Hate Speech! And Why Colleges should attack it (with a star wars twist)

AFFIRMATIVE CONSTRUCTION

We have been selected to answer the question: Do colleges and universities have a moral obligation to prohibit the public expression of hate speech on campus. To answer this, we should preclude our discussion with an awareness of what this question is really asking. First, what constitutes a moral obligation? Throughout history, morals—of or relating to the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, in relation to the actions, desires, or characters of responsible human beings—have been used to make claims for civil changes.


It makes sense that private universities should have laws and codes that promote and protect the moral rights of those individuals who form the institution. This is their moral obligation. We therefore believe that it is not wrong in any sense for colleges and universities to prohibit hate speech.

But we now must understand what hate speech is before we can allow its prohibition. Hate speech is any form of communication with disparages, attacks, insults, dehumanizes, and/or fosters hatred against a person or group of people, based on their characteristics, such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. In the America we live in today, hate speech is unquestionably fought against. As the Webster’s New World Law Dictionary, published in 2010, states: “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment because it is intended to foster hatred against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, place of national origin, or other improper classifications.”

In the 1942 Supreme Court case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, involving the verbal explosion of a Jehovah’s Witness upon a police officer, the court ruled that such epithets, such “fighting words”, were completely outside the protection of the first amendment because they were words that “by their very utterance inflicted injury” and which “are no essential part of any exposition of ideas.” Similarly, Justices White, Blackmun, O’Connor, and Stevens commented on a 1993 Supreme Court Case saying:

“Fighting words are not a means of exchanging views, rallying supporters, or registering a protest; they are directed against individuals to provoke violence or to inflict injury. Therefore, a ban on all fighting words or on a subset of the fighting words category would restrict only the social evil of hate speech, without creating the danger of driving viewpoints from the marketplace.”



Hate speech is recognized as an evil that can be legally fought against, and as an evil, any form of law, any code, any moral citizen has a moral obligation to fight against it. Do colleges have the moral obligation to prohibit, to forbid by command, hate speech? We believe so, because it is necessary for groups of people to live by laws, and, although you cannot force the absolute end of hurtful behavior without enacting tyrannical policies that remove all innate liberties from individuals, a college ought and should set guidelines for behavior to minimize how much negativity exists on campus. Furthermore, the harm inflicted from prohibiting hate speech is minimal in comparison to taking a completely neutral stance on the subject.

Hate speech is undoubtedly negative, but it is organic, arising out of natural human emotions. What causes hate speech is irrational fear. Hatred against the other, the group of people that is not us, occurs from misunderstandings, from unrealistic generalizations, from the fear that in some way, people who are not like us are bad for the world we live in. This is a failure of logic.

Furthermore, we should not respect these failures of logic because they are damaging for society. Fear is a strong tool in persuasive arguments. Often, it is used to hide logical fallacies. Helen Keller argued that prior to America’s involvement in World War One, “fear [was being] advanced as argument for armament.” Ten million Americans died in World War One because we were afraid of what might happen if Germans, who we criticized as brutish people, took over much of Europe. This fear also resulted in the unfair, unjust, and unnecessary discrimination against Germans in America during both world wars. There was an exigence, a need for something to be said about the war and about all the tensions and uncertainties of our involvement. But instead of open and honest communication, orators took the easy way out, choosing to exploit fear to cut short any meaningful arguments for alternative solutions.

Because of this, hate speech isn’t only detrimental to the people it is used against; because it is a form of communication, it can propagate fear to others, people are polarized, society as a whole is harmed. Hate speech is often, and some would argue always, illogical, fiery, and usually anonymous. Potentially real issues and real misunderstandings cannot be dealt with when their only expression is that of hateful speech and actions. It would seem that, morals aside, it is in the University’s best interest to promote anything other than hate speech, so that problems arising from individuals within the student body can be dealt with, because a University is primarily a place of learning and deviations from this path tarnish a University’s purpose.

Another reason why Universities should prohibit hate speech is because it is often in the form of physical threats. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Supreme Court justice from 1902 to 1932, said that “the right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” For all intensive purposes, hate speech with the intent of intimidation, is a prerequisite for the violation of an individual’s moral right to personal safety.

Threats are treated seriously because they can silence fearful victims, forcibly removing their access to the First Amendment. Losing the feeling of safety is something that we should never allow. Individuals have a moral right to feeling safe if they so desire. If the killing of innocents is never a good thing, then it follows that the intimidation of innocents is never a good thing.

Violence, and even violent threats, create victims. It is necessary for institutions to take stances that promote protecting and compensating victims of crimes for the betterment of society as a whole. Therefore, we should not question whether or not hate speech should be prohibited. We know that allowing any form of violence and any threat of violence, be it intimidating speech or intimidating acts, within a society will create damaging effects to the population, a population that governments and institutions were created around, to primarily protect and advance.

To conclude, the prohibition of hate speech harms society less than if it were allowed, for the following reasons:

First, hate speech is used to intimidate and to threat, often physically, people of a specific group.

Second, hate speech silences these people because it causes target groups to feel severely unsafe and open to physical attacks, diminishing their willingness to express their views to an audience that no longer seems accepting, or even rational.

Third, prohibiting hate speech cannot cause any harm because it protects feelings of safety on both sides of whatever polarization may occur, and prohibition maintains ideas and other viable forms of communication.

Finally, hate speech is an illogical expression that promotes general fear and damages the type of honest, real, and important discussion the first amendment was put in place to promote. Hate speech can only sow distrust within communities, and is an unacceptable and dangerous reaction to one’s fear. A wise man once told a young boy, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” That boy grew up to become Darth Vader, who single handedly killed thousands of Jedi and slaughtered younglings, resulting in the reduced civil liberties of all individuals as the Empire took over unopposed, in that galaxy far, far away.