Tag: Free Speech

Liked Israel Folau’s sacking isn’t the end of this tricky story (ABC News)

Sport is to be commended for striving to uphold the best values of a modern society, but what happens when those values clash — the human right of sexual orientation versus the human right to freedom of religion?

Marginalia

Terminating Folau’s contract will not make this issue go away.

The Religious Freedom Review found that while there was a vast amount of public interest around these issues it was in no way matched by the number of formal complaints, “which shows that discrimination on the basis of religion is a little-used ground of complaint, as is discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and related attributes by religious bodies”.

This may be sport’s first legal test case pitting religious freedoms against the freedom of sexual preference.

Liked An Avalanche of Speech Can Bury Democracy (POLITICO Magazine)

It’s not speech per se that allows democracies to function, but the ability to agree—eventually, at least some of the time—on what is true, what is important and what serves the public good. This doesn’t mean everyone must agree on every fact, or that our priorities are necessarily uniform. But democracy can’t operate completely unmoored from a common ground, and certainly not in a sea of distractions.

via Mike Caulfield
Replied to Too Long; Didn’t Read #161 (W. Ian O’Byrne)

This raises broader questions about hate speech, freedom of speech, and rights online. I hinted at some of the questions I’ve been having about this topic several months ago in TL;DR. Should there be a “terms of service” for freedom of speech? Also, should we require that tech companies be the ones to dictate and enforce these freedoms. I’m still not sure.

Ian, this is such a challenging situation. People like Quinn Norton argue for engagement, while others argue that bigotry should be banned. I think that my initial response is to ban the liars and bigots, but the conundrum that was pointed out to me recently is that if you deny the voice of a particular few they will most likely find their own space somewhere else.

I found this podcast on ‘free speech’ intriguing:

It is always more complicated than we want it to be I guess.