This reminds me of the controversy around whether or not Trump was allowed to block people on Twitter when he was president. Some people were saying that as a public official, he had no right to do that. I don’t recall whether there was any authoritative legal decision about it one way or another…
I consider myself a free-speech absolutist. I think even terrible people saying terrible things have the right to express themselves. However, I think banning these people from city council meetings doesn’t infringe on their right to express themselves at all. They can still speak freely to anyone who wants to listen.
The city council meeting is for the benefit of the council members and they should be free to decide which speech is useful for them to hear and which isn’t. There’s no more reason for them to listen to everyone who wants to talk than there is for them to read letters from everyone who wants to write to them. (It would be silly to make them read every letter if they wanted to read any letter.)
The meeting does serve a secondary purpose of allowing participants to address each other rather than the council members, but this is IMO incidental and preventing it does not limit anyone’s freedom of expression - they can still talk in public if they want to.
Edit: accidentally deleted my own post.
Hate speech is an explicit threat and should not count as free speech. It is very clear what someone saying bigoted things would do if they could get away with it.
Also, the first amendment doesn’t restrict them from trespassing you.
You can say almost whatever you want , you just can’t do it wherever you want.
Time and place restrictions are permissible in certain circumstances but I think you’d have a hard time applying that in a court of law towards a town hall meeting during the public comment period.
Disturbing the peace laws exist. I’m sure whatever jurisdiction he’s in has laws that would cover kicking him out.
A tolerant society tolerates everything but intolerance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
You don’t even need to cite the paradox of tolerance. Explicit threats are already deemed not to be covered by the First Amendment. It’s pretty hard to argue that hate speech is not an explicit threat.
Its not even a paradox really. Tolerance is a social contract. If a party violates it through intolerance they are no longer covered by this mutual agreement.
Agreed, but I’m not sure what a better name for the concept would be and a lot of people really need to understand it.
I am so sick of assholes saying, “you lefties are supposed to be tolerant!” when called out on their bigotry.
People who say that confuse liberals with the left.
They also don’t understand what tolerance is.
I’d probably just rename it more descriptively: The Contract of Tolerance
I largely agree with this and in the context of the extremely broad conception of free speech under the Constitution it is an important critique.
However, I think we also need to be thoughtful and careful in how we define hate speech. I am worried that as this idea becomes more popular, some valid and even important speech might get inappropriately labeled as hate speech. A current example is critiques of Israeli military violence being labeled as antisemitic. If we ban hate speech, will it be used to silence those who speak out against similar atrocities? How do we keep the concept of hate speech narrowly defined to the speech that is most likely to cause physical harm?
