The United Kingdom just denied entry to a Dutch Right Winger because he supposedly said bad things about Muslims, and meanwhile, Germany continues to imprison people who say bad things about Jews. Who came up with this idea that if you can just shut speech up that that somehow solves the problem? That’s got it totally backwards, doesn’t it?

Free speech, even when it is hateful speech, actually serves to often times open up channels of communication between 2 groups of hostile people. Worried about hate speech? If you solve the problem in the first place then you won’t have that hate speech follow more often than not.

Sure, there are hate mongers who will never respond to any speech to them other than mere repetition of their own hateful attitudes towards the target group for their hate. That being said, if you outlaw the expression of their hate through their speech, then you just hide it away where it begins to fester into more dangerous possibilities of expression.

Society has much more to gain by not outlawing speech of any kind than it generally does in trying to limit and outlaw it. Does anybody really think that if a person is thrown into jail for 2 years for saying bad things about Islam or Judaism that they will return to society a better person? Isn’t that just a version of a school yard bully who tells the smaller kid that if he doesn’t shut up that he will go and kick his ass? What’s the lesson learned there?

It’s time to stop making hate speech an illegal speech threatened by jail time if you engage in it per somebody else’s opinion. That’s pretty stupid law. Meanwhile, we have all sorts of other laws on the books that actually do more harm than good. We have laws that legalize torture, and laws that throw people in jail for life for the use of some self abusing substance or other. Jailing people for saying nasty things about other people or their religion or social grouping is also a stupid law that does just the opposite of what it is intended supposedly to accomplish. It makes people hate others more instead of less. It’s time to do away with this sort of law hiding behind the idea that it is in someway a supposed tolerance campaign for multi-diversity. It just isn’t so.