Speech can hurt – that’s why it’s important
No view is more special than another. We all think we’re fighting the good fight, writes Jim Rose.
If free speech means anything, it is the right to tell others peacefully in public what they don’t want to hear. We resolve our differences in a democracy by trying to persuade each other and voting. A majority of New Zealanders support the right to choose, but are uneasy about late-term abortions.
The peace that comes with a fair defeat on the floor of Parliament is that the losing side is safe in the knowledge it can continue to press its case through normal democratic means before and after the next election. The virtue of a democratic system is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so and change their laws accordingly.
By banning anti-abortion protests within 150 metres of abortion clinics, all viewpoints but one will be able to resolve their differences by normal democratic means. One viewpoint is singled out by the abortion law reform bill for restrictions on its ability to press its case peacefully at a forum of last resort, such as outside abortion clinics.
Every social movement started in the streets. The powerless used the only power they had, which was their voice, loudly, unpopularly, publicly, and unwanted by the ruling majority.
Every political party started in someone’s living room where citizens banded together to work for change. The only way to press their case was to say things many initially didn’t want to hear. All reforms came from the few patiently persuading the many to come over to their side.
Some say the right they are championing is special. That they’re fighting the good fight. Don’t we all.
Fifty years after the US Supreme Court allowed 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker to wear a black armband to school to protest the Vietnam War, she was asked by Professor Jonathan Zimmerman’s University of Pennsylvania class why the American Right should be able to say so many hurtful things about so many.
Tinker said that, when she wore her black armband, her classmates ‘‘had fathers and brothers who were dying in Southeast Asia’’. She added: ‘‘Do you think they were not hurt to be told by a snot-nosed kid with an armband that their fathers and brothers were dying for a lie? Do you think that didn’t hurt them? Wake up! If you think hurtful speech should be outlawed, if that’s your rubric, forget my armband. Speech hurts.’’
The class replied that ‘‘free speech was a bit of an abstraction, that it was only of use to the powerful’’. Tinker said: ‘‘I was a 13-year-old kid. All I had was my right to speak out.’’
After the Ihuma¯ tao protesters were evicted from Parliament’s public gallery for singing, I asked clicktivists whether they would be equally outraged if antiabortion activists were evicted from the same public gallery for singing hymns during the abortion bill debate. They had no idea what I was talking about when I asked this obvious ‘‘when the shoe is on the other foot’’ question.
The parliamentary restriction was viewpoint neutral: if you want to speak in Parliament, get elected to it; if you want to protest outside, it’s a free country. Defending free speech requires you to put up with oddballs and a good deal of rubbish, and to stand up for the right of your worst opponents to protest as robustly as you do for what you hold dear.
Jim Rose blogs at Utopiayouarestandinginit.com