Free speech

[paulpablo]

Just out of curiosity, does anyone here not believe that their should be freedom of speech and religious expression in our country?

Should the humiliation of Christians possibly be considered a hate-crime? Where do you draw the line and does no line take us down a slippery slope?


Love over tongue-lashing or na?[/i]

I'm skeptical of what use classifying any crime as a hate crime is, but humiliating a christian is not a hate crime just by itself.

If I think christian beliefs are bullshit for example and I want to express that then I should be able to even if it humiliates Christians.

Although if it was proven that I had a discussion with someone and I said "I want to humiliated these christians by causing them physical harm/vandalizing property/causing a public nuisance" Then that would just be me conspiring to commit a crime I suppose, in which case I'm guessing charges could be brought against me.

I think there's a common sense factor to what I personally believe in with regarding freedom of speech and it's admittedly very blurry.

like on a video I saw on youtube about a girl who was proud she broke her hand because she punched a guy in the face for making a joke about rape, at first I thought that sounded a bit harsh but then I found out the joke about rape consisted of a guy calling out to another drunk girl across the street, she ignored him, so he said to his friend something like "I'll take that cunt down an alley and rape the bitch, she won't even see it coming."

If I was with my friend and he made a joke like that and got punched in the face by a girl I wouldn't be protecting my friends freedom of speech, I'd probably laugh and congratulate the girl .

Me and my friends do make rape jokes though, and I mainly make them with girls I'm seeing, but they will be things like joking slightly about putting something in their drink and they know I'm joking about it, or I'll joke about taking advantage of them while drunk, on the other hand if I made sexual advances on a girl then she refused my advances and I then said to her something like "Listen you cunt I could just take you now and you couldn't stop me." In my personal opinion that's too serious, because that could easily be a serious threat and if a guy made that joke and got stabbed with a knife I'd completely be on the girls side because she couldn't have known it was a joke.

Plus there's a lot of prank shows on youtube now, where guys go into rough ghetto type areas and say rude things to people to try and get punched for camera, or in some instances just shout things at random people thru a megaphone to startle them, in those instances I'm definitely on the side of the people who punch them in the face, it's hard to see how they don't deserve it when they are literally asking for it.
It used to happen all the time in my work because one guy would constantly try and make me jump by shouting loud right behind me, and a lot of times primal instincts took over and I'd kick him or throw something at him fairly hard. We both found it funny though so there was no harm done. Except for the moment of stress I'd get by the shouting and the moment of pain he would get by being kicked.

But then just to make one more point, I don't think any joke is bad enough to kill someone over, in the cases where Muslims kill people over stuff that's drawn or written about them they aren't being threatened physically, or startled suddenly into an act of violence. And even if you do believe in Islam, Muhammad is a prophet of god, surely he can take care of his own problems.

I think that this is where the problem lies. Because if I believed that one man over a thousand years ago was more important than all my family members living or dead, and I loved him more than my own family, then I would want to hurt people who insulted him.
But then from my perspective, the more secular perspective, if a group of people go around arrogantly threatening people with death everytime they're offended by what someone has to say about this man, then they deserve even more criticism because going around killing people, or threatening to kill people if they say certain things isn't acceptable.