Freedom of passions, freedom from speech
Dominic Green
Video Embed
Everyone likes free speech until they’re the one being spoken about. No doubt the Swiss journalist Catherine Macherel was insulted when the French-Swiss racist agitator Alain Soral called her a “fat lesbian” in a Facebook video and said that her work as a “queer activist” showed that she was “unhinged.” But should Soral go to jail and pay thousands of euros in fines, as a Swiss court decided on Oct. 3?
In 2018, the Swiss Parliament expanded its law against racial and religious discrimination to make it illegal to “denigrate, discriminate or stir up hatred” on the basis of biological sex, with a maximum sentence of three years in jail. The largest party, the nationalist Swiss People’s Party, objected on free speech grounds. Because the Swiss value consensus almost as much as they value financial opacity, in 2020, their Parliament called a referendum. The Swiss public approved the law by 63% to 37%.
HOW AN ARIZONA ELECTION LAW COULD CAUSE HAVOC IN 2024
Macherel does indeed seem to be on the heavy side. She is also openly lesbian. Soral wanted to denigrate her as “fat,” but fatness is not a sexual characteristic. And is fatness a biological characteristic in the sense of the Swiss law? Some are born fat, but most of us attain fatness by soaking up the carbs and avoiding the gym. The Swiss law concerns biological sex, not the waistlines of Geneva or Lausanne, or how their bearers describe their sexual preferences.
This is just as well for Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be,” Sunak told the Conservative Party’s annual conference on Oct. 4. “They can’t. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman.” If the Swiss law covered gender identity, Sunak could be arrested for hate speech the next time he lands in Geneva.
Soral’s lawyers are preparing an appeal. Perhaps they will ask Macherel to prove that her lesbianism is biological, and thus protected under law, rather than situational, like male homosexuality in prison. This cannot be proved, for or against, but the insult to Macherel would likely exceed Soral’s original insult.
The same goes for Soral’s claim that Macherel’s “queer activism” shows that she is “unhinged.” The OED defines “unhinged” as “having a mental illness that makes somebody unable to think or act normally.” In the absence of a medical diagnosis, this is clearly a subjective exaggeration. But anyone who thinks that you can change your genes on a whim or a wish, or that a man can become a woman by pills and surgery, is, objectively, either ill-informed or delusional. Again, Soral’s lawyers will cross-examine Macherel to establish whether her beliefs on gender accord with the basic facts of biology.
“Defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred” is pretty much a summary of Soral’s entire career. He was a member of the French Communist Party, crossed over to the neofascist National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and now runs a personal exercise in the horseshoe theory called, hilariously, Equality and Reconciliation. He calls feminism a neoliberal conspiracy, creating two kinds of women, the flippees (“freak-outs”) and the petasses (“b****es”). He thinks that the French republic is threatened by “Judeo-Zionist communitarianism.” In 2019, a French court jailed him for a year for Holocaust denial.
As a Judeo-Zionist communitarian, I would be delighted if a hole opened in the Earth and Alain Soral fell into it. That does not mean the state should dig the hole and push him in because he makes a living by being cruel and dishonest, or because his cruelty and dishonesty hurt my feelings. If we jailed the cruel and the dishonest, the halls of Congress would be empty and there would be tumbleweed on Wall Street. If we make sentiment and grievance the measure of the law, we subordinate justice to subjective passions.
Either freedom of speech applies to all of us, or all of us lose that freedom. The Sorals and the torrential hatreds of social media are the price of democracy. Are Americans prepared to continue paying it? In July, the Pew Research Center reported that 55% of Americans think the U.S. government “should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information.” Sixty-five percent think that technology companies should limit our freedom of information. Republicans, at 39%, were less censorious than Democrats, at 70%.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The philosopher J.L. Austin thought that there were two kinds of speech, “constantive” and “performative.” Constantive speech makes claims about the world that can be judged to be true or false: “The murder rate has risen since the BLM protests.” Performative speech intends to change the world: “Black trans lives matter!”
Free speech laws are good at protecting constantive speech, but they are easily exploited by performative speakers. The French have a long tradition of Soral-style extremism that is at once constantive and performative, and social media has allowed the rest of us to sink into the same mess. If the barrier between constantive and performative speech needs restoring, can we trust the government to do it?