The Free Speech Union still doesn't understand free speech. For all its good work, it remains ignorant of the very foundation of their subject.
Over the summer, a woman was barred from New World Otaki for wearing a T-shirt expressing an opinion that reportedly upset a staff member, and then allegedly engaging in a shouting match with shop staff.
The Free Speech Union leapt into action in support of the woman and her T-shirt, saying in an Open Letter to the shop owner that they were "concerned" at the store's actions. "Customers may not be entitled to repeatedly share their views with a store's employees," says the Free Speech Union, "but employees and businesses do not have the right to have to have customers banned from their store simply on the ground of their person views."
This is exactly wrong.
Businesses have the moral right to ban customers for any reason they damn well choose. Your place: your rules. Just as anyone else has the right to criticise that, if they damn well choose to.
That's what free speech looks like. Understand? Because the Free Speech Union still doesn't.
"We are considering legal advice on this matter," threatens the mis-named Free Speech Union however, exhibiting a complete unawareness of how free speech works.
The right way to protest the decision is to protest the decision, i.e., to exercise your own free speech. Not to threaten them with lawyers. Not to insist on telling a shop owner what they may or may not do on their own property. Criticise away, and boycott if you wish. But start calling in the thugs and you've lost my support altogether.
You'd think an organisation said to promote free speech would understand this.
That they still don't after several years of having it pointed out to them is embarrassing.
4 comments:
Absolutely.
Hmmm... Since it's her 20th anniversary of blogging, US Law Professor Ann Althouse has posted about and listed a bunch of favourite posts that commentators had picked a couple of days earlier. One of them was this 2006 where she responded to an attack on her by Reason Magazine's Ron Bailey about a liberterian conference she'd attended earlier that year.
You may find it interesting given that the biggest fight is about the whole question of state vs private intervention into the matter of depriving people of their civil rights, specifically in the case of the US 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Here's the post where I take on Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine.
I was rather struck by this comment of hers:
Someone asserted that the free market would solve the problem better than government regulation. I said that the restaurant in the case about the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in fact made more money by seating only white customers and serving take-out to black people. One other person at the table agreed, but the point was pushed past. It didn't fit the abstraction. I thought the failure to deal with this point was very damaging to the credibility of what we were reading and talking about.
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As I understood Meyer's argument, he believed that preserving federalism as bulwark [sic] against the growth of central government power was more important to him than vindicating the rights of black Americans.
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Big of him, huh? He really believed his principles, so deeply that black people were just going to have to suffer for his beliefs. What a guy!
Absolutely. The FSU needs a lecture or two in philosophy around free speech and property rights, it isn't that difficult.
Precisely.
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