From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Edward G. Nilges)
Subject: Re: Minneapolis Hate Speech Ordinance 
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 19:41:24 GMT

In article <1992Sep28.170613.22678@midway.uchicago.edu> thf2@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>Followups narrowing the distribution.
>
>
>Well, how about your continued misrepresentation of the Minneapolis
>statute?

Ted, if I felt it was an error I would have retracted it.  But I read
the statute when the case came before the Supreme Court and I did not
feel it was unconstitutional then and I don't feel it's unconstitutional
now.  I felt then that it merely enhanced penalties for existing torts
and crimes and I feel that way now, since placing an abusive sign on
your own property is a form of assault when you know full well it will
seriously harm blacks, Jews, or women.  I retract errors only when *I*
feel I was in the wrong, and I do so promptly.  Which is more than I can
say for most of the clowns on this net.

Futhermore, if I were to engage in more frequent retractions, either of
necessity (thorugh failure to do my homework, as Carl Kadie failed), or
out of a misplaced attempt to curry favor, I'd be flamed for changing my
mind, and macho posters don't do that, do they?  Seems I cannot win.  So
I shall go on posting the truth as I see it, which is that "hate speech"
laws don't pose a threat to free speech, the conduct that they proscribe
poses a threat to free speech.

>
>No, it isn't.  Not under any definition of assault used in the last
>five hundred years in the legal community.

Wrong.  Assault is the creation of a belief in another's mind that he
or she is at immediate risk of being harmed.  Nazi displays on one's
lawn create this belief in Jewish passersby; burning crosses create
this belief in the minds of blacks; pornographic displays create this
belief in the minds of women passersby.  A reading of tort law taken
literally lends itself immediately to this interpretation, and it's only
the sexism and racism of law professors that cause law students to read
the typical tort as occuring between two white adult males.  In other
words, when you read your casebooks, you form a picture of two
INDIVIDUALS whereas in the abstract a tort or crime can be one-many: one
perpetrator, many victims.
>
>>Marching through a
>>Jewish neighborhood with Nazi regalia is assault on every Jew in that
>>neighborhood.  
>
>It's obnoxious, it's offensive, but it's not an assault.

Oh?  And if I find out where Judge Richard Posner teaches, walk up to
him after class and call him, to his face, an asshole, what's that?
Speech?  No.  The guy would either punch me out, and expect to be
released from any legal action (since I ASSAULTED the guy), or he'd sue
my butt for ASSAULT.  Now you tell me how this is different from giving
Posner's grandma a heart attack because she was in Theriesenstadt in
1940 and I march through her neighborhood in Nazi regalia.  You tell me
how this is different from giving a black guy's grandma a heart attack
by dressing up like the lynch mob that killed her first husband in 1936.
You tell me how this is different from giving my secretary a nervous
breakdown by putting pornographic magazines on her desk. 

You're restricting assault to the attack on powerful MALES by anyone
else by saying that what would be construed as assault on a powerful
MALE is "free speech" when it victimizes the powerless.  

>
>I know that, Ed.  You know that.  Now write a law that can ban one without
>resulting in the ban of the other.  Can't be done--we live in a world where
>there are more people offended by OBOB than Hustler.  Once you ban one,
>you remove the opportunity for protection of the other.

This is a threat (let us have Hustler, then MAYBE you can have OBOS)
rather than a statement of fact.  And your statement that there are more
people offended by Our Bodies, Our Selves than Hustler is absolutely
heart-breaking.  It's untrue, but it shows (in its utter fantasy) that
YOU are more offended by OBOS than Hustler.  This means that you'd
rather see pictures of women bound and gagged than pictures of women
determining how to live their own lives.  I sorta knew that many folks
are offended by self-determining people, but this still shocks and
disgusts me.

A distinction CAN be drawn.  The distinction WAS drawn in the St Paul
statute, and in the MacKinnon antiporn statutes.  But because this
distinction was drawn by the relatively disempowered, it was ignored and
said to be unconstitutional.

David Noble, a historian of technology, tells a story.  Lee Iacocca gets
up and discourses extensively on a technical subject about which he
knows nothing; like as not, people with rapt attention would take notes
and quote him, because Iacocca's got a lot of POWER.  Then another
speaker, say a low-level Chrysler engineer, gets up and says, Lee,
you're wrong, and produces extensive documentation as to why he is
wrong.  The engineer, of course, would not be feted for setting us
right.  He'd be fired, abused as "wordy" and as "wasting our time" and
"wrong".  Until it happens that he's shown to be right...by another
powerful male.  

Feminists who draft these statutes are in the same boat. They draw a
clear distinction between Hustler and Our Bodies, Our Selves, a
distinction which can be understood by anyone.  But because they bear
the SAME relation to male, and male-identified, Supreme Court justices
as does Noble's engineer to Lee Iacocca, they are ignored, thought NOT
to be drawing any distinction, thought to be leaving a "slippery slope."
The very fact that they words they have produced would prevent the
slippery slope, IF those words were attended-to, is ignored.

>
>Your support of penalties for speech endanger the very groups you seek to
>protect.  You're a white male (as you've stated before); this isn't going
>to hurt you when it happens.  I'm a minority that's been squashed before
>by governments extending their powers as you wish them to.  The ordinance
>that bans swastikas today as offensive to Jews will eventually lead to
>the ordinance tomorrow that bans Jews as offensive to Christians.

You don't know what you're talking about.  I'd bet that most Holocaust
survivors would have welcomed an anti-hate-speech law in Germany in
1933.  


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