Free Speech

Free Speech And Hypocrisy

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

 

Cristina Odone’s latest piece for The Telegraph really takes the biscuit. Today she uses her platform to  distort the words of an actual principled libertarian and a thinking man, the Education Secretary Michael Gove, who recently made the fairly benign statement that we really shouldn’t be using the word “gay” as an insult anymore. Given, y’know, the fact that it is now the year 2013.

Naturally, Odone sees this as an attack on her and her values.

The original Telegraph article reporting Gove’s words, by Rosa Silverman, states:

“It’s utterly outrageous and medieval to think that to use the word gay as an insult is somehow acceptable,” he told Stonewall’s Education for All conference in London. “If it’s Chris Moyles or anyone, they should be called out.”

Mr Moyles, the DJ who previously hosted BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast Show, was accused of homophobia in 2006 after describing a phone ring tone as gay.

Mr Gove said: “If you’re growing up wrestling with your sexuality…the last thing you need to feel at school is any sense that the difficulties with which you’re wrestling or the path on which you wish to embark are in any way a legitimate subject for humour, ostracising or prejudice.”

He said he belonged to a generation that felt attitudes towards homosexuality “that still persist in part or many parts of our country” should be actively challenged to make society fairer.

So far, so uncontroversial. Or so you might think.

Odone, extrapolating wildly from Gove’s words and playing the victim card with as much drama as she could muster (which is a lot), took this to mean that the word “gay” should be banned, and that anyone who disagreed with homosexuality is guilty of hate crime, thought crime, or is in some other way a bigoted monster who should henceforth be shunned by society.

From where does she derive these fevered imaginations? Nobody knows. Certainly not from Michael Gove himself. To my recollection, Gove never endorsed the idea of imprisonment for people who make “gay” jokes, or advocated re-education camps for those who disapprove of homosexuality. He just said that, since we no longer live in the 19th century, while people are free to remain set in their ways and to say bad things about gay people, others have the right to call them out on it and register their disapproval.

But Cristina Odone has to transform this into a persecution story where she and others like her are somehow being suppressed. So let us tackle Odone’s ludicrous straw-man plea for tolerance of bigotry line by line. From the top:

Michael Gove, the impressive Secretary of State for Education, has just decreed that the term “gay” cannot be used as an insult. It’s “outrageous and medieval” to do so.

No, he didn’t. That is an outright falsehood. Michael Gove said that the word “gay” should not – as opposed to can not – be used as an insult, for the obvious reason that it is hurtful to people who are gay. At no point, however, did he propose infringing on anyone’s right to free speech if they wish to do be obnoxious and do so, however.

And Odone should know this, given Michael Gove’s spirited defence of free speech at the recent Leveson enquiry into the practices and standards of the media. But she continues:

I wonder what he’d have done at the fabulous wedding we attended, last Saturday. A young guest in morning suit used his iPhone to snap a friend in similar attire. He peered at the result: “Oooooooh you look sooooooo gay!” The word, clearly, was interchangeable with “naff” and “chav”: but henceforth, if Mr Gove gets his way, would it land the boy on a sinister register of “hate speakers” – disqualifying him as an applicant for just about any job?

Again, the modus operandi of those fighting the rearguard campaign against gay rights: Take a quote from someone you disagree with. Add ten pounds of outrage, a pinch of wounded pride and a splash of resentment. And hey presto, you are social crusader Cristina Odone. Where and how did you make the jump from Michael Gove’s words to people who use the word “gay” in a juvenile and irresponsible way being presented with criminal charges and convicted?

Oh, I know it happens in today’s dystopian Britain, for all sorts of reasons. The police knocking on your door if you put up a poster saying anything slightly controversial, or arresting people for saying things that might “hurt the feelings of others”. But surely it would be better to campaign for a PROPER right to free speech in Britain across the board, and against the politically correct thought police who censor us for expressing all manner of opinions, rather than focusing specifically on the gay topic? Not if you are the hypocrite Cristina Odone.

Only the day before, as he faced UK immigration officials, Mr Tony Miano had been afraid of precisely that: was his name on a secret register, and would he be stopped from leaving the country? The American street preacher had been arrested outside Centre Court shopping centre in Wimbledon on July 1. He had been reading from St Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, which condemns homosexuality. A passer-by called the police. Three officers arrived and arrested Mr Miano, a retired deputy sheriff from California, for disorderly conduct.

The irony of being marched to the Wimbledon nick after having spent 20 years as a law enforcer was not lost on Mr Miano. He told me over the phone: “The booking process held no surprises.” He had his DNA and fingerprints taken (and was relieved of his wedding ring) and was then locked up in a small cell for seven hours.

In the police station, he was granted his request for a Bible and for a lawyer from Christian Concern, a group that fights cases involving religious freedom. Then the police asked if he’d ever feed a homosexual, or do them a favour.

“I said yes, of course: the Bible taught that I should love my neighbour as myself,” Mr Miano told me. “The policeman asked if I believed homosexuality was a sin and I realised that I was not only being interrogated about what had happened but about what I believed.”

This is unacceptable, but is indicative of a wider problem in Britain – the fact that the police can come and arrest you for saying things that might be hurtful to the feelings of others. No longer do you have to incite violence or utter libelous comments – today, ruffling feathers is enough to put you inside a police cell. If Cristina Odone really cared about this, she would campaign against restrictions on free speech across the whole spectrum – and yet she is peculiarly hung up on the topic of speech about gay people.

Mr Miano could have pointed out that, while preaching at the shopping centre, he had condemned pornography and slushy novels, too; but it was clear to him that the police were only interested in one “thought crime”, just as Mr Gove seems only interested in one kind of insult. You can believe that homeopathy cures ailments but not that homosexuality is a sin.

You can call someone a bigot, but not say something’s “gay”.

If anyone is being hypocritical here, it is Odone, not Gove. If Cristina Odone had watched Gove’s testimony at the Leveson hearings, or paid any attention to him at all, she would know that he is a stalwart defender of free speech across the board. But she didn’t take the time to do her research. A national columnist for the Daily Telegraph couldn’t be bothered to check her facts, but just sat down at her laptop in high dudgeon and penned a polemic about how Gove wants to put her in prison.

Homophobia deserves to be condemned. But muzzling freedom of speech is the wrong way about it. When the Government decided last January to drop Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which criminalised “insulting language”, the move was hailed rightly as a victory for free speech. But if Mr Gove now says that he supports free expression only if it doesn’t offend gays, he undermines the gains made in ditching Section 5.

Michael Gove did no such thing. Odone should ho back and read his comments again if she is in any doubt. Michael Gove said in his Leveson testimony that “free speech, by definition, will offend some of the people some of the time”, and took a lot of flak from the egotistical Leveson for doing so. There is no muzzling of free speech going on. If you honestly cannot discern the difference between encouraging children not to use the word “gay” as a playground insult (but not banning them from doing so), and making disagreement with homosexuality a thought-crime then you really need to have your brain re-wired.

He also sets an alarming precedent. Tolerance will come with caveats, freedom with clauses. Today, Mr Gove and his Government prioritise the gay lobby; tomorrow, it could be the fat lobby to persuade the authorities that discrimination against their members damages pudgy youngsters growing up in a climate of hostility. We’ll inhabit a world where people cannot say “fatty” or “fatso” for fear of ending up on a secret register or in the Wimbledon nick.

There is no precedent, because nothing is being banned. If you want to be the dumbass who thinks that it is cool to insult people by calling them “gay”, then good for you, keep doing it and see how far it gets you in life. Gove was simply saying that it is not a nice thing to do. Where is the FEMA re-education camp that Odone seems to fear so much? If you want to insult people for being fat, or ginger, or gay, or black, then you can keep doing it (within the already over-draconian limits set by the previous government). Gove proposes no enhancements to our already restrictive laws, and in fact he would love nothing more than to roll them back. He just wants people to be nice to each other. Not under threat of criminal penalty. Just because that is how adults should behave.

In the end, Mr Miano was released without charge. He asked if he could keep the Gideon Bible that he’d received in prison. When it turned out to be the only copy, he asked if he could provide a few more. The following day, he dropped off 10 copies of the Good Book at Wimbledon police station.

That’s tolerance for you.

Well done, Cristina Odone, what an ending to your excellent piece of writing. You win The Argument. I am very glad that Mr. Miano was so magnanimous following his ordeal at the hands of the heavy-handed British police state. I am ashamed of my country that such a thing would happen to him, simply for proclaiming his beliefs on the street. But why do you not broaden your argument? Why take a plea for adults to teach their children not to use the word “gay” as an insult, expand it in your mind to include people who respectfully and politely disagree with homosexuality, and then falsely sound the alarm bells that both sets of people are now considered thought criminals?

I suppose my concluding point is this: If Cristina Odone genuinely believes in free speech and civil liberties then she should join with people like Michael Gove, who are passionate defenders of the very rights to freedom of expression that she claims to love, regardless of the subject or people at hand. But when she attacks Michael Gove, and falsely accuses him of attempting to clamp down on free speech when he did no such thing – he simply wanted people to teach children that using the word “gay” as an insult could be hurtful, because it can be – she reveals her true priorities.

And aren’t those priorities rather insidious and ugly? Cristina Odone doesn’t care a fig about free speech per se – but she is willing to forge an alliance between people who morally disapprove of homosexuality and people who use the word “gay” as a childish slur in order to advance her regressive, socially conservative agenda.

What a true, principled moral crusader she is.

In Praise of Glenn Greenwald

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Glenn Greenwald, former blogger at Salon.com and now writing at The Guardian, is one of the best and most articulate people talking about civil liberties and pressing back against the intrusive power of the government today.

Exhibit 1, in which he tears apart the war criminal Dick Cheney for the casual way in which he celebrated his own lawbreaking and contempt for the US constitution on the eve of the publication of his memoirs:

 

Exhibit 2, in which he rips into CNN (both the network, the host and her former Bush administration talking head stooge) for their coverage of Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks scandal:

 

And finally exhibit 3, in which he takes on Bill Maher and Andrew Sullivan in a roundtable discussion on the morality and constitutionality of extra-judicially ordered drone strikes on US citizens.

 

Keep fighting the good fight, Glenn.

On Cavorting Naked In Las Vegas

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

Prince Harry Naked Las Vegas

 

Considering the fact that this blog has so far avoided any real mention of Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as a running mate, the huge success that was the London Olympic Games or the Todd Akin “legitimate rape” controversy in Missouri, to name just three recent trending stories, it might be considered a bit unseemly to come back from a brief break by writing about the bare buttocks of the third in line to the British throne.

But then again, one has to pick up somewhere.

Everyone seems to have a strongly held opinion about Prince Harry’s recent exploits in a Las Vegas hotel suite, but I have been surprised by how many of those views have been along the lines of “it was totally fine, he was just letting off steam”, “everyone is entitled to a private life” (well duh…) or “how ghastly that anyone would consider publishing these pictures, it should be made illegal”.

Here’s my take:

1. What on earth were the royal protection officers doing? I would think that it should be standard practice to confiscate mobile phones from strangers when they are invited up to a secured area to party with the prince, not simply to avoid the leaking of embarrassing pictures but so that security-related information cannot be sent in real-time to other people outside.

2. What Prince Harry decides to do behind closed doors among friends is his own business. However, he is also a member of the royal family and has public duties to perform. He represents the United Kingdom to the world. Picking up random girls from a bar and inviting them up to your hotel suite to play strip billiards is not classy and does not reflect well on the royal family, the Army (in which he serves as a Captain) or on his country. Again, if they were existing friends unlikely to leak pictures or stories, there’s no problem. But they were strangers. Even if the pictures had not emerged, stories would have done, which would have also embarrassed the country, albeit to a lesser extent. If Prince Harry wishes to behave in that way without attracting negative comment or approbation, he is of course free to relinquish his position in the royal family and in the line of succession. He would then join the massed ranks of other British celebrities who make fools of themselves in public, but it wouldn’t matter and I would not be writing this blog post.

3. The story, and the pictures, are absolutely in the public interest, because at all times, Prince Harry represents our country. Again, if he doesn’t wish to carry this burden and have to look over his shoulder all of the time whenever he decides to “let off steam”, he can renounce his place in the line of succession, and “quit” the royal family, so to speak. But since he does represent our country, the fact that he decided to pick up random girls in a hotel bar and take them to his suite to play strip billiards is very much in the public interest. He has public duties to perform. He represented the Queen at the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games a matter of days ago. His role and level of responsibility in the royal family has been steadily increasing, and therefore there is an indisputable public interest in how he conducts himself, on and off duty. Louise Mensch MP was absolutely right to say that he ‘had no expectation of privacy‘.

4. Bravo to The Sun, for publishing the pictures in the face of bullying by the royal family, the Press Complaints Commission, and the ever-present, chilling shadow that is the Leveson enquiry. Shame on everyone else for being too prudish or too scared.

That is all.

SEMI PARTISAN SUMMARY

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CULTURE

Free speech continues to be squashed in Britain as a teenage Twitter user is arrested for sending mean-spirited and hurtful tweets to British driver Tom Daley. In a wonderful piece of journalism, the BBC neglect to tell us the precise wording of the tweets in question, saying only that “the 18-year-old received a message telling him he had let down his father”. Unhelpful, BBC. They go on to report: “A 17-year-old boy was arrested at a guest house in the Weymouth area on suspicion of malicious communications”. Apparently this is a crime in Britain, now. It goes without saying that mocking an Olympic athlete and making insulting reference to his late father is reprehensible and in very bad taste; equally it should go without saying that it should not lead to arrest, criminal charges or incarceration

Email may be king for most of us these days, but in Japan the humble fax machine is still alive and well, and in frequent use, both in the workplace and at home. This is partly attributable to the aging population – with one in five Japanese being over 65 years of age, many of these older citizens are more comfortable with the familiar fax technology. Also a factor is the perceived impersonality of the email as a medium for communicating with valued clients, or sending time-critical messages.

An extremely valuable Stradivarius violin was left on a train in Switzerland by an absent-minded musician. This makes me feel slightly better about losing my bank card last month.

At the conclusion of his Beethoven symphony cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at the BBC Proms, Daniel Barenboim gave a moving impromptu speech thanking the audience and the organisers for the opportunity. In his remarks, he said: “Our gratitude to the BBC who gave us this wonderful, unique opportunity to be here and play all the Beethoven symphonies – and in every concert one, and sometimes two, works by Pierre Boulez – and have all that televised. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, we travel a lot, there is no country in the world that would do that for music and for culture”. Barenboim is not my favourite musician in the world, but the work that he is doing here is priceless.

Following the sad death of author Gore Vidal at age 86, The Guardian has assembled a selection of 26 of his most memorable quotes. My personal favourite: “I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television”. Or perhaps: “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise”.

 

BRITISH POLITICS

The BBC reports that many disabled people feel that media coverage about benefit cheats has worsened attitudes toward them. The article states: “When asked what could be contributing to such hostility, 87% singled out people claiming disability benefits to which they are not entitled. And 84% highlighted negative media coverage about benefit cheats”. Based on these numbers, you might be forgiven for thinking that the thing that would make the most improvement for genuine claimants would then be to crack down harder on illegitimate claimants. But apparently 84% trumps 87%, and what we actually have to do is have the government tone down its rhetoric about fraudulent claims, and have the media stop reporting about it. Who knew?

The Labour Party was forced to apologise and disassociate itself from comments made by supporters, eagerly anticipating the death of the former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The Telegraph reports: “Last night, Louise Mensch, the backbench Conservative MP, called on Labour to respond after being sent a message by a follower who claimed to have worked for the Party inviting her to a party following Lady Thatcher’s death”. Labour responded, saying “Language like this has no place on politics or civilised society. No one should be wanting to celebrate the death of anyone.”

 

AMERICAN POLITICS

We have it all wrong, according to Rush Limbaugh. Mitt Romney’s overseas trip to the United Kingdom, Israel and Poland was actually not a complete disaster. We just think that it was because the US press pool travelling with Romney are deliberately harassing him (by this, I think he means asking him questions at press conferences) and trying to trick him into making mistakes. Like Sarah Palin’s famous “gotcha questions”. Says Limbaugh: “They’re trying to create gaffes. They’re working on behalf of Barack Obama. They are attempting to carry forth the meme that Romney’s foreign trip is a disaster, that it’s one gaffe after another. They’re trying to do this in the mainstream. And the fact of the matter is Romney is having a home run of a trip”. Well, that’s good, then. Insulting your best ally on day 1, fawning to appease the views of one particular Israeli party (despite promising not to create new foreign policy as a candidate travelling abroad) and being rebuffed by the Polish Solidarity movement are all good things, in Limbaugh’s world view. Of course, if you want to make the argument that these things don’t matter because the only important thing is the perception of the trip back home, as Romney’s aides are trying to do, it might help if the candidate actually spoke with the US press pool that are travelling with him.

Tim Stanley, writing in his Daily Telegraph column, comes late to the Chick-fil-A party but essentially agrees with the view taken by Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, many others and myself, that attempts by local politicians to bully Chick-fil-A by withholding permits to open new outlets as punishment for the views of their executives is unseemly, unwise and unconstitutional. He does close with a good point though, aimed at Rahm Emanuel: “Someone should explain to Rahm Emanuel that gay rights was supposed to be about guaranteeing privacy, abolishing legal discrimination and defending the dignity of the individual against the prejudice of the mob. It wasn’t supposed to be about creating a new standard of acceptable opinion and enforcing it with the muscle of the state. Liberalism without a profound respect for difference is just fascism by another name.”

Mark Oppenheimer, writing in The Nation, has an interesting profile of Canadian/American conservative thinker and former Bush Administration aide, David Frum. I’m quite an admirer of Frum’s (though we would disagree strongly on some issues), particularly since he penned the famous “Waterloo” piece criticising the Republican tactics opposing US healthcare reform, which got him fired from one of the jobs that he held at the time. This long-form piece looks in some depth at the evolution in Frum’s thinking, showing the areas where he has moved (gay marriage, tax policy) and those where he has definitely not moved (foreign policy). In an interesting aside, the author characterises David Frum’s new position thus: “Frum has found a new synthesis, according to which a moderate welfare state stabilizes the United States so that it can remain internationally strong. A little liberalism at home helps keep us neoconservative abroad.”

 

MISCELLANEOUS

What happens when an electricity grid failure knocks out power for half the population of one of the most populous nations in the world? Well, apparently, the story gets buried deep down at the bottom of the BBC News homepage. I did not know that it was possible for a technical fault or excessive consumption to cause such a widespread failure, but given that it is, I hope that the British and American governments are taking suitable precautions to guard against a similar failure, perhaps caused by malicious intent rather than technical fault.

In another bold signal of intent, China has announced plans to land an unmanned probe on the surface of the moon next year, as part of their wider project to land a man on the moon at an unspecified time. China has already achieved significant milestones in terms of human spaceflight, recently including their first spacewalks, first manual docking manoeuvre and first female astronaut.

The Last Word On Chick-Fil-A

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Glenn Greenwald says it best:

Obviously, it’s perfectly legitimate for private citizens to decide not to patronize a business with executives who have such views (I’d likely refrain from doing so). Beyond that, if a business is engaging in discriminatory hiring or service practices in violation of the law — refusing to hire gay employees or serve gay patrons in cities which have made sexual orientation discrimination illegal — then it is perfectly legitimate to take action against them.

But that is not the case here; the actions are purely in retribution against the views of the business’ principal owner on the desirability of same-sex marriage.

Yes. This is why it is so disconcerting to see supposedly “enlightened” liberal politicians in the US calling for more severe sanctions against Chick-Fil-A, including the refusal by cities and municipalities to grant the fast food chain permission to open more outlets. Such bullying tactics have no place in a democracy, least of all one that claims to place such a premium on the right to free speech.

Greenwald goes on to say:

It’s always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It’s much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent. But having Mayors and other officials punish businesses for the political and social views of their executives — regardless of what those views are — is as pure a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech as it gets, and beyond that, is genuinely dangerous.

It is a real shame and surprise to see so many politicians taking the opposing view. It certainly doesn’t do much for the image of “Chicago politicians” to see both Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Alderman Joe Moreno attempting to punish Chick-fil-A for the opinions of their executives by vowing to deny permission for the company to expand in their city.

Finally:

If you support what Emanuel is doing here, then you should be equally supportive of a Mayor in Texas or a Governor in Idaho who blocks businesses from opening if they are run by those who support same-sex marriage — or who oppose American wars, or who support reproductive rights, or who favor single-payer health care, or which donates to LGBT groups and Planned Parenthood, on the ground that such views are offensive to Christian or conservative residents. You can’t cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share. [My emphasis.]

Amen.

This is one of those times where someone else gets there first and says it better. But I wanted to put on the record of this blog that I agree totally with Glenn Greenwald on this issue. While the cultural and civil rights positions expressed by the Chick-fil-A CEO are to my mind socially regressive and (more importantly) completely irrelevant to Chick-fil-A’s success as a corporation, he should be allowed to say what he says, and the public have the right to vote with their feet and choose not to patronise the restaurant chain if they feel strongly about the matter. Beyond that, no more needs to be said. Elected politicians certainly have no right – moral, constitutional or otherwise – to use their powers to bully or discriminate against individuals or companies with whom they happen to disagree.