(no subject)
Something I've been thinking about intermittently over the last year or so is what the obligations of private individuals and groups to support free speech should be.
Many kids go through a phase where they attempt to use "free speech" as a argument that their parents should let them swear, or something similar. And many people never quite outgrow that--almost any action, by any private actor, punishing or even criticizing someone for saying something will get a few "You can't do that! We have free speech!" comments in return.
But the standard response--that free speech only applies to the government--is wrong.
The First Amendment is only about the government. But free speech is a broader principle, which most people (or at least Americans) believe (or ought to believe) for both principled and practical reasons, and it has implications far beyond government actions. Unfortunately, I don't think we've done a good enough job as a society of working out what those implications are.
Most people believe (or, again, Americans ought to believe) that free speech is a natural right (whatever that means in their particular moral framework)--something people are intrinsically entitled to, as part of their dignity, or something like that. (I'm trying to be ecumenical here.) Of course that right shouldn't be infringed by state coercion, but it goes beyond that. Suppose that every employer in the country refused to hire anyone who believed X. (Here, and in the following, consider for X: gay rights, that the holocaust didn't happen, that some race is inherently inferior.) Then it would be pretty pointless to say that they had a legal right to believe that--the social coercion being exercised is as strong as if the government were just throwing them in jail (hey, at least in jail they can eat). If we believe that someone has the moral right to believe something, we should also believe that they have the right to make a living while doing so.
This isn't to say that there should be a law enforcing that. Merely that, just as we believe that the government ought to respect free speech, we (should) believe that private actors *ought* to do so too, at least to some degree. And just because we shouldn't have a massive conspiracy preventing X-ists from being hired doesn't mean they no one should take it into account ever. When a company hires a spokesperson, it's probably entitled to reject people with intensely unpopular views. Similarly, what a person believes is a lot more relevant when hiring the third person in a startup and hiring the thirteenth person in the accounting department. This is part of why there shouldn't be a law--this should be enforced by broadly agreed upon social norms.
Similarly, I doubt I could be friends with an X-ist, for some values of X, and I certainly think other people are justified in refusing to be friends with X-ists. But it would be petty and obnoxious (and bad for society, and wrong) if I refused to clear the newspaper from my X-ist neighbors' porch while they're on vacation.
What got me thinking about this was LJ's recent decision to cancel a whole bunch of journals. From what I can tell, they aimed for a few genuinely objectionable journals where activity that's quite possibly illegal was going on, and ended up hitting a swath of journals, some ranging deep into what ought to be protected territory.
They seem to have recognized that they screwed up, and I'm all for giving people second chances when they acknowledge their mistakes and try to fix things. But they haven't fixed it yet. Their revised position is that they're suspending "journals that a reasonable person would think supported these activities." (These activities are, indeed, pretty repulsive--they pretty much mean pedophilia.)
Now, to the extent that they're pulling down sites that are actually telling people how to go about it, or where a bunch of pedophiles are discussing strategy, I'm all for that. But mere fictional description of--or even abstract advocacy of--disgusting and illegal behavior is legal, and rightly so. And they way LJ went wrong should remind us why that's the case--they managed to hit a bunch of legitimate artistic sites, and even sites organized around opposing and preventing pedophilia. It didn't even take time to slide down the slippery slope--they fell halfway down in the first step. That's not a coincidence. We've seen this slope a million times. Once you start going after what people believe, you have an infinite number of decisions to make about what's in other people's minds, what's really art and what is--as LJ puts it--"a thin veneer of fictional or academic interest."
Really, my point is this: we believe that it would be a bad idea if the US government started punishing people for "supporting" even the most egregious and universally condemned crimes we have. We believe this for two primary reasons:
1) The government will be unable to adequately distinguish between "a thin veneer of fictional or academic interest" and, well, actual fictional or academic interest
2) The class of prohibited opinions will grow over time, and will rapidly reach the point where public discussion is undermined (remember, France has started punishing mainstream historians who publicly criticize the usual rule of the Armenian genocide--the slope is steep)
If the LJ management believes these arguments apply to the US government, they should recognize that the *exact same* arguments apply to LJ--no staff they can hire will ever be able to make the distinctions they're trying to make, and that a combination of internal and external pressure for consistency will lead to a broader range of prohibited discussions. Consequently, if LJ wants to remain the kind of institution it's been so far, it should in fact restrain itself to essentially the same bounds as the US government.