It's an odd world we live in when quoting from the Bible is derided as "hate speech." In some jurisdictions, you can face legal consequences for criticizing Islam, and also for promoting Christianity; and I'm not talking about Muslim-majority nations, this can happen to you in the United Kingdom.
I'm not religious. But I do live in a Judeo-Christian culture, and I'm glad for that; it's a much more comfortable system to live in than many others, like the aforementioned Muslim-majority world. Part of the freedoms we enjoy in that culture, in the Western world, is free speech. Or, at least, it used to be. In recent years, some accusations of hate speech have gotten truly ridiculous.
Here are a few examples.
In November, the Daily Sceptic reported that a policeman had told a Christian preacher that some words painted on his van “could be seen as hate speech in the wrong context”. The words were a Biblical verse: Chapter 3, verse 16 of the Gospel according to John, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
How, we might ask, could that be hateful?
The alleged (potential) problem with John 3:16, one infers, is that it proclaims Christ to be God, and if you are a Muslim – or, actually, a believer in Judaism – you believe that is not true, and that the claim is blasphemy. The ‘context’ of a Muslim reader could make those words hate speech. But making a statement that someone else considers blasphemy is not intense dislike or aversion for that someone.
OK. Of course, few Jews are going around threatening people with violence over religious disagreements. Few Christians, for that matter, are doing this, either. They may think someone is wrong for holding different religious views - or no religious views - but they don't threaten people over it. Unless, that is, they are creatures of the left.
Here are a couple more examples:
Maya Forstater said that “I don’t think people should be compelled to play along with literal delusions like ‘trans-women are women’”, and that “radically expanding the legal definition of ‘women’ so that it can include both males and females makes it a meaningless concept, and will undermine women’s rights and protection for vulnerable women and girls.” Disagreeing firmly with someone else’s (even sincere) claim about himself is not loathing or wishing ill to him.
Felix Ngole, the social worker, said that he “believes that marriage is a divinely instituted lifelong union between man and woman, and that the expression of sexual relationships only accords with Biblical teaching when expressed within a monogamous marriage of one man and one woman.” Saying that things other people do – indeed, some of their fairly major life choices – are wrong is not malevolence or aversion.
No matter how much the left may protest, words are not violence. Thoughts are not violence. Thinking bad things isn't a crime. Only actions can be crimes. That's central to the very notion of freedom of speech.
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This is why hate crime laws are the purest of horse squeeze. Even a vocal expression of hatred, actual hatred, is just speech, the only line being drawn at an incitement to violence, to push that raw red moment when words lead to actions. If there is no incitement, then it's speech - and should be free. A Christian should be free to profess their faith. A social worker should be free to state their thoughts on marriage. A father with a daughter in high school sports should be able to state his opinion on a boy joining his daughter's team. Even in actual attacks, in acts of violence, the attempts to divine if "hate" was somehow involved, and in so doing arguing for a stricter sentence, smacks of punishing a perp for badthink.
And yet, the complaints about hate speech always seem to come, ironically, from the left, who are the all-time champions of hate. Just look at the left's reactions to Charlie Kirk's murder:
This, for example, is inherently hateful: laughing at a man’s murder, and proclaiming contemptuous indifference to his family’s grief. If you do that, you hate him – and them. It fits the definition, unarguably: dislike, loathing, malevolence. George Abaraonye, for example, did not just say he didn’t care that Charlie Kirk had been killed, nor express indifference to the fate of a living opponent (“I wouldn’t care if someone shot him”). He laughed that the man had been murdered (“loool”), and he and his friends then verbally bullied people who suggested that this wasn’t right. If someone’s death prompts that from you, you hate him. If you respond with praise or endorsement to advertised glee at a person’s murder, you hate him. If, two months later, you are yelling “F*** your dead homie” at attendees of an event organised by the murder victim’s organisation, you hate him – and you hate persistently and deliberately, not just in a brief and thoughtless moment.
Should despicable people like George Abaraonye be allowed to say dreadful, hate-filled things like this? Yes. That's what free speech means. If he acts on that hate, then he will face consequences. But as long as he's only flapping his hateful, ill-informed mouth, he has the same rights to speak as any other lunatic.
Free speech applies to everyone, or it applies to no one. "Hate" cannot be a gateway. Free speech applies to all speech, even hate speech - or else, it isn't free. Having a policeman stop someone, implying possible legal consequences because they display a Bible verse on their personal vehicle, their personal property, that flies in the face of every liberty the Western world has fought and bled for, for centuries.
