Speech and offence

Henry Porter in The Observer makes a neat observation (emphasis added):

We live in a time of official proscription. Every political second-rater is after votes or validation. Justice Minister Jack Straw proposes to add to the laws against incitement to religious hatred by making it a criminal offence to incite hatred against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals. This new offence will be punishable by a maximum of seven years in jail. What next? The disabled? Yes, indeed. Mr Straw hopes to protect the disabled with a similar law. After that, there is no telling what this ambitious and calculating man plans. But the attack on free speech must be clear even to the groups which lobbied for this law. When the bill is passed, we will arrive at the absurd situation in which gays who express strong opinions about religious bigotry risk prosecution under one law while religious bigots who express strong opinions about gays risk prosecution under another.

Some aspects of New Labour administration are liberal in the best sense and have my strong support: civil partnerships for same-sex couples, for example, is an important and welcome piece of legislation that expands liberty. I am also unfazed, on liberal grounds, by a smoking ban in public places. But again and again you come up against New Labour's eagerness to proscribe offensive speech. That is a thoroughly pernicious tendency. My objection is not only the pragmatic one that unexceptionable statements - say, secularist critiques of religious myth - risk getting caught up in a sensitivity about religious hatred. It is that genuine advocates of bigotry - Holocaust denial, or anti-homosexual prejudice, or pseudoscientific notions of racial inferiority - must have a protected right to free speech. There can be no such thing in a free society as a protection from being offended.