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lunasun

(21,646 posts)
5. hate speech is seen as brave
Wed Dec 25, 2013, 12:31 PM
Dec 2013

hate and ignorance as “biblical"

Can one say anything?
US laws and interpretations
I thtink the last big ruling on hate speech

In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, (1992), the issue of freedom to express hatred arose again when a gang of white racists burned a cross in the front yard of a black family. The local ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota, criminalized such racist and hate-filled expressions and the teenager was charged thereunder. Scalia, writing for SCOTUS, held that the prohibition against hate speech was unconstitutional as it contravened the First Amendment. The Supreme Court struck down the ordinance. Scalia explicated the fighting words exception as follows: “The reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey.”[71] Because the hate speech ordinance was not concerned with the mode of expression, but with the content of expression, it was a violation of the freedom of speech. Thus, the Supreme Court embraced the idea that hate speech is permissible unless it will lead to imminent hate violence.[72]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech

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