Hate Speech Banning Essay

Words: 2383
Pages: 10

Title The high profile group Westboro Baptist Church has been protesting various events for years. The church through provocative protest has spread its dark gospel that all of the earth is doomed because we accept homosexuality. (Deutsch) White supremacist groups are now taking to the internet. When they type the name of a Jew, they surround it with triple parenthesis. The parenthesis in the digital world is equivalent to wearing the yellow star. (Gunaratna) Hate speech has always been a weapon. Banning speech, much like banning assault weapons, hands even greater power to the privileged. There is a dangerous precedence with four in ten millennials saying that the government should limit speech considered offensive to minorities on the college campus. (Poushter) So what exactly is hate speech? “Hate speech is a communication …show more content…
Board of Regents, the University of Wisconsin faced a similar challenge to its system-wide policy on racist and discriminatory conduct… which involved either vile, profane, and offensive name-calling or derisive comments based on the listener’s race or sex. The court declared the policy overbroad and void for vagueness; it also rebuffed the university’s arguments for the policy under the fighting words doctrine and Title VII.5” …show more content…
“Exploration, deliberation, and debate may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought ... to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed,” the Regents added. “It is for the members of the university community, not for the institution itself, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress exploration of ideas or expression of speech but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas...they oppose.”