I'm Warning You, Don't Get Complacent About Liberty

I wrote here about the travesty being committed against Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn (as well as others, including blogger friend of QC, Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury) in Canada, and I warned you that complacency is dangerous even in our great nation. Here's more proof: Hate speech or free speech? What much of West bans is protected in U.S.

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

"It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken," Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, "when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack."

Waldron was reviewing "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment" by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.

But even Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections "in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism." In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court's insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

Make no mistake, the powers of political correctness have our first amendment in their sights.