Posted on 05/06/2015 9:30:41 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
This guy is a professional journalist. And a Yale grad. And a law-school grad.
But let’s be fair. If you polled the media, how many of them would agree? Don’t stomp Cuomo just because he’s bold enough to say what the rest are thinking.
For once I’m with Glenn Greenwald. The funniest part of this, at least for law nerds, is Cuomo suggesting that a “hate speech” exception might be found in the text of the First Amendment itself rather than a Supreme Court case somewhere. You remember how James Madison went on and on about hate speech in the Federalist Papers, don’t you? Know your history, haters.
There is, of course, no “hate speech” exception to the Free Speech Clause. But I’m going to give Cuomo some credit for anticipating the inevitable liberal attempt to carve one out by using a troubling bit of case law detritus that I’ve grumbled about before. Here’s how he replied when people on Twitter began asking him if he’s a moron.
Ah yes, the “Chaplinsky test,” a.k.a. the “fighting words” doctrine. He’s eating crap from righties and lefties alike as I write this for reading too much into what the Chaplinsky decision allows. That’s the case, handed down by the Supreme Court in 1942, that says the First Amendment doesn’t protect words “which, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Over time federal courts have narrowed that ruling to make clear that it only applies, in Ken White’s words, to “face-to-face insults that would provoke an immediate violent reaction from a reasonable person.” In other words, says Instapundit, a “personal invitation to brawl.” All true, but it’s painfully easy to move from that standard to a standard in which “hateful” speech qualifies as “fighting words” whether or not it’s uttered face to face, whether or not the violent reaction is immediate, and whether or not a reasonable person from the “majority” might object to it. Pam Geller’s Mohammed cartoon contest is a perfect example. That was a private event, not a face-to-face demonstration in front of a group of Muslims; most Americans would say that cartoons of any figure, no matter how insulting, don’t justify a violent response; and there was no reason to expect that the violent reaction, if it came, would be an immediate attack on the event itself rather than a plot to target Geller or her allies later. It should fail the Chaplinsky test easily. (And Cuomo, in fairness, isn’t saying otherwise.)
But if the point of Chaplinsky is to keep the peace by banning certain words that are likely to inspire a violent reaction, then of course the cartoon contest qualifies as “fighting words.” Even Geller’s critics, like Noah Feldman, acknowledge that there’s a nonzero risk of bombs going off around someone who mocks “the prophet.” In the modern world, where we’re all basically face to face on the Internet, communicating your insult in person seems like a formalistic, archaic requirement. And of course, as any good progressive would tell you, it’s horrible chauvinism by a privileged class to think insulting Mohammed should be permissible simply because America’s non-Muslim majority doesn’t find it offensive. Again: If keeping the peace is the touchstone here then naturally we should ban insults to Mohammed. It’s the very first thing we should ban, in fact, because there’s no form of speech nowadays that’s more likely to lead to violence than that. And that’s why Chaplinsky is such a pernicious, awful decision: It rewards violence by punishing the speaker instead of the guy who wants to punch him in the face. In fact, if you re-read the majority opinion, you’ll see that the case didn’t actually involve an invitation to fight or any sort of direct threat of physical violence. The words that got Chaplinsky thrown in jail, that were unworthy of constitutional protection, were him telling a local cop, “You are a God damned racketeer” and “a damned Fascist and the whole government of Rochester are Fascists or agents of Fascists.” He was guilty, in other words, of being insulting. You don’t think progressives, given a few decades of sustained effort to influence the consensus about the First Amendment among left-wing judges, couldn’t build on that precedent to treat all “hate speech” as fighting words? Remember:
America needs to be a “safe space” for all its citizens. Equality demands no less. And no one can be truly safe where “hate” is free to flourish. Right?
Liberals are the bastion of free speech until somebody disagrees with them.
The Chaplinsky statement in fact seems rather quaint and innocuous today. It’s like a modern cop might answer that, if he even bothers, by yawning and saying “well so’s your sister.”
I hate you, Chris, you greaseball. ;>)
Oh yea, and Muck Fohammed.....
Seems that at bottom, rage is driving them. They get to say how mad they are, but don’t you dare tell them how angry you are or what about them you hate.
America has a large appetite for appeasement. This isn’t coterminous with grace, however. Grace will state there is something wrong, but even yet here’s a reasonable way it could be made right.
There’s a new branch of “Hate Speech” and they call it “body shaming”. Where does it end?
The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, says what the limits on the Government are, not the citizenry. The”Government shall make NO LAWS.....etc”. It is NOT the other way around.
A strange conclusion, considering that the guys who wrote the First Amendment also wrote this definitive example of "fightin' words":
I don’t see how the U.S. Treasury could ever mint a new coin with Obama’s head on it just for the fact that the hole would be too big!
First time I heard that phrase, but I bet I probably hear it dozens of times in the future... that’s how such things usually turn out for me.
Still not clear what it would MEAN. Is it another kind of nanoaggression?
So IMO that means that employees of the media like Mr. Cuomo are just as "bad" as Ms Geller -- the difference being that the employees of the media will cease immediately all favorable treatment of gay issues.
I searched the text and could not find any mention of homosexual or gay.. I guess Mr. Cuomo, et al will demand removing support for homosexuality soon to avoid insulting and provoking followers of the Prophet Muhammad. Good for them and great example for Ms Geller to follow.
Do I really need a /s ?
Fortunately for the media, it DOES protect hypocrisy, regardless of how rank and transparent.
The 1st Amendment does not protect hate speech (even tho SCOTUS ruled it does)...............
Against muslims, homo sexuals, blacks, and most left wing nuts.
And liberals get to define “hate speech”.
They’re not “liberals”. I refuse to apply the term to them. They use a facade of “liberal” only to persuade their opponents to tolerate their views, until they assume enough power to subjugate their opponents.
To call somebody who is morbidly obese “fat” or a bald white guy “cue ball”...I don’t know. That’s why I ask, “Where does it end?”.
Religious sensibilities would not have been included as “injury.” And there was no “immediate breach of the peace” involved here. Anyone wanting to avoid the contest could just decide not to go or pay any attention to it. Easy! These terrorists drove from Arizona to Texas.
This is one of the more impenetrable conundrums of the liberal political world.
I can only speculate. Maybe since the practice is to pretend nobody is “gay” in Islamic countries (because they would want, for pride’s sake, for you to believe they manage to wipe all of it out, which is not so) — they pretend it here too. But that’s a far more difficult pretense in a place where the closet has been jettisoned. Taqqiya? — that is understandable, but how long is it until you know you are no longer credible when pretending or lying about the obvious?
I think there is some thin ice in the future and it could catch complacent liberals by surprise. Let Unreasonable Fury A finally meet up with Unreasonable Fury B, with the masks taken off, and watch the fireworks....
Age-old debate tactic. Frame the debate around a vague term, and then attack the other side’s version of the term. Here, it is “what is hate” and “how imminent is imminent” that are getting the focus, rather than our First Amendment Freedoms. Since the Left generally defines and redefines all terms in the public sphere (see Hillary’s most recent stunning examples of controlling the terms used to describe her), the debate is now over who is more demonized in the media. Gee, I wonder how that will go.
Correct me if I am wrong but the Dems come up - basically create - the term ‘hate speech,’ and then go about placing whatever offends in that category in order to shut people up and down.
And they try to redefine language until there are no words to debate with. Like thug is now racist, then they make an alternate word racist, so you end up debating the term.
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