Many will be saying "What the hell took so long!?" now that a Human Rights complaint for Hate Speech has been filed against Free Dominion. Apparently someone saw some thread on FD that they deemed as hateful, took it to the Government and now the wheels are in motion for I guess a fine(?) against the site's owners. Ooooh nooo. Big mistake.I think it's a load, and I might add one that makes liberals look like the friggin Thought Police the right-wingers accuse us of being. As chock fulla nuts as FD is, what in the world is someone expecting to see when they go there: a bunch of people posting "Kumbaya" verses? Of course not, they're wingnuts and FD is their message board, so anyone going there can expect to see the usual wingnuttery, which unfortunately may be tinged with racism, homophobia, and misogyny. I'm not saying it's good, but it's their site and that's the way they roll, so forewarned is forearmed. I've been known to screencap a couple of FD posts that I found offensive or idiotic and post about them here, but complain to the government? Not a chance, that's out of line and really, quite uneccessary.
This reminds me of last month's dust-up over a fly-buzzed pile of racist excrement RightGirl posted on her blog -- yes, it was reprehensible, but on her blog it's her right to say what she pleases. Other bloggers can show their displeasure (or not) by de-linking or, in RG's case, asking the Canadian Embassy to stop linking to another site she runs. Surely we can police ourselves.
In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to be concerned about hate speech. But it's an imperfect world, and there will always be a minority of people spewing varying thicknesses of bile; the FD-ers of the world are the least of them. Forcing them underground would only divide people further and make the real haters that much harder to isolate. And while silencing hateful comments might seem like a good thing at first blush, isn't it better to know who's making them? The leveling of something as serious as a hate speech complaint against a site like FD (where nobody says anything you won't find on most hard-right blogs) only trivializes truly, dangerously, actionably hateful speech.
So as I write this I'm shocked and awed to say I'm on Freak Dom's side on this particular issue. I hope they emerge unscathed and continue on as a place where nutty conservatives can go to play (and lefties can go to be, in turns, entertained and offended, by wingnuttery at its finest).
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