touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
Laws against hate speech protect and fortify the ideological worldview of those who enforce them—and here I don’t mean cops, but the politicians, the law profs, the prosecutors, the judges, and (most importantly) the media elites who beam the spotlight of their antagonism on some group they find noxious while giving others a pass. What makes hate speech a crime is not what the perp actually does or intends to do, but what the victim claims to feel—and de facto, only certain groups are accredited as victim groups. . . . For Christians, hate speech laws are a lose-lose proposition. We have excellent reasons to doubt the elites will accord us victim status, and excellent reasons to believe the same elites will find crimes in our ordinary evangelical discourse.
—Paul Mankowski, S.J.
Diogenes Unveiled, ed. P. Lawler (Ignatius, 2022)
— Politics — Commonplaces #182 — Sept/Oct 2023 —
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