Freedom of Speech
A friend sent me this quote that I find very fitting during our current times. It's a little controversial but I think it's a point of view that really should be surfaced and thought about a lot more than it currently is.
Freedom of speech is not just a special and distinctive emblem of Western culture that might be generously abridged or qualified as a measure of respect for other cultures that reject it, the way a crescent of menorah might be added to a Christian religious display.
Free speech is a condition of legitimate government. Laws and policies are not legitimate unless they have been adopted through a democratic process, and a process is not democratic if government has prevented anyone expressing his convictions about what those laws and policies should be ... So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended. That principle is of particular importance in a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness.
If weak or unpopular minorities wish to be protected from legal or economic discrimination by law - if they wish laws enacted that prohibit discrimination against them in employment, for instance - then they must be willing to tolerate whatever insults or ridicule people who oppose such legislation wish to offer to their fellow voters, because only a community that permits such insult as part of public debate may legitimately adopt such laws."
Free speech is a condition of legitimate government. Laws and policies are not legitimate unless they have been adopted through a democratic process, and a process is not democratic if government has prevented anyone expressing his convictions about what those laws and policies should be ... So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended. That principle is of particular importance in a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness.
If weak or unpopular minorities wish to be protected from legal or economic discrimination by law - if they wish laws enacted that prohibit discrimination against them in employment, for instance - then they must be willing to tolerate whatever insults or ridicule people who oppose such legislation wish to offer to their fellow voters, because only a community that permits such insult as part of public debate may legitimately adopt such laws."
- Ronald Dworkin, New York Review of Books (cover date 23/3/2006)
1 Comments:
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