On alicublog, which remains one of my favorite blogs, Roy Edroso addressed the potential hate speech prosecution of Dutch kulturkampfer Geert Wilders in the same way he did the earlier legal complaint against Mark Steyn:

Hear, hear. Wilders is a wretched bigot, but here in the states we let them rave.

I didn’t respond before, bu it’s this kind of thing that pisses me off. In the US, we let them rave because we have a legal tradition protecting speech and a broad right to freedom of speech and press encoded in the Constitution. The Netherlands is not the United States. Neither is Canada, for that matter. Different nations have the right to their own legal traditions. If you want to argue that the specific American concept of freedom of speech is an inalienable right, do that; just be honest about what you’re doing.

I live in Oregon. We have an even stronger constitutional protection of free speech than the US Constitution. It’s so broadly interpreted that it’s been repeatedly applied by the state supreme court to regulations banning all-nude stripping. Other states may put their exotic dancers under the unfair yoke of “pasties” or “g-strings,” but in God’s own country, that 18-year-old has a right, enshrined in 150 years of glorious tradition, to display her unobscured genitals to drunk guys for money for as long as she damn well pleases. Other states don’t have that protection, and that’s why there’s so many strip clubs on the Oregon-Idaho border. Is Oregon right, and Idaho wrong? Is the federal interpretation of free speech right, and the Oregonian interpretation wrong?

Israel banned Meir Kahane’s Kach party and prevented him for standing for office for basically the same thing — openly campaigning for the persecution and exclusion of a large minority of his country’s citizens. I can’t remember the last time I heard a free-speechy liberal mourning Kahane’s persecution, and for good reason. The United States is large, and its race-warriors have generally either been marginal or in control of the reins of state. Hate speech has never been as dangerous here.

Have you seen Fitna? In the context of Wilders’ political stances and demands, and the current climate in the Netherlands, it can only be seen as incitatory — an attempt to depict Islam as incompatible with Western laws and ideals, and Muslims as ineligible for protection under those laws and ideals. Ultimately, whether Wilders has broken Dutch law is up to the Dutch people. Hate speech laws would be unconstitutional in the United States, and I oppose them completely. But while freedom of speech is an inalienable right, whether hate speech is as well is another question.

Oh, and Roy? Must you, must you quote someone who uses the word “dhimmitude” unironically?