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This started as a tweet in response to @akaCoggo about an article they posted (THIS ONE) called “Is Public Shame the Best Way to Deal with Bigotry?”. After retweeting the initial post they mentioned how, after reading a lot about the subject, they kept finding articles suggesting the solution against hate speech as enforcement. This post is my response to @akaCongo since Twitter doesn’t provide enough characters to do so.
I’ve been thinking about this topic since Tosh’s horrendous verbal assault of a woman at one of his shows. After I left a small rant against Tosh on my Facebook wall, an older man whom I had met through Occupy responded angrily that if I didn’t defend Tosh’s right to speech then my right to speech would soon disappear as well. While I don’t believe that that order of events would actually happen it got me thinking about the difference between governmental restriction of speech versus speaking out against the speech of another. I believe that the man who left a reply to my status was severely confused. He was mixing up freedom of speech, a freedom that prevents the government from regulating our speech, with saying that someone shouldn’t say something.
Sometimes just because it is legal for you to say something doesn’t mean you should say it. It also doesn’t mean that people aren’t able to call you out about what you are saying. Enforcing the restrictions of certain speech is tricky, its a slippery slope that we should of course stay away from. But if we can’t, as a society, call out others on their use of hate and violent speech then we will never move away from it.
That’s why I kind of love the idea of publicly shaming those who use hate speech. It doesn’t restrict the bigot from being a bigot but hell yeah its gonna make them feel like shit because of it.
Now I know there could be a dark side to this idea as well but hey, its a good start.