|
|
|
|
|
|
by pacala
3114 days ago
|
|
|
If adding one law is not a slippery slope argument, then removing [or not adding] one law is not a slippery slope argument either... Very convenient to support civil penalties against speech that you disagree with. What if some people find BLM "bigoted speech". What if some people think that pro-choice argumentation is "incitement to murder". How about we fight together to preserve our freedom of speech? |
|
|
Black Lives Matter is a political advocacy group that protests police and state violence perpetrated against Black people. Bigoted speech is speech that denigrates people based on ascribed statuses (gender identification, sexual orientation, race). These are blatantly not the same thing.
Words have meaning. If we have a law that says "killing people is illegal" and you force me into a dead-end 12 hour a day 7 days a week job for the rest of my life, I can't say "you killed me" even if spiritually you might have. That's not what "kill" means.
If your argument is that people interpret words differently and consequently laws are inherently too ambiguous, that's another argument against all laws. And even though the premise is correct - human languages are by their nature imprecise - that's why we have courts.
Most of your arguments boil down to: you can't do this perfectly, therefore you shouldn't do it. But that's not at all how law works, and if we were to apply this standard to laws we would never write one.
> How about we fight together to preserve our freedom of speech?
Sure, but that's not under assault here. Can we also fight together to protect the two-thirds of Americans who suffer under racism, misogyny, homophobia and discrimination?