A new poll found that a majority of millennials want the moral equivalent of eating a Tide pod.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Campaign for Free Speech found that just over half of Millennials felt that the First Amendment — your right to free speech — should be altered a bit so that “hate speech” is punishable by law:
More than 60 percent of Americans agree on restricting speech in some way, while a slim majority, 51 percent, want to see the First Amendment rewritten to “reflect the cultural norms of today.” The Campaign for Free Speech, which conducted the survey, said the results “indicate free speech is under more threat than previously believed.”
“The findings are frankly extraordinary,” executive director Bob Lystad told the Washington Free Beacon. “Our free speech rights and our free press rights have evolved well over 200 years, and people now seem to be rethinking them.”
Millennials seem to believe that the Constitution “goes too far” when it comes to allowing certain kinds of speech, and over half believe jail time is a proper punishment for speaking out of line:
Nearly 60 percent of Millennials—respondents between the ages of 21 and 38—agreed that the Constitution “goes too far in allowing hate speech in modern America” and should be rewritten, compared to 48 percent of Gen Xers and 47 percent of Baby Boomers. A majority of Millennials also supported laws that would make “hate speech” a crime—of those supporters, 54 percent said violators should face jail time.
If I had a week, I couldn’t tell you all the reasons why this is a bad idea, and I’ll keep it to the main point as much as possible.
Too many in my generation seem to not only have little in the way of foresight, but they also can’t seem to see what’s happening right under their nose. What is and isn’t considered to be taboo, hateful, or non-PC has changed so many times throughout the last decade that they’ve likely forgotten more things they were outraged about than they think.
People just living their lives are suddenly guilty of things like cultural appropriation, homophobia, transphobia and more. A person simply stating that a man isn’t a woman is suddenly suspended from social media platforms, and if the mob is willing enough, he may even lose his job.
These are very recent occurrences and all of them have been labeled hate speech at one point or another.
I can’t trust that the public can even define what hate speech is, and I’m not sure I ever will. The term is so nebulous and it shifts from one thing to another almost by the month. They want to ban hate speech, but I doubt that any of them can actually tell me what it is, and even if they could, I’m willing to bet that they only want those rules to apply to certain kinds of people in certain kinds of situations.
You can get a glimpse of this very thing during Steven Crowder’s “Change My Mind” video surrounding hate speech. Many seemed to know what hate speech was until they were asked to really define it. Many seemed to think that things like racist or homophobic speech really did equate to violence.
Racist and homophobic speech occurs every day, and likely more often than people think. I see more racism and sexism against white men in the mainstream media itself. I doubt many of these people would even stop to consider that racist and sexist because they don’t consider it racist or sexist to talk about how horrible white men are. Herein lies my point.
They can’t seem to define it and they’d certainly be unwilling to apply the rules across the board. What’s more, what is considered “hate speech” changes with the wind, and before you know it, you may very well be caught in a legal proceeding because you said something that qualifies as “hate speech” on Wednesday that didn’t apply on Tuesday.
The First Amendment is fine how it is.
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