Oh Dear,

Sometimes, I start reading things for essays - particularly opinions or articles posted on the internet, and the only thing I can think is, oh dear, just oooooh dear. This essay is proving to be worse than most.

I'm writing about 'hate speech' and whether or not it would be a threat to our freedom of speech to restrict it. It seems like it ought to be simple to answer - surely anything which dictates what we can or cannot say is a restriction on our freedom of speech, but then again, that is dependent upon a few other factors. 

Freedom of speech doesn't actually define speech as flapping skin, bone and muscle to form intelligent (or unintelligent) noises which other people can understand (or try to), neither does it simply refer to this and the written (or typed, in this day and age) word. When you read 'freedom of speech', your brain should instead insert a phrase such as 'freedom of expression in any auditory, visual or physical form that is not more harming to others than the restrictions would be to the person who wishes to express in such a format', but that's a bit of a handful to write or type at once, and textbooks are large enough as it is. 

Now, why do we define the 'speech' part of freedom of speech in this way? Probably because we like to protest pretty loudly, and actions apparently 'speak' louder than words. If one person who disapproved of the war in Irak and Arghanistan spoke up, we wouldn't hear it, if ten spoke up, we still wouldn't hear it, but if hundreds marched along the streets of London, we would begin to hear it. The loudest shout from this was of course the burning of poppies, which caused public outrage

BUT...

restrictions on freedom of expression etc. must be neutral, so we can't say that burning poppies is not okay, we'd have to say that burning all symbols is not okay, but then we would need to define symbols. There's also the problem that it could be seen as restricting protests against the government, even though most would see the action as a disrespect to the military. 

Freedom of speech is one of the those tricky ones, because I would love to say that Nick Eriksen wasn't allowed to say that any kind of rape is much like chocolate cake, but if that was a law, he'd possibly be holding political office as well as his controversial views. We could also be talking in the language of 1984 saying this band is double plus good, whereas war is double plus ungood. 

Whilst it's true that the Westboro Baptist Church upset grieving families at funerals across America, as well as other activists of an opposing view, the fact is that their idiocy sparks a debate that can only be a good thing. Of course we know it is nothing more than assertions of someone who is completely ignorant and deluded to say that soldiers deaths are caused by America's lax attitude to homosexuality, but then again, we only know that because the debate is there and the thought is there. That line of thinking has changed people's views, whether we want to admit it or not. 

Still, watching the Louis Theroux documentaries about the Westboro Baptist Church, My Hometown Fanatics by Stacey Dooley and reading both The Londonist and Daily Mail's take on the Eriksen blog, I can't help but thinking it would be at least double good if people couldn't say all these horrible things to each other, because in the end, we just trade insult for insult and inadvertently teach children that it's an okay situation to be a part of.