Hate Speech or Free Speech?

Editor’s Note: The New York Times, which owns the International Herald Tribune, frowns on our posting excerpts of its articles. Nevertheless this is an important article, a harbinger of the coming assault on the First Amendment under the leftist legal theory that “hate speech” is not free speech. This has already happened in most Western countries. The case of Canada is the primary focus of the article, which we strongly urge you to read at its original site.

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Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”

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