Free Speech Takes a Hit in Canada, Too, Maybe

Since I've been blogging a lot about free speech issues lately, I thought I'd pass along this story from today's New York Times, contrasting the US stance on "hate speech" with other Western democracies, using a pending Canadian case as a catalyst:

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their 'dignity, feelings and self-respect.'

As the article explains, the US is an outlier in the West for valuing free expression over communal/societal harmony.

Our theory goes that it is both dangerous to allow the state to regulate speech because it might offend someone's "dignity, feelings and self-respect" and that the best antidote to hateful speech is more speech (the "marketplace of ideas"). Their theory goes that a modern democracy must maintain an "atmosphere of mutual respect" in order to ensure participation from all segments of society.

Those theories are products of different legal traditions and national histories and I can understand where the Europeans and Canadians are coming from. I can't help thinking, tho', that given the impossibility of enforcing respect and the dangers of chilling legitimate (if vulgar, hateful, or just plain stupid) speech that we tend to get the better of the argument.