By Harmony Grant, 14 Dec 06

Everybody, all together now: Iran’s Holocaust conference is bad, bad, bad! This is something that can get even Bill O’Reilly and Kofi Annan to beat the same drum. Hey, they’d probably march shoulder to shoulder in the same parade.

Lady Renouf of Britain hands the Iranian President a copy of the dramatic Zundel documentary, Setting the Record Straight.

But what should we be saying about Iran’s conference?

Whether you agree that questions should be raised about the Holocaust, we should defend the rights of everybody who wants to ask them, or write books or talk about them. O’Reilly and others worry about the threat to Western civilization posed by Muslim extremists. But in their concern, they themselves put one of our most important values at risk: freedom of speech.

In 1986, the Supreme Court severely restricted workplace speech with their definitions of an illegal "hostile work environment." Thousands of subsequent lawsuits compelled employers to enforce all kinds of rules about what could be said at work. Crude jokes and sexual come-ons weren’t the only kinds of speech banned from places of employment; Christians quickly learned to shut up, too, when they might have shared the gospel.

One company, for example, was indicted for "harassing" a Jewish employee by printing Christian-themed verses on its paychecks (David Bernstein, You Can’t Say That! p. 27). Courts refused to let employers use the first amendment as a defense against hostile environment charges. Employers who were leery of being sued were quick to write rules way broader than what the Supreme Court had actually demanded.

A major constitutional problem with hostile workplace laws, like hate laws, is that they discriminate based on viewpoint. "For example, hostile environment law potentially penalizes expression of the viewpoint that "women are stupid and incapable of being physicists," but not that "women are brilliant and make excellent physicists." (Bernstein, 31)

Both hate laws and workplace laws end up persecuting specific kinds of speech, based on the damage claimed by favored groups. This gives the government (meaning, whichever fallible, biased human beings are in charge) the power to decide whose feelings to protect and whose speech to silence. If you’ve read any George Orwell, you know this is not a good situation.

Employers’ quick compliance with speech laws was motivated by self-interest, of course, just like Google’s belly-up complicity with internet censorship in Germany and China. Google just deleted banned sites from their foreign search engines, without a whisper of protest. The censorship was never debated in the courts, nor were the offending site-makers able to defend themselves. Businesses can’t realistically be expected to do battle for things like freedom and justice.

But public opinionmakers should. If neocons like Bill O’Reilly really loved Western civilization, they’d use the Iran conference as a chance to stand up for freedom of speech, even for those whose speech we hate. They would challenge the federal hate laws that criminalize many kinds of speech, including Holocaust reductionism, in Europe, Australia, and Canada.

After all, the radical Muslim agenda that they fear is set against the very freedom of speech they’re failing to champion. Isn’t lack of freedom the very reason we don’t want to turn into a Muslim state? Arabs set fires in the streets after the publication of those Danish cartoons of Muhammed, and a third Yemeni editor is facing prosecution for republishing them. Totalitarian regimes require stitched-shut mouths, which is one reason Stalin was so quick to shoot all the intellectuals.

To save Western civilization, we need one of its most essential stays: the free and open exchange of ideas, including rotten ones. This is the only hope for our civilization. It’s our only hope because government can’t be trusted to create our social, political, or religious orthodoxies or to protect our interests. Freedom of dissent is one of the checks on power. If it weren’t for freedom of speech (and people who used it despite the cost) whites would still own slaves and England would still own the States.

Our founding fathers knew that the nature of power is to increase and to oppress. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison said one reason for the right to bear arms is that we may someday need to take back our freedoms by force, from a government grown large and despotic. He was comfortable with the image of armed patriots storming the streets, because he’d lived painfully through the need for such a revolution.

Today, we hardly guard our right to bear ideas, let alone bullets! You’d think the twentieth century would’ve taught us to be even more leery of government power than Madison was, but it seems we’ve forgotten the lessons of our own history.

Let’s try to remember these lessons. Try hard. When you get locked up for politically incorrect speech, you won’t be able to forget them.