Well, good afternoon. I’m just to get this information to you quickly. On Saturday, November 10th, at the Chinese Community Church in Chinatown, a group that I volunteer with called One Body will be hosting the fifth annual Night of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. We will have four excellent speakers from Syria, Burma, Nigeria, and China. So, if you want to put what you’ve heard today about International Religious Freedom and the persecuted Church into practice, we invite you to come join us at 7 o’clock next Saturday at the Chinese Community Church.

I want to thank the Institute on Religion and Democracy for being one of the supporters for that for several years. And I don’t know if Faith MacDonald is still here, but she’s been very involved. So, if you have more questions, please feel free to ask her. The topic today that I picked is global hate speech. As Travis mentioned, the temperature is rising not only in the United States but around the world. We see growing incivility, political violence against figures on both the left and the right. And I think this week, particularly with the tragic shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Eugene, Chestnut Hill, has brought the issue of tolerance to the forefront in many people’s minds.

Now, most of us want tolerance. Some people are calling for restrictions on speech because they think that is the way to make our society more tolerant. But can we have tolerance without free speech? The answer is no. It may seem paradoxical, but it is only by expressing our own ideas and hearing the ideas of others that we can have true tolerance. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and religion cannot coexist with a right not to be offended, which is what some people are proposing.

So today, I want to talk about it from three different perspectives. First, I’ll speak about it from a biblical perspective, and then from a human rights perspective, and then from the perspective of social violence, which I think is a national security interest. Censorship cannot resolve conflict; it will drive grievances to a subterranean place, only to eventually surface again. If governments recognize a right not to be offended, they will end up eventually violating freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and religion.

Silencing speech is at odds with our capacity as human beings to reason and to offer counter speech. Those who truly want tolerance must travel the path of freedom. So, I’m going to start with three Bible verses that have been personally important to me. Now, I’m not a theologian; I come from a family of several theologians, but I just chose these passages because they’ve been very helpful to me in my thinking. You could find support for free speech in natural law and the Enlightenment. Today, I’m just going to focus on these three.

In Isaiah chapter one, God says, “Come, let us reason together.” This verse establishes not just that we have the capacity to reason but that God desires to reason with us. It’s very interesting that in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it says, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” The foundation of the entire human rights movement is based on the idea of human dignity.

But when you look at Article 1, the two evidences cited for human dignity are our capacity, our endowment with reason and conscience. So, if we are rational beings, then we should have the right to use our reason, and the state has a duty to refrain from violating our freedom to use reason and to suppress ourselves according to our consciences. Both culture and law should respect these pre-political rights. The state should not violate our ability to use speech and to use our reason to make judgments about how to live our lives.

In a democracy, it’s essential that we have access to a broad range of ideas in order to make well-informed decisions about how to govern ourselves. But what if, in the exercise of our rights, we don’t operate in a spirit of brotherhood as the UDHR says we should? What if our speech is offensive to others? What if speech comes from a place of ill-will regarding offense to ourselves? I believe Proverbs 19 is significant. It says, “A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”

But regarding harm to others, Proverbs 31:8 calls us to “speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves, to speak up and judge fairly.” And this verse has been the most important verse in my career that inspired me to go into human rights and to become a lawyer — “to speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves.” When I apply that to this discussion about free speech, I’m speaking only of civil society. I think that as Christians, we have a call to speak up for those who may be attacked unfairly.

And I’m going to get to the legal response in a minute. God endowed us with the ability to reason, and He desires to reason with us. So, by extension, I believe we should try to reason with others. When we are offended, it’s to our glory and to God’s glory to overlook those offenses. And when others are attacked because of who they are, because of what they believe, we have the opportunity, and I believe we have the call to speak up for them, but not to shut down the speech of others. For us to be able to speak up for others, we must have the freedom to do that.

Now, I’m going to turn to the human rights perspective and talk about some of the global trends on hate speech. But first, let me just recognize that in the United States, we have a lot of issues right now. How many of you are in college and have seen firsthand efforts to limit speech, to censor speech? Anyone, raise your hands high so we can all see. Okay, so several of you. I don’t need to tell you about what’s happening in the U.S. or what’s happening on social media, but today, I want to focus on what I say on governments because I think that is where our primary focus should be.

From Islamabad to Brussels to Strasbourg, we see that there is pressure to limit speech in highly secular countries and in highly religious countries. In both cases, extreme elements of civil society are seeking to leverage the power of the government to gain power over society, to dominate others, and to compel conformity to their orthodoxies. In secular Western nations, it is conformity to an orthodoxy of political correctness on matters of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

In religious countries like India and Pakistan, it is to enforce the orthodoxy of a dominant religion — Hinduism, Sunni Islam. Advocates of hate speech and blasphemy laws claim they are doing so in the name of tolerance, but history shows that restrictions actually have the opposite effect. They foment social conflict. So, let me talk about Europe for a second. The trajectory in Europe is truly alarming. Today, hundreds of hate speech laws exist there. The European Court of Human Rights just ruled to uphold an Austrian court’s criminal conviction of a woman who held a seminar in which she questioned the morality of the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a young girl.

The court ruled that she had to pay the equivalent of five hundred and fifty US dollars or spend sixty days in jail for disparaging a religion. In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights held a Swedish court’s conviction of individuals who passed out leaflets at a school that questioned the morality of homosexual acts. In Belgium, a Catholic priest was prosecuted for saying in a newspaper interview that marriage is, by definition, a stable union between a man and a woman. In the United Kingdom, a Christian couple was prosecuted for declining to create a cake with the message supporting gay marriage.

They just won their lawsuit on grounds of compelled speech, which I think is arguably even a worse violation of human rights than censorship. Anti-gay bigotry does exist and should be condemned, but not supporting same-sex marriage is not anti-gay bigotry. It is impossible for governments to apply hate speech laws without violating the freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religion of citizens. It is inevitable that those who hold unpopular or controversial views will be punished and censored. The US has criticized these laws, and not only these egregious individual cases.

Now, I’m going to turn to religious blasphemy laws in highly religious countries. Hate speech goes by a different name — blasphemy. Whereas secular countries ban hate speech because it offends an individual’s ideas or their identity, blasphemy laws ban speech for causing offense to a deity or at least to the deity’s followers. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Pakistan took a step in the right direction when they overruled the conviction of a Catholic woman named Asia Bibi, who had been on death row for nine years for allegedly blaspheming the Prophet Mohammed.

Her case highlights the relationship between freedom and social conflict. Two government leaders, one a Muslim and one a Christian, both defended her freedom to speak, and both were assassinated for their courageous stance. And now, thousands of protesters are filling the streets of Pakistan calling for her death, and the blasphemy law that was used to prosecute her is still on the books. But the Prime Minister of Pakistan has gone even a step further to call for a global blasphemy law to be passed at the United Nations. He’s called upon the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to again introduce the defamation of religions resolution.

Now, that sounds like a very innocuous term, defamation of religions, but it is essentially a global blasphemy law. Historically, the United States has resisted international attempts to censor speech. First

historically, the United States has resisted international attempts to censor speech. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She said that any criticism of public or religious authorities might all too easily be described as incitement to hatred and consequently prohibited. That’s why when the U.S. signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, we took a reservation to Article 20 because it bans any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence.

The U.S. has also opposed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s attempts to pass the defamation of religions resolution at the United Nations. However, last spring, when the UN independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity called for every country in the world to adopt a hate speech law—specifically to hold religious leaders accountable for anything they say that is offensive to people who identify as LGBT—the United States stayed silent. The United States should firmly oppose any attempts in international law at the United Nations to censor speech, whether it comes from a religious actor or from a secular actor. It is intrinsically incompatible to have a right not to be offended and to have freedom of speech, religion, and conscience.

Now, I want to turn to the social complex that arises when hate speech laws and blasphemy laws are passed. There is no evidence that restrictions on speech actually curb the rise of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, or anti-gay bigotry in Europe or sectarianism and religion-related violence in India or Pakistan. The paradox of tolerance is that it can’t be reached through censorship. As the research of social scientists Brian Grim and Roger Finke has shown, government restrictions on religious freedom, which would include blasphemy laws and is closely related to freedom of speech, actually increase the likelihood of social conflict that can become violence.

Their comparison of a hundred different variables relating to 195 countries showed this close relationship between restrictions and broader religion-related violence, including terrorism and war. As Paul Coleman, the executive director of the Alliance Defending Freedom International, has pointed out, restrictions on speech in Europe during the Weimar Republic did nothing to curb the rise of Nazism, and similar restrictions in Yugoslavia did nothing to stop the rise of ultranationalism and the ensuing civil war. Today, unfortunately, anti-Semitism is skyrocketing in Europe, driving hundreds of Jews to leave Europe to immigrate to Israel. Censoring speech does not curb any of these disturbing trends; rather, it simply drives hatred and extremism underground, fueling more tension.

Finally, I want to turn to how the U.S. should respond. Our own jurisprudence on free speech has always been much more robust than Europe’s or the rest of the world’s. But the disturbing trends we’ve talked about show that our cultural and political commitments to free speech may be more tenuous than ever. We have always valued in America robust debate, and therefore, our jurisprudence has always followed the principle that we protect the speech that we hate. This has included allowing the burning of the American flag, pornography, and even videos of animal cruelty. It is a legal tradition that is uniquely American and historically bipartisan.

We draw the line at speech that incites others to imminent violence, that’s fraudulent, libelous, or slanderous. Since 1952, when a Supreme Court overturned a conviction based on a New York blasphemy law, blasphemy laws that are still on the books throughout the United States do not get enforced. But now, a new ideology threatens free speech in our country. In recent years, courts have increasingly elevated feelings of personal offense into a legal cause of action known as dignitary harm. In some cases, courts have ruled that dignitary harm can trump both free speech and freedom of religion.

In the Masterpiece Cakeshop case at the Supreme Court last year, the Supreme Court overruled a Colorado court’s decision that upheld dignitary harm over the free speech and freedom of religion arguments of Jack Phillips, the Colorado cake artist who declined to bake a cake endorsing same-sex marriage. The couple who filed the complaint against Jack Phillips were offered free cakes by several other bakeries in Colorado, so they could not claim that they suffered any material harm. Instead, they said that they felt humiliated and that this was dignitary harm. But as Professor Robert George of Princeton University and Sherif Girgis wrote, accepting that justification would shatter the bedrock principle that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds that idea offensive.

The Supreme Court did rule for Jack Phillips, but it did not resolve the conflict between dignitary harm and freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Dignitary harm threatens the core of America’s free speech jurisprudence. One of my colleagues at Heritage, Arthur Milikh, has written about two professors at the University of Alabama Law professors who have said that banning offensive speech is necessary to protect the dignity of minorities because it undermines their self-respect. Professor John Rawls has said that our self-respect normally depends on the respect of others unless we feel that our endeavors are honored by them. It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to maintain the conviction that our ends are worth advancing.

As Arthur has said, if the government adopts this assertion that our dignity and self-respect are impossible to achieve without the affirmation of others, those demands ultimately will override our rights of speech and conscience and our moral authority. Not only do these new theories of dignity empower governments to censor unpopular ideas and to quash reasonable disagreements, they also preclude persuasion. Our courts should not allow these new theories of dignitary harm to trump the First Amendment, not only because it’s illiberal but also because it’s unwise. Limiting speech is a terribly misguided way to engage with those who promote hatred and who are most likely to commit violence.

Arno Michaelis, a former white nationalist, wrote an op-ed in CNN last week that explains why. His editorial is entitled “The Fear Behind the Hate.” He wrote, “Fear has the capacity to destroy us. Everything I did back then was rooted in fear, as was every genocide in human history.” Referencing a social media post by the synagogue shooter which said, “I can’t stand by and watch my people get slaughtered,” Mike Alice wrote, “Note the intense fear in the shooter’s statement. He had convinced himself that his people were being slaughtered. If we want to persuade people who feel threatened not to commit violence, we must have avenues of dialogue with which to persuade them that they aren’t going to be slaughtered.”

They must have the freedom not only to voice their anger but also to express their fears, and they must have the moral authority to reassess their judgments. When children are young, we sometimes tell them, “Use your words.” We do that so that they won’t use their teeth and their fists. And we should apply the same principle to adults. We should allow them to express emotions like anger, sadness, and frustration. We should do this as individuals in society, and our law should not deny them the freedom to speak. The state should not cover their mouths with its hands, in a metaphorical sense.

Instead, we should use facts and logic to persuade those who live in fear that they needn’t. Nadine Strossen, the former head of the ACLU and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, says, “We must make use of our own free speech rights to raise our voices in ways that will actually counter either the underlying ideas that are conveyed in hateful speech or their potential adverse impact. Ultimately, each individual must make their own decisions about how to treat others.” As our colleague at Heritage, Dr. Kim Holmes, has written, enabling the state to coerce conformity to its views tramples the right of individuals to make that call on their own, and it undermines the moral authority of making the right decision.

If we want more people to treat others with dignity and with respect, we must defend their freedom of expression. Doing so might require us to control some natural impulses to silence them, and freedom might seem like a more difficult path than censorship. But what matters most about a path is where that path takes you. For those who truly want to reach the destination of tolerance, freedom is the only right choice. Thank you.

Mark, do you want me to take a question?

Hi, I’m Christine Brim, the Center for Policy Communications. Can you address the role of technology right now? There’s a kind of race to the bottom as we see Google happily censoring in China. And also the link through technology where censorship actually becomes a tool for individual surveillance and tracking. Therefore, because of the rating system in China, for example, another example of compelled speech where people say things to get points so that they’re not penalized by the state. The fact that that’s now spreading elsewhere in the world.

Yeah, I think technology is a huge area of discussion. I have chosen today mostly to focus on the laws that are passed by governments. It seems like right now in the U.S., a lot of the discussion about social media platforms is focusing on their biased censorship. Obviously, Google, Twitter, or Facebook, they’re private companies, right? So we sign user agreements, we know what their parameters are, and their guidelines. Sometimes they’re a little bit vague and they do use terms like hate speech. I think it’s a very serious issue for both civil society and for civil society, especially, to oppose the censorship of anybody, whether they’re conservative. I think a lot of it is happening to conservatives right now and to religious people who have conservative views.

I think on the government’s response to that, I think we need to be very thoughtful and very cautious. But I think one of my greatest concerns is empowering the government to pick and choose winners and losers. So just generally, I would say I have some hesitations about government getting too involved in telling the social media companies what to do in their user agreements. I think the situation you’re talking about in China is different though. I mean, my understanding is that it’s the government that is actually collecting all the data on people, getting these user scores, and I think that is just clearly a human rights abuse.

I’ve left you all speechless. No pun intended. Thank you.