The Scandal of Free Speech

From Bret Stephens, at WSJ, "A year from now none but the unfeint of heart will still be with Charlie":

Last May, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage gave a talk at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics in which he used a term so infamous that it caused members of the audience to walk out “in a state of distress.” Later, a petition was put forward to demand that the institute apologize “for failing to stop” Mr. Savage from using the term, and to “assert a commitment to preventing the use of slurs and hate speech in the future.”

The word in question? To adapt the old joke: I could tell you but they’re going to kill me.

Well, OK, here goes. The word is “tranny,” meaning a transgender, or transsexual, or transvestite person. So hideously offensive is this word nowadays that, when I arrived at an Institute of Politics event a few weeks later, a group called Queers United in Power—or QUIP, minus the humor—held a protest outside and handed out fliers denouncing (without spelling out) the use of the “T word.” I had to ask around to find out just what the word was; I got the answer in a whisper.

Attention all of you logicians of Hyde Park: If words are to be forbidden, must they not first be known?

I was reminded of this small episode following last week’s massacre of journalists in France, after which it has become fashionable to “be” Charlie Hebdo. Sorry, but QUIP is not Charlie Hebdo: QUIP is al Qaeda with a different list of moral objections and a milder set of criminal penalties. Otherwise, like al Qaeda, it’s the same unattractive mix of quavering personal sensitivity and totalitarian demands for ideological conformity.

To which one can only reply: tranny-tranny-tranny; Muhammad-Muhammad-Muhammad; de-da-da-da. Free speech—at least speech that is truly free—is always a scandal to someone or other. Chill out and deal with it.

But deal with it we won’t. People forget just how radical is the idea of free speech. For more that 2,000 years—between, say, the executions of Socrates and Giordano Bruno —the story of the West was the story of killing blasphemers. Enlightenment began when we started to repent the practice; modernity survives under the shield of the First Amendment and equivalent laws in the free world. But the arrows always keep coming.

I doubt the Charlie Hebdo murders will do much to shake loose the array of campus speech codes or change the incentive structures for their enforcers in sundry administrative offices and multicultural-affairs departments...

No surprise, of course, that the radical left is Islam's partner in tyranny, terror, and oppression.

But continue reading.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.