I don’t follow the news much, but I have been paying just a bit of attention to the British Columbia Human Rights Commission’s tribunal to determine whether Mark Steyn’s writing is in violation of their hate crime laws. I like Mark Steyn. He is both very perceptive and very funny, and is willing to say things that other people won’t say. I like him particularly because one of his central themes is also a deep concern of mine: the spinelessness of people in the West today. Mark Steyn has correctly observed that people in the west today are mainly a lot of pampered, chicken-hearted wimps, which fact explains much about the political agendas of liberals. But this isn’t something most people like to hear about themselves, so unsurprisingly the Canadians now want to shut him up. It’s an important moment for them, though they themselves might not fully appreciate it. It may be a watershed case for determining how much control the Human Rights Commissions will have over Canadian speech.

There seems to be a real possibility that Mark Steyn’s writings will be banned in Canada sometime in the near future. That is ridiculous, and if it happens will certainly be to Canada’s shame. Mark Steyn is acerbic, but he isn’t a hate-monger; I have little doubt that the very reason he offends people so much is because he makes so much sense. I’m not going to write a post defending Mark Steyn, however. I assume in this crowd that that would be rather gratuitous. In any case, there’s very little chance that Steyn’s work will be banned anytime soon in my country, but I did think it might be interesting to reflect more generally on the topic of free speech, and what traditional Catholics should think about it.

I might begin by saying this. I don’t really see a Catholic way to maintain that people have a pre-institutional right to free speech. I avoid rights-talk in general, actually, having observed that “rights” became a central part of ethical discourse only within the last few centuries, and only among people with a basically Kantian understanding of the human good. For a Christian, the way to be good and to make others good is not by going around trying to discover the nature of these mysterious entitlements called “rights.” Rather, we should try to understand the nature of man more deeply, and then to live (or help others live) in such a way as to foster the virtues.

Why, given those aims, would we accept that there is an inalienable right to free speech? It is obvious that some kinds of speech are inimical to the fostering of virtue. It doesn’t follow, obviously, that all vicious speech should be regulated by law — there could certainly be occasions when a person’s moral development is better served by not coercing him into choosing the more virtuous way. Nonetheless, it seems likely that there will be occasions when society would be better served by certain regulations in speech. Blasphemy, and the preaching of seductive heresies, are two of the most obvious examples of kinds of speech that would plausibly be regulated in a well-ordered Christian society.

Obviously much more could be said about this; the question brings us into that troubling tangle of questions raised by the Church’s apparent shift in her teachings in the encyclical Dignitatis Humanae. Others are free to say more about this in the comment boxes if they wish, but I’ll leave things with that basic outline of why I cannot agree to regard free speech for all as an absolute demand of justice. Moving to a more pragmatic level, however, it seems perfectly clear that a well-ordered Christian society is a pretty distant dream for most of us alive today. There really isn’t much we can do to transform the modern democratic state into a Catholic theocracy. The question becomes: how ought we to behave within a less-than-ideal political system? Those aspects of it that are clearly evil (for example, laws protecting abortion as a “right”) should of course be opposed. There is another category, however, that is more complicated: laws that have their basis at least partially in philosophical ideas that we do not accept, but that work to our advantage pragmatically.

It seems to me that the laws protecting speech are probably of this kind. I don’t subscribe to the idea that “freedom” means doing whatever I want to do and saying what I want to say. Real freedom is freedom from sin; it is virtue and truth, not the absence of restriction, that really set us free. However, the state can only be an agent for instilling virtue to the extent that the state understands virtue. It can teach only as much truth as it knows. And in the modern democratic state, we can’t expect too terribly much — we will inevitably be choosing the lesser of evils. With that in mind, a strong commitment to preserving civil liberties seems mainly to be in our interests as Catholics. Most especially, protections of speech and religious liberty are going to be largely in our interest.

Mark Steyn’s trial illustrates this very well. In his writing, he frequently makes the point (mostly quite a reasonable one, though he does undeniably have a flair for hyperbole) that the Islamic world is a danger to us, and will be increasingly more of a danger so long as our culture (and especially our birthrates) continue to decline. For these views, expressed in what is obviously an editorial style, he is charged with inciting hatred against a religious group… which is now a crime in Canada. At the trial, websites (including Catholic Answers!) were printed out as proof that hateful language had been inspired by Steyn’s writings. If angry comments on websites count as evidence of hate speech, it boggles the mind to think how many Christianophobes Canada must be harboring! Which is largely the point. Our beliefs as Catholics are highly, err, countercultural these days. Some of them (most obviously teachings on homosexuality, but others too) might easily be classified as “hate speech” in the current climate, even when expressed in the most civil and compassionate of language. And the Catholic church is certainly among the most socially acceptable targets for abuse in the Western world. Some of us might be okay with the idea of restricting speech in theory but in practice, we wouldn’t like the way speech was restricted if it started happening here. Traditional Catholics are likely to be among the biggest losers if the commitment to protecting speech and religion should weaken in the West. Of course, this particular trial is taking place in Canada; I don’t think we’re going to see anything quite like that in the United States just yet. But even for Americans, it’s worth thinking about this. Life could get a lot worse for American Catholics. For pragmatic reasons, at least, we may be well-advised to be supportive of civil rights.

At the same time, there are legitimate questions to be asked about the degree to which we can support this agenda. That’s not to say that I would want to regulate almost any of what gets cited as “hate speech” today. I tend to agree with Mark Steyn that it’s better to let the white supremacist sit in his basement and keep his offensive blog for the six people who actually read it, rather than free the state’s hands for enforcing whatever it might determine to be “orthodox” at the present time. On the other hand, there might be times when acts of speech simply aren’t tolerable to us; even if we don’t actively seek legal redress, we might feel compelled to fight back in whatever way we can. A case that comes to mind for me is something that happened at Cornell a few years back, when a “progressive Catholic” club on campus started putting up inflammatory posters advertising their meetings. Some were kind of obnoxious, but basically fine — protesting the Iraq war, the death penalty, capitalism, etc. — but one or two were quite offensive, directly attacking the Church’s moral teachings on homosexuality, birth control and abortion. The most egregious one — and I hesitate even to repeat this, because it makes me furious just remembering it — declared that “Even Mary Had a Choice.” I tore those posters down wherever I saw them.

Now, okay, I would hardly have asked that the members of this club be arrested for their foul speech, if only because that obviously would never happen. I don’t think any of us even applied to Cornell to do anything about it. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have agreed to stop tearing the posters down for the sake of “free speech”, nor would I ever have apologized to the club for sabotaging their publicity efforts. Picturing the same thing on a larger scale — say, a blasphemous billboard or mural put in a prominent public place — it seems easily possible that a good traditional Catholic might feel morally obligated to deface property or otherwise deliberately squelch the speech of others. I’d like for countries like America to be safe places where Catholicism can grow and spread, but obviously I don’t want to purchase the safety at the expense of the faith. So what kind of compromise could we strike, in good conscience, with our modernist compatriots? How ought traditional Catholics to treat this question?