Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
On Tuesday, July 2, 2024, Coeur d’Alene’s Mayor and City Council will be debating whether they should create a new category of municipal crime: “Hate Crime.” In the Cd’A Library after 6:00 p.m., item H-2: “Council Bill No. 24-1010 – Approving the creation of a new Chapter 9 of the Municipal Code, entitled Hate Crimes, providing for definitions and penalties” will be deliberated.
Like all Progressives and their fellow travelers, these elected officials plan to exploit a wave of emotional revulsion about a couple of isolated incidences of thuggish obnoxiousness to justify establishing permanent policies that most local citizens would reject on principle. The pretext for this move is that it has been alleged that, on a couple of occasions, people of non-Caucasian ethnicities were cursed at from cars passing by.
If every allegation is true, then this is more proof that our world is full of idiots. Will any law, no matter how intrusive and censorious, alter human nature and purge society of jerks? Totalitarian legalists in Germany, Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea, with all of their unlimited coercive power, have never succeed at pruning human nature to their liking. Laws can never make human beings more virtuous.
At best, these local leaders are overreacting. Unfortunately, their virtue-signaling actually poses a real threat to personal freedom.
The very concept of “Hate Crime” is un-American. It proceeds from the assumption that some ideas are so self-evidently evil that they must be repressed. Precisely who elected Mayor Hammond and Councilors McEvers, English, Evans, Gookin, Miller, and Wood to police expressed ideas like some latter-day Spanish Inquisition?
Yet, a Holy Inquisition is precisely what these worthies are emulating. By even flirting with establishing “Hate Crime” laws, they are arrogating unto themselves the right to distinguish what constitutes acceptable dissent. Any speech that these elected officials and their agents determine to be beyond their arbitrary standard of acceptability will now be considered to be in violation of the law.
Where in the US Constitution is political speech that offends certain privileged elites forbidden? Where in Idaho, Kootenai County, or Coeur d’Alene statutes is control over political expression placed in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats?
Actions are rightly subject to lawful review. A person’s chosen deeds can justifiably result in their arrest and trial, possibly followed by conviction and punishment.
However, unless one’s speech is equivalent to intentionally inciting a deadly human stampede by shouting “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, the American tradition is to allow for the broadest possible scope for free speech. Speech is not protected if it is used to systematically conspire to commit a crime and speech is not protected when it is deemed to be obscenely harmful to
innocents.
Of all expression, political speech is most sacred in our laws and traditions. It led to the American Revolution. Free expression birthed the United States. Every single controversy that Americans have wrestled with since even before 1776 has involved citizens of all backgrounds boldly arguing about their beliefs and convictions.
Local officials will now give themselves the role of distinguishing truth from lies? Municipal leaders will now criminalize utterances of unpopular opinions in order to cleanse the body politic of toxic ideas? Is this really what these politicians were elected to do?
Our Founding Fathers spent much time worrying about what they called the tyranny of the majority. We are not a democracy because our Founders well knew the essential instability and propensity for mob rule in democracies like ancient Athens. Only a tyrannical majority would define dissenting opinions as being unlawfully “Hateful.”
Our Federal Republic was established in imitation of Republican Rome, whose imperfect structures came closest to promoting and preserving the political freedom of its citizens to think their own thoughts and speak their own minds. The preservation of our ongoing liberty is the overriding purpose for all American political institutions.
Freedom of Speech is indispensable in the preservation of our liberty. It is also the very best evidence of freedom’s objective existence.
Free Speech is not measured by how many who hold fashionable and uncontroversial convictions may fully express themselves. Our US Constitution’s First Amendment was written by traitors who fomented rebellion against their lawful King, George III, against the laws of their country.
Every Patriot understood that one of the costs they paid in their fight for liberty was that each of them committed treason. Donald Trump will not be the first American President to be a convicted felon. All of our earliest Presidents were traitors under British law.
Free Speech protects the untrammeled expression of racists, sexists, homophobes, Satanists, environmentalists, Klansmen, Communists, anarchists, Islamists, Flat-Earthers, and any other iteration of cringe, fringe, conspiracy cultists. It exists to allow people to advocate for their authentic beliefs, no matter how offensive and even bizarre they may be.
We cannot afford to indulge these vainglorious officials and their censorious, virtue-signaling law. “Hate Crime” laws are a much greater threat to our ongoing liberty than the profane expression of personal bigotry on the part of a couple of ignorant thugs could ever be.
Contact these Coeur d’Alene officials, and tell them that we do not need them to police our thought, our words, or our lives. Or, attend this meeting and say that we do not need them to save us from ourselves.
