A “joke” which consisted of insulting their disability, I take it?
It's hard to have sympathy for such “comedy”.
It's hard to have sympathy for such “comedy”.
It was in bad taste, but bad taste is not a crime. What is a crime is using violence to take $42,000 from someone merely for saying words.
A fine is enforced with the threat of violence. Knowing that someone somewhere is laughing at one is not, in fact, violence.
It takes two to humiliate: one to mock, and one to accept the mockery.
Could we even have meaningful political dialog if, for example, it was illegal to intentionally offend Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?
The idea of a right to not be insulted has scary implications.
That's actually exactly what Citizens United was about … a group of people were trying to show a film critical of Mrs. Clinton, and the federal government attempted to punish them for it. That's why there was a big push in 2014 to repeal the First Amendment: politicians wanted to make it illegal to oppose politicians.
Luckily they're not doing that. They're waiting for the offence to cause harm, and then they step in.
(To save us the argument, if it's violence when I do it, it's violence when the government does it too. If I take your money, lock you up in a cage, or kill you, these are all violent.)
So that begs the question: should “jokes” be protected? Why?
Yes, that's kinda the point of free speech: the State doesn't get to send men with guns and truncheons to silence people who are merely saying things.
Because they're expressions of ideas, i.e. speech.
In the end professional comedians are artists and art can offend.
Jerry is more eloquent than I am he can explain it better he often does on his show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
Is this where to draw the line? I'm not sure, but it is not the case that absolutely any “joke” is costitutionally protected free speech.
It doesn't matter what you or I think about the examples I gave above. It only matters what the government thinks. And if they think any or all of those are harmful concepts, then by using your reasoning any speech invoking those concepts would be controlled by the government.
That's simply untenable as far as I'm concerned. The only way to ensure the government doesn't have that kind of power over words, is to allow any and all ideas to be expressed. It's impossible to draw lines on which ideas are allowed to be expressed and those that aren't, without running into this hazard.
The thing Canada mostly considers illegal is saying something like "hey everybody, you should hate/kill X because they're {Native American, gay, old, disabled, etc.}!" with a specific X that people might then go and kill.
It's not even that we don't want to protect that speech as speech; it just seems to lead directly to hate crimes being committed a non-negligible proportion of the time. So we make hate speech itself illegal, to try to stop the hate crimes early.
These are complicated questions. But this is what case law exists for. The US, for example, allows one to speak of revolutions “in broad terms”.
> That's simply untenable as far as I'm concerned. The only way to ensure the government doesn't have that kind of power over words, is to allow any and all ideas to be expressed.
Allowing absolute freedom of speech is self-defeating. Yes, now the government can't hurt you, but your opponents can use their “free speech” to silence you. It's not healthy for a democracy, and this is why no country on earth has absolute freedom of speech.
I'm interested in some examples of this. At first blush this statement reads to me as a "marketplace of ideas", which is a feature in my opinion. But I could be interpreting your statement wrong.
That's speech.
The legislature and the judiciary do.
Regardless of where they derive their power from (democracy, monarchy, whatever). Constitutions exist to provide limits on even the power of the current majority to change fundamental aspects of governance. The U.S. Constitution for example, requires a very high bar before alterations can be made, precisely to avoid even democratically-elected representatives from making changes, even where those changes would enjoy popular support.
And it's hard to say anything about this joke without actually hearing it. Maybe the comedian has some useful funny things to say about Treacher Collins syndrome?