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by camgunz 3124 days ago
We absolutely can. No one's gone to jail for being a racist or a misogynist. Hooray, everything's fine.
1 comments

No one goes to jail for being a racist, but people are physically assaulted for saying mildly controversial things.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/middleb...

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/berkeley-riots-...

People are beat up, shot, and run over for being black, too. They don't even have to say anything.

Man, if I had to pick a side I'd stand up and fight for, I know who I'm out there defending.

Yeah right, what's a bigger problem: not being able to say the N word or going to jail for no reason and feeling lucky that you weren't shot for no reason because you're Black?
Going to jail, but they are unrelated. If you can't separate the two, you will make bad policy.
They are related; there's a false equivalency in these arguments between the right to be a racist and the right to be free from racism. On that spectrum, our society is far better at ensuring the former at the expense of the latter, and we need to recalibrate.

Lest you think this is futile, our system of laws and the social contract itself is based on balancing rights. For example, we have the right to free expression, but perjury and fraud are crimes.

In other words, we work too hard to protect bigoted speech, and we don't work hard enough to protect Americans from bigotry and discrimination, and this is at least in part due to the false equivalency we maintain between them. I'm not saying I have a great policy answer -- although allowing civil suits for bigoted speech might work -- but we should at least be talking about it.

You are actually making the false equivalency. You have the right to live free from discrimination, but not racist speech. These things aren't on a scale to be balanced, they are orthogonal, and each are balanced separately.