Freedom of speech should mean one thing: freedom of speech. It should not mean, ‘Say what you like but please don’t be mean’, or ‘Yes, speak your mind but don’t say anything too unpopular.’ However, as we are told to continue red-flagging our language, freedom of speech increasingly becomes an unnecessarily murky terrain about what you can say and, more crucially, whose feelings you can hurt.
I’d long ago given up any hope that my home country would have the courage to protect free speech, which should be as simple and basic a human right as you can have, but this news should still raise Canadian eyebrows. In Quebec, a car salesman has been ordered to pay $1000cdn fine to a man he called a ‘fifi’ (French insult for gay). According to the judge:
"Calling someone a 'fifi' constitutes a scornful way of referring to homosexuals," Judge Michele Pauze concluded. "The use of this term wounds and adds to the disgrace and lack of respect of human dignity a person (can suffer), homosexuals in particular."
(The last sentence is particularly ludicrous, as who else besides a homosexual would feel hurt by being called this particular name?)
Regardless of how cretinous the car dealer may be, have we gone so far about making sure the state can protect everyone’s sensibilities that we think we can pick and choose the speech we want to protect? I’ve been called a lot of names in my life, but never had the good fortune to be able to cash in on the resulting loss of my ‘human dignity’ simply because I was a) taught the valuable lesson that people are sometimes cruel in life, or b) occasionally, deserved the insult. As distasteful as it is for us to admit, the right of homophobes, racists and run-of-the-mill jerks to shoot their mouths off stems from the same rights and freedoms we all enjoy. Letting them have that same right, that’s the tough part.