Dialogue: Fundamentalism has no place in free speech

By PETER SAXTON*

The urge to make sense of complex issues by viewing them from inside ideological frameworks is strong indeed. As Robert Persig once wrote: "We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and we call that handful of sand the world."

So it is with recent correspondence on the anti-gay videos case. Most have simply avoided discussion of all the issues that do not fit neatly into their way of seeing.

For most people, the central outcome of the Court of Appeal decision is that the Censorship Office no longer has jurisdiction over hate publications except under certain restricted circumstances.

The office is now, for example, powerless to censor even extreme anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda such as Joseph Goebbels' film The Eternal Jew. For those of us who are not freedom-of-speech zealots in the American mould, this decision is an unexpected seashift.

Advocates of the absolutism of free speech have tended to centre their argument on the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor. There are good ideas and there are bad ideas. Bad ones, such as racism or homophobia, are supposedly weeded out through the participation of affected groups and because people will, in the end, reject such views in favour of tolerance.

As Justice Holmes famously put it, the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. It follows from this view that the worst possible thing to do is for the state to pick winners and prohibit certain expressions in law.

But this is precisely what several jurisdictions overseas have enacted. Legal decisions in both Canada and New South Wales have balanced the ideal of freedom of expression with the equally important ideal of multiculturalism. Our Human Rights Act contains some provisions for prosecuting people who incite racial disharmony.

Challenges to freedom of speech absolutism have come in at least three forms.

First, free-speech fundamentalism fails to account for the fact that some people and some groups have more power in society than do others. Some actually control the marketplace of ideas, because they control the means by which ideas are disseminated.

Others are more or less - and in some cases completely - locked out. Stigmatised minority groups simply do not have the same level of access to the marketplace of ideas as do those possessed of widely accepted majority opinion. And they likely never will have.

Secondly is what to do with communication techniques that are so sophisticated that they effectively prevent viewers from engaging a subject rationally. Expressions are not restricted to verbal utterances but, through film, can convey ideas by using images, sounds and text. Media analysts, for example, explain how carefully packaged productions can subconsciously take advantage of our cultural baggage by exploiting ingrained emotional symbols.

When directed at groups in society, the results can be chilling. Even in 1966, the report of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada noted that messages can work subliminally, some recipients not realising they have been provoked to respond in a certain way.

Thirdly, it is disingenuous to suggest there is no connection between discriminatory ideas and discriminatory behaviour. The New South Wales Police gay and lesbian liaison officer has commented that a key factor in the high rate of anti-gay hate crime was the perpetrators' ability to dehumanise the individual attacked. Suicide rates among gay youth also attest to the impact on targets of hate themselves.

What price ought we be prepared to pay for absolute freedom of speech? Who will pay it?

Exceptions to free speech do exist. We don't seem to have difficulty regulating extreme forms of pornography, for example. Most of us have no problem classifying this material as injurious to the public good.

Is the counterpoint, then, that bad ideas should be censored out of existence? Far from it. Everyone should be free to vigorously criticise other groups, institutions and ideological frameworks. Democracy relies upon the thorough exercise of this right.

What ought to be censored, however, are those expressions that go well beyond mere advocacy of an opinion.

The videos Aids: What You Haven't Been Told and Gay Rights and Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda are hate propaganda. They generalise the behaviour of some gay individuals to gay people as a class, then through careful juxtaposition of images and subject distance the gay community from normal society. The videos then set about depicting the gay community as a threat to the population.

The association with the Aids epidemic on the one hand, and demands for equal rights on the other, provoke powerful personal reactions. Both threaten the imagined securities of sex and convention. In other words, these videos are intended to influence negatively people's capacity to live with members of the gay community in cooperative coexistence.

The successful public health response to Aids in this country has been based on providing accurate information and preserving the human rights of groups affected by the virus. Videos such as these are unsafe because their alarmist nature militates against rational responses.

* Peter Saxton is the research officer for the Aids Foundation.