Arizona: We don’t get irony here

Measure backs ‘American values’ in state schools
Arizona schools whose courses “denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization” could lose state funding under the terms of legislation approved Wednesday by a House panel.

SB1108 also would bar teaching practices that “overtly encourage dissent” from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance. Schools would have to surrender teaching materials to the state superintendent of public instruction, who could withhold state aid from districts that broke the law.

So, is it just me, or is a law that bans the encouragement of dissent, or disagreement with traditional values of Western civilization, not kind of COMPLETELY COUNTER to those values? Isn’t part of the whole point of free speech that it is explicitly the freedom of unpopular speech.

This is in the context of governmental controls on hate speech, a topic I was recently debating online, so let me quote myself:

Whenever there’s a question of establishing limits on individual rights, you better approach that with a very jaundiced eye exactly because you are giving power to government that can so very easily be misused. And when you do acknowledge a need to put these limits in place, you definitely need to do so with a system of checks and balances, to limit the capability to misuse the power.

Hand-in-hand with this goes the idea that it’s better to mock than outlaw, that the best way to deal with the hatemongers and the demagogues is to just laugh derisively at them and then teach the truth. Outlawing them limits our ability to mock them in the open social conversation, and also grants them a kind of respectability that they don’t deserve–it makes them look like we think they are dangerous rather than just risible. Rush Limbaugh or Ernst Zundel, the response is the same: give them the mocking they deserve and speak the truth.

(A bleary area for me: where does free speech for teachers extend to? I’m pretty sure I don’t want some crazy Holocaust-denier teaching my kid history. How do we balance the additional authority that inheres in that kind of position with responsibility?)

Also, a key component is that there’s a distinction between an idea and an action: the government has no right to intervene in my speech, association, communication, or thought unless they present an imminent danger to someone else. This is not the “danger of making them uncomfortable” threshold, or the “danger of spreading an evil idea” threshold, this is the “my right to swing my arm stops at your nose” threshold. Maliciously yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre where there’s a decent and easily forseeable consequence of harm to someone is probably a crime–but I wouldn’t support a law that automatically made it so because I want that sort of thing to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis, with legislated exceptions that have to be evaluated by both jurists and juries.

Yes, I understand that this view of rights, and the limitations thereof is substantively more American than Canadian, what with our focus on collective rights and “peace, order, and good government” rather than “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Well, guess what? As much as I will mock the Americans for a lot of things, I think they’re righter on this than we are.