Last week, I suggested that while the outpouring of support and unity in the wake of the horrific murders of staff members of Charlie Hebdo in France seems to be about free expression in the abstract and not about defending particular kinds of expression, we might be misleading ourselves a bit on that score. Many people said that while they realize that the magazine's work is often offensive to many, you don't have to like all their cartoons to honor the courage of the staff in continuing to publish in the face of very real threats, and to proclaim loudly that no one should be killed for saying what they think.
True as that is, the content does matter. Let's be honest: if you declared "Je suis Charlie" (privately or publicly), then you probably weren't that offended by their work. Maybe it's because people like you weren't among their targets, or because things like blasphemy don't bother you all that much. Even if you didn't approve of some of their cartoons, your reaction to them was more intellectual than visceral.
That doesn't mean you don't believe in the principle of free expression, just that how you react to people paying a terrible price for their expression will depend in large part on what you thought of the expression. It's the difference between saying, "What happened was wrong" and actually going out to participate in a rally or making a public show of solidarity. As I said in that post, if the creators of the white supremacist magazine Stormfront had been murdered, we'd all agree that it was unacceptable, but we wouldn't be putting on "I am Stormfront" t-shirts.
But what's important about the American version of freedom of speech is that even the most abhorrent views get the same First Amendment protection as any other speech. It isn't that our laws and jurisprudence don't set limits on what you can say, but those limits aren't very limiting. You can't directly incite violence, but you can do it indirectly. In America, you can say, "All Zoroastrians should be killed," you just can't tell an angry crowd, "Hey, that guy on the corner looks like a Zoroastrian-go get him." Similarly, you can lie about lots of things-for instance, you're free to publish a tract claiming the Holocaust never happened-you just can't lie intentionally about an individual (if I proclaim that my neighbor killed Kennedy when I know it isn't true, he can sue me).
The looseness of these limits on speech is a pretty recent development in American history. For most of our country's existence, you could get tossed in jail for advocating certain political ideas. In 1920, socialist Eugene Debs ran for president from prison, where he was serving a sentence for sedition because he opposed the draft in World War I. In the 1960s, Lenny Bruce was arrested multiple times and charged with violating obscenity laws, because in a comedy club with only adults in the audience he said dirty words that today you can hear every night on HBO. Today, those prosecutions seem absurd to us. In fact, we've all but stopped prosecuting people for obscenity, when for decades it was a constant topic of debate and legal wrangling.
Although First Amendment jurisprudence is still somewhat complicated, we've essentially come to a place where we allow almost any speech that doesn't do direct and demonstrable harm to specific individuals. But in most countries, even those that you might think share our commitment to free speech, they're much more comfortable outlawing speech that they've decided is harmful in a much broader, more long-term way-not because it injures a specific person, but just because they think it isn't good for society. And one of those countries is France. In the last week they have arrested dozens of people for violating speech laws by doing things like "condoning terrorism." Most notably, the French government is considering charges against the incredibly popular anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne, who wrote on his Facebook page "je me sens Charlie Coulibaly," (I feel like Charlie Coulibaly) combining the "Je suis Charlie" with the last name of the man who killed four hostages in a Jewish market.
As an American, you probably think, "Wait-how can that be a crime?" But in France, it can be. It's also a crime to deny the Holocaust, as it is in a number of other European countries. Does that make the French hypocrites? They'd probably argue that there are certain classes of harmful speech that they've identified and outlawed, and the Charlie Hebdo cartoons don't fall into those categores, while other kinds of speech do. Like you Americans, they'd say, we draw a line between speech that's allowable and speech that isn't; our line is just a bit different from yours.
To return to where we started, you probably think it would be ridiculous for the French to put Dieudonne in jail for a Facebook post, but if they do, you also probably won't be organizing a march to proclaim "Je suis Dieudonne," because his views are despicable and you don't really want to associate yourself with him. So does intellectual consistency demand that we defend someone like Dieudonne with a vigor and energy equal to that with which we defend Charlie Hebdo? Not really. You can take the position that French speech laws are too restrictive and even someone like him should be able to say whatever he wants, but you don't have an obligation to put those abstract ideals into some kind of political action every time you take a position. We all pick and choose.
