Well-intentioned legislation to protect equal rights for all flies in the face of many very basic, simple human psychological conditions. If you genuinely believe that making a law or a rule with the stroke of a pen will change how people think and behave, you’re probably not far from believing in the tooth fairy, mind-reading, psychics and Santa Claus.
The first and most obvious issue is that most people don’t take kindly to being told what to do or how to do it.
Regulation merely forces people to pretend they’re doing whatever the regulations demand while still holding whatever opinions they choose and acting on them as they please under cover.
This caught my eye on Stuff:
“New hate speech law needs our love”
If someone in the media is telling you that a new proposed law “needs our love”, you’d have to wonder exactly why.
“Remember when the Christchurch terror attacks happened, and we were all shocked that such a senseless atrocity could happen in New Zealand?”
“Remember how we wept and felt guilty for not paying attention to the hate that had engulfed our Muslim community? Remember how we kept asking how we could make a difference?”
One of the dangers of making generic assumptions about feelings is that you’re quite likely to get the conclusions wrong.
Certainly, the Christchurch terror attack was a senseless atrocity and we were shocked by it, but shocked that it had happened in New Zealand? I don’t think so. Not that I’m aware of any study to determine that question, but certainly there appeared to be a strong contingent of people who publicly expressed the view that it was inevitable that something like this was bound to happen here sooner or later.
Let me be really clear about the next bit. The author doesn’t speak for me nor anybody else I know when she highly emotively talks of remembering how “we wept and felt guilty for not paying attention to the hate that had engulfed our Muslim community” – and I never once asked myself how I could have “made a difference”.
I was unaware of this alleged all-engulfing hate that had “engulfed” our Muslim community. I’m sorry, I didn’t weep and there is nothing I could have done to make a difference. Nothing has happened to change that.
I remain deeply saddened at the loss of life and the effects of this lunacy but seeing it for what it is doesn’t mean I care any less for my fellows.
A psychologically dysfunctional young man whom I’d never met and had indeed never heard of until that day, attacked a group of people who I’d also never met. How could I, or indeed anybody, have done anything at all to make a difference?
Give the law all the love you want, but don’t expect the law or your loving of it to make one iota of difference in preventing a repeat of the Christchurch tragedy. People who do that kind of thing find a way and they don’t usually announce themselves in advance!
What the law will do though is leave a wide-open book of interpretation for politicians, the woke, the Social Justice Warriors and the police to determine what is and what isn’t hate speech. Through that, they will have the potential to easily shut down whatever arguments they want.
I don’t see how that can be of any use to anybody in a democracy.
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