also be happy to bring back Spectral Evidence, which William Stoughton allowed into his courtroom with such famous success at the Salem Witch Trials.

LifeSiteNews: After this week’s Supreme Court ruling finding him guilty of “hate speech,” Canada’s most controversial Christian activist says he will continue publicly witnessing against homosexuality.

LifeSiteNews: Brazilian lawmakers are seeking pass a law prohibiting “homophobia,” which would potentially outlaw all criticism of homosexual behavior. The bill is part of the country’s criminal code reform currently being undertaken in the National Congress, according to members of Brazil’s newly-formed National Association of Evangelical Jurist (ANAJURE). (Piero Tozzi in the video)

Christian News Net: The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Biblical speech opposing homosexual behavior, including in written form, is essentially a hate crime.

Religion Clause Blog: In Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission v. Whatcott, (Sup. Ct. Canada, Feb. 27, 2013), the Supreme Court of Canada, in a 116-page opinion, upheld the constitutionality of a key provision in theSaskatchewan Human Rights Code, Sec. 14.

LifeSiteNews: Canada’s top court has released an unanimous decision today that critics say has struck a monumental blow against freedom of speech, opinion, and religion across the country.

Today, the Supreme Court of Canada set a new standard in determining the legal boundaries for religious expression in public debate.

National Post: Canada’s controversial 20-year-old legal definition of hatred is set to be updated or even overturned on Wednesday, as the Supreme Court of Canada rules in the case of William Whatcott, a born-again anti-gay pamphleteer who ran afoul of Saskatchewan’s Human Rights Code.

Paul Coleman at the Christian Post: The British are free to insult each other once again! Amazing as it seems, for over 25 years the use of “insulting words or behaviour” has been a criminal offense in England and Wales. However, on Monday, January 14, the British government agreed to remove the word “insulting” from section 5 of the Public Order Act after a longstanding campaign by civil rights groups.

Catholic News Agency: The petition reveals an “underlying agenda,” which is not simply to prevent violent crimes, but to “stigmatize any disapproval of homosexuality at all and essentially to silence us,” said Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.

Paul Coleman on the Hugh Hewitt Show to discuss his new book. | MP3 audio 5:35 mins

Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Paul Coleman has authored an important new book, released this week, about the criminalization of so-called “hate speech” in Europe and the widespread threat it poses to free speech everywhere.

Daiy Mail: Free speech campaigners have hailed a vote by the House of Lords to scrap a draconian law that made it a crime simply to insult someone. The controversial legislation led to countless arrests of ordinary people for making jokes and expressing opinions about religion and sexuality.

Telegraph: The Daily Telegraph has used its editorial to urge the Government to drop a controversial law that criminalises “insulting” words or behaviour.

Christian Institute: The House of Lords will vote on Wednesday on reforming a controversial law that criminalises “insulting” words or behaviour, as pressure mounts on the Government to act.

Christian Concern: Attempts to silence the free speech rights of a Christian provincial member of parliament in South Africa have been condemned by the Christian Peoples Alliance (CPA), a Christian democratic political party in Britain.

Christian Concern: Two big British banks have threatened to withdraw support from an awards dinner featuring a derogatory “bigot award” for which several Christians have been nominated.

Edwin Meese and Jennifer Marshall at USA Today: Chick-fil-A controversy is only the most recent in a series of examples of intractable actions.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh offers more details about a video that has circulated on the Internet. See also this earlier Alliance Alert Post: Obama’s DOJ Can’t Say Criticizing Religion Will Remain Legal | Congressional Testimony Video

National Review has embedded the video. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez refuses to confirm that the DOJ will not take any action to outlaw criticism of any religion.

The Church Report: Pastor Terry Jones, who received global attention in 2010 when he threatened to burn a copy of the Koran, has been barred from entering Germany.

Boston Globe (AP): Federal authorities have identified a southern California man once convicted of financial crimes as the key figure behind the anti-Muslim film that ignited mob violence against U.S. embassies across the Mideast, a U.S. law enforcement official said Thursday.

Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy: That’s what MSBNC contributors Mike Barnicle and Donny Deutsch, the University of Pennsylvania’s Prof. Anthea Butler (Religious Studies), and of course the Egyptian government argue with regard to the movie that mocks Mohammed . . .

Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy: From yesterday’s Opinion Juris post by Prof. Peter Spiro, one of the leading international law scholars in the country . . . As the regime of international human rights grows thick, however, that justification should no …

The Alliance Defending Freedom has posted a short and powerful video titled: Why Marriage Matters (3:25 mins).
It has prompted several attacks some of which are identified below . . . Alliance Alert Editor’s Note: Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys have repeatedly rebutted the Loving argument raised in the “Lez Get Real” article quoted above.  Here is a recent rebuttal by Alliance Defending Freedom Attorney Jordan Lorence at the Speak Up Movement University Blog titled Interracial Marriage and Mormon Polygamy: ADF Debates the Definition of Marriage at the University of Virginia Law School . . .

Michael Brown at Townhall: Do you realize, Mr. Potok, that by placing mainstream, conservative Christian ministries like the American Family Association and the FRC side by side with legitimate hate groups that you call your whole work into question? Do you realize that millions of Americans, hearing about the SPLC for the first time in the wake of the FRC shooting, will now question the veracity of all your listings, thereby empowering genuine, dangerous hate groups?

Rich Lowry at National Review: What the SPLC is doing is profoundly illiberal. The whole idea of a “hate group” is an organization that is so irrational and beyond the pale that it has no legitimacy. The SPLC brags about shutting down such groups, and rightly so . . . Putting the Family Research Council in the same category is a statement that it isn’t worthy of a democratic society — that its views shouldn’t be debated so much as shunned and marginalized.
This is the trend in the gay-marriage debate. The attempt to punish Chick-fil-A for the opinions of its founder and CEO, although an abject failure for now, will probably be the template of the future. “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views,” William F. Buckley Jr. once said, “but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” The SPLC and its allies on the left won’t be satisfied until there are no other views on gay marriage.

Christian Newswire: Bill Keller, the world’s leading Internet Evangelist and the founder of LivePrayer.com, with over 2.4 million subscribers worldwide reading the Daily Devotional he has written every morning for 13 years on the issues of the day from a Biblcial worldview, is planning to file a $100 million defamation lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center for labeling him and his ministry as a “hate group.”

CNSNews: The map and SPLC listing of “hate organizations” equates groups such as the Family Research Council, which promotes the traditional Christian view of marriage and sexuality, with racist groups that violate Christian teaching on human dignity.

National Review: That the SPLC cannot distinguish between a traditional-family organization and the guys in the white sheets and swastika armbands says a great deal about that organization’s intellectual depth, which is measured in millimeters. Organized homosexuality’s relentless crusade to align itself with the civil-rights movement of the 1960s is on the face of it absurd — such insults as homosexuals have suffered in this country do not include chattel slavery — but the SPLC has been happy to play along, in the course of the past decade or so transforming itself from a watchdog on extremism to a peddler of liberal pieties.

AP on Boston Globe: Carroll Conley Jr. from the Christian Civic League says ‘‘senseless violence’’ will likely continue as gay marriage opponents are referred to as ‘‘hate groups or bigots.’’ The league is one of the groups fighting a proposal that would legalize gay marriage in Maine.

ABA Journal: Civil rights activist Morris Dees was awarded the ABA Medal, the association’s highest honor, during a meeting of the ABA House of Delegates on Tuesday.

Jordan Lorence at the Speak Up Movement University Blog: Universities cannot justify unconstitutional “speech codes” by pointing to crimes like the recent murder of six Sikhs in Wisconsin by a white supremacist who entered their temple during a worship service and opened fire. University policies that ban “offensive” speech target expression protected by the First Amendment, which is far different than laws punishing criminals who harm others because of their race, religion, etc.

Legal Project (see the embedded CBN video): . . . the forces of Islamism that are working to silence critics of Islam-related topics —both in the United States and in Europe – and how they’ve set their sights on international restrictions through the Organization of Islamic Cooperation as well. Director Nunberg also highlighted the Obama Administration’s unfortunate decision to work with the OIC to promote United Nations resolutions that would restrict any “defamation” of Islam.

Financial Times: Twitter is preparing to introduce new measures to reduce the visibility of “hate speech” or “trolling” on the site.

Herald Sun: The matters finally reached the Court of Appeal, where it was decided that bisexuals could claim vilification on homosexual grounds depending on the case. | Owen v Menzies & Ors; Bruce v Owen; Menzies v Owen [2012] QCA 170

Christian Institute: Police in Lincolnshire have threatened to arrest an atheist who displayed a poster in a window saying, all “religions are fairy stories”. But The Christian Institute has joined with others in criticising the police’s actions as yet another example of misusing Section 5 of the Public Order Act.

Michael McConnell at the NY Times: The United States is almost alone among Western liberal democracies in not punishing what is called hate speech . . . In his engaging new book, “The Harm in Hate Speech,” tahe legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron urges Americans to reconsider that tradition.

OnIslam.net: Finnish lawmakers forced a right-wing deputy on Wednesday, June 13, to resign from an influential parliamentary committee after making derogatory comments on Muslims and immigrants.

AWR Hawkins at Salvo Magazine: But the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill knows hate speech when it hears it. Thus, apology or not, university officials barred local radio station WRDU from even mentioning Limbaugh’s show . . . On the other hand, this same school recently paid homosexual activist Dan Savage $18,500 in speaker’s fees,1 without even wincing at the duplicity . . . But the way things look from here, UNC–Chapel Hill’s method for determining what does and does not constitute hate speech seems to be no more sophisticated than determining what speech it agrees with and what speech it doesn’t. That is obviously not a trustworthy standard.

Stanley Fish at NY Times: Jeremy Waldron’s new book, “The Harm in Hate Speech,” might well be called “The Harm in Free Speech”; for Waldron, a professor of law and political theory at New York University and Oxford, argues that the expansive First Amendment we now possess allows the flourishing of harms a well-ordered society ought not permit.

Hickory Daily Record: More than 2,000 protestors armed with signs and slogans lined Newton’s Southwest Boulevard on Sunday morning. They were there in reaction to the May 13 sermon by Charles Worley, pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church . . . Someone set a fire under an air conditioning unit at Providence Road Baptist Church Saturday night. The church was not seriously damaged and was able to hold services on Sunday morning.
“It got hot enough to melt the insulation,” said Catawba County Sheriff Coy Reid.

Baptist Press: Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, said pastors in particular should not be afraid to speak biblically from the pulpit without fear of reprisal, even when their opinion is contrary to that of President Obama. “The fact that the pastor may be responding to a comment from the president doesn’t make the biblical comments off-limits,” Stanley said. The ADF campaigns against U.S. law that prohibits pastors from using the pulpit to oppose political candidates. “At ADF, we believe that restriction is unconstitutional,” Stanley said. “Our point is that we should let the pastors and the churches of America debate what is wrong or right.”

Benjamin Bull at American Thinker: Several days ago, I noted with interest that Danish journalist and historian Lars Hedegaard has been acquitted by a unanimous Dutch Supreme Court of charges that he violated Holland’s notorious “hate speech” laws. His crime? He made a public utterance that state prosecutors concluded was “denigrating” of Islam.

Ben Bull at Townhall: Efforts are currently underway in Spain to criminally prosecute Catholic Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Plà of the diocese of Alcalá de Henares. It seems he had the audacity to deliver a homily from the Bible during a Good Friday mass extolling the virtues of the sinless life. And as bad as this was—reading aloud from the Bible on Good Friday and all—everything he did was acceptable until he included “homosexual behavior” as one of the sins to be avoided.

BBC: A church has been banned from holding a weekly bookstall in Norwich following a complaint it was producing “hate-motivated” literature against Islam.

Legal-Project.org: On April 13, 2012, Lars Hedegaard — a journalist, historian, and president of the Danish Free Press Society – takes the appeal of his conviction under Article 266(b) to the Danish Supreme Court. Readers may recall that back in January of 2011, Hedegaard was tried and acquitted for remarks he made during a 2009 interview concerning sexual abuse within Muslim communities.

Quoting the Telegraph the Volokh Conspiracy reports: . . . The [Divine Comedy] should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination . . .

ABC: Kirk Cameron is fighting back against the “hate speech” he feels he’s endured since calling homosexuality “unnatural,” “detrimental,” and “ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization” during a Friday appearance on “Piers Morgan Tonight” to promote his new film, “Monumental.”

LifeSiteNews: A Brazilian federal prosecutor is demanding that a televangelist retract certain statements he made in 2011 which the prosecutor says incited “hatred” against homosexuals – a thinly veiled threat of future legal action.

One News Now (AP): Wright said, “The hecklers in our culture are beginning to dictate the terms of debate and what speech is permitted on social media.”

The Guardian: A Christian street preacher told two gay men they were “sinners” who would “burn in hell” as they walked past him on a busy high street, a court has heard.

Religion Clause: Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders was acquitted by an Amsterdam court yesterday of charges of group defamation against Muslims, and incitement to hatred and discrimination against Muslims based on their religion and race . . . Now lawyers for those who filed complaints against Wilders are considering taking the case to the United Nations Human Rights Council or to the European Court.

Christian Concern: I am obliged to speak. For the Netherlands is under threat of Islam. As I have argued many times, Islam is chiefly an ideology. An ideology of hatred, of destruction, of conquest. It is my strong conviction that Islam is a threat to Western values, to freedom of speech, to the equality of men and women, of heterosexuals and homosexuals, of believers and unbelievers. All over the world we can see how freedom is fleeing from Islam. Day by day we see our freedoms dwindle . . .

Thomas J. Webb, Verbal Poison–Criminalizing Hate Speech: A Comparative Analysis And A Proposal For The American System, 50 Washburn L.J. 445 (Winter 2011)

CBC.ca: Members of Canada’s Muslim community say the government is guilty of hypocrisy in allowing a prominent critic of Islam to enter Canada on a speaking tour.

AP: “The hate speech trial of Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders resumed Wednesday with defense lawyers seeking to discredit a judge who ordered the lawmaker to face trial on charges of inciting hatred against Muslims.”