‘Dehumanizing’ Speech Is Still Free Speech

Once again, Leftists are trying to change the meaning of words to support their goals

If you’re going to ask a conservative which predominantly leftist idea is the greatest threat to our nation’s culture of free speech, I’d expect that they’d immediately answer with “speech is violence.” It’s an understandable response. After all, “speech is violence” is not only the most dramatic claim, it’s a claim that has occasionally justified and rationalized actual violence — including on campus.

But there’s another claim, one that’s slightly less lurid and thus somewhat easier to justify. It applies in the most emotionally fraught debates about race, sexuality, and gender, and it goes something like this: No person should be required to “debate” his right to exist. Free speech is fine, but “dehumanizing” speech is something else entirely.

For example, if you argue that a man cannot get pregnant, you are “erasing” trans people. If you argue that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, then you are “dehumanizing” gay Americans. To take another example, as Jesse Singal points out in his invaluable newsletter, campus activists once tried to deny Heather Mac Donald a platform to critique Black Lives Matter by arguing that “if engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist.”

It’s time to recognize the American culture war for what it is — a religious dispute — and incorporate it into America’s existing religious pluralism. A Christian no more “dehumanizes” a gay man when he believes in traditional sexual morality than a gay man “dehumanizes” a Christian for believing that the theology he’s based his entire life upon is nothing but an ancient fiction. A proposed limit to freedom of conscience is no more “dehumanizing” than a proposed limit to the reach of a public-accommodation statute.

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