Censorship

Should we expect our public institutions to protect our freedom of expression?  The Toronto Public Library made a controversial decision in July 2017 to permit a memorial to the late Barbara Kulaszka to be held in a rental space in one of the library’s branches. Ms Kulaszka, a former librarian, was a lawyer best known for her legal defence of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists. Many people registered their objection to the event, both before and after it took place. These people include the President of the Toronto Public Library Workers Union and the Mayor of Toronto, John Tory.

Pornography has once again been thrust onto the public stage. This time, however, it’s been (re)framed as a “public health” issue (as opposed to a women’s equality issue or a source of criminal harm). I’ve been researching sexual speech for almost as long as I’ve been consuming it, which is to say a long time. It therefore comes as no surprise that we’re in the midst of yet another attempt to censor it and to surveille its consumers.

We should applaud the public outcry that recently helped to restore Saskatchewan library funding. This situation served as an important signal work needs to be done to protect libraries and the people who work in them, who are often in difficult political situations, including over the freedom of expression.

One gets the sense that the Supreme Court of Canada does not have a good feel for free speech questions. It took some time, for instance, for a majority of the Court to acknowledge that legal constraints might ‘chill’ free speech. The Court confidently proclaimed, on more than one occasion, that civil and criminal legal prohibitions should not be expected to deter speakers.

In hate speech regulation a distinction is generally made between an attack on a (religious) group, which if sufficiently extreme may amount to hate speech, and an attack on the group’s beliefs, which must be permitted, even when it is harsh and intemperate. A ban on hate speech should apply only to assertions that the members of the group are less worthy or less human than others or that they necessarily share certain undesirable traits – that they are by nature dangerous and should be treated accordingly. Attacks on belief are a different matter.

Scholars in the United States and abroad have called for an academic boycott of international conferences in the United States in reaction to Donald Trump’s Executive Order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries.