Note: This massive wall of text is presented in case a poster cannot access the links.
In the news.....
NYC bans calling someone an ‘illegal alien’ of out hate
Excerpted....
A document shared on the
nyc.gov reads that, “It is illegal for a person’s employer, coworkers, or housing provider such as landlords to use derogatory or offensive terms to intimidate, humiliate, or degrade people, including by using the term “illegal alien,” where its use is intended to demean, humiliate, or offend another person.”
:
The City of New York shared news of this on Twitter, “BREAKING: New York City has made it illegal to threaten to call ICE based on a discriminatory motive or to tell someone “go back to your country.” Hate has no place here.”
It was reported that those who violate this new law can be fined up to $250,000 per offense. The City Hall’s Commission on Human Right released a 29- page directive about the new law.
The document reads, “Alien’ — used in many laws to refer to a ‘noncitizen’ person — is a term that may carry negative connotations and dehumanize immigrants, marking them as ‘other.”
And another section of the memo reads, “The use of certain language, including ‘illegal alien’ and ‘illegals,’ with the intent to demean, humiliate, or offend a person or persons constitutes discrimination.”
At the moment, four ongoing cases involve discrimination based on folks threatening to call to ICE in order to intimidate, harass, and threaten victims.
Carmelyn Malalis, the agency’s commissioner, told the New York Post that, “In the face of increasingly hostile national rhetoric, we will do everything in our power to make sure our treasured immigrant communities are able to live with dignity and respect, free of harassment and bias.”
And....
https://nypost.com/2019/09/26/city-bans-calling-someone-an-illegal-alien-out-of-hate/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blo...ds_illegal_alien_said_supposedly_in_hate.html
About the constitutionality of banning hate speech....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/
Excerpted...
I keep hearing about a supposed “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech,” or “When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam — or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens — as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans.
To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with “hate speech” in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for “fighting words” — face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isn’t limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (
R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible. (And, notwithstanding CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s
Tweet that “hate speech is excluded from protection,” and his later claims that by “hate speech” he means “fighting words,” the fighting words exception is not generally labeled a “hate speech” exception, and isn’t coextensive with any established definition of “hate speech” that I know of.)
The same is true of the other narrow exceptions, such as for true threats of illegal conduct or incitement intended to and likely to produce imminent illegal conduct (i.e., illegal conduct in the next few hours or maybe days, as opposed to some illegal conduct some time in the future). Indeed, threatening to kill someone because he’s black (or white), or intentionally inciting someone to a likely and immediate attack on someone because he’s Muslim (or Christian or Jewish), can be made a crime. But this isn’t because it’s “hate speech”; it’s because it’s illegal to make true threats and incite imminent crimes against anyone and for any reason, for instance because they are police officers or capitalists or just someone who is sleeping with the speaker’s ex-girlfriend.
The Supreme Court did, in
Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952), uphold a “group libel” law that outlawed statements that expose racial or religious groups to contempt or hatred, unless the speaker could show that the statements were true, and were said with “good motives” and for “justifiable ends.” But this too was treated by the Court as just a special case of a broader First Amendment exception — the one for libel generally. And
Beauharnais is widely understood to no longer be good law, given the Court’s restrictions on the libel exception. See
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) (rejecting the view that libel is categorically unprotected, and holding that the libel exception requires a showing that the libelous accusations be “of and concerning” a particular person);
Garrison v. Louisiana (1964) (generally rejecting the view that a defense of truth can be limited to speech that is said for “good motives” and for “justifiable ends”);
Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. v. Hepps (1986) (generally rejecting the view that the burden of proving truth can be placed on the defendant);
R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) (holding that singling bigoted speech is unconstitutional, even when that speech fits within a First Amendment exception);
Nuxoll ex rel. Nuxoll v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. # 204, 523 F.3d 668, 672 (7th Cir. 2008) (concluding that
Beauharnais is no longer good law);
Dworkin v. Hustler Magazine Inc., 867 F.2d 1188, 1200 (9th Cir. 1989) (likewise);
Am. Booksellers ***’n, Inc. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323, 331 n.3 (7th Cir. 1985) (likewise);
Collin v. Smith, 578 F.2d 1197, 1205 (7th Cir. 1978) (likewise);
Tollett v. United States, 485 F.2d 1087, 1094 n.14 (8th Cir. 1973) (likewise); Erwin Chemerinsky,
Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies 1043-45 (4th ed. 2011); Laurence Tribe,
Constitutional Law, §12-17, at 926; Toni M. Massaro,
Equality and Freedom of Expression: The Hate Speech Dilemma, 32 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 211, 219 (1991); Robert C. Post,
Cultural Heterogeneity and Law: Pornography, Blasphemy, and the First Amendment, 76 Calif. L. Rev. 297, 330-31 (1988).
Finally, “hostile environment harassment law” has sometimes been read as applying civil liability — or administrative discipline by universities — to allegedly bigoted speech in workplaces, universities, and places of public accommodation. There is a hot debate on whether those restrictions are indeed constitutional; they have generally been held unconstitutional when applied to universities, but decisions are mixed as to civil liability based on speech that creates hostile environments in workplaces (see
the pages linked to at this site for more information on the subject). But even when those restrictions have been upheld, they have been justified precisely on the rationale that they do not criminalize speech (or otherwise punish it) in society at large, but only apply to particular contexts, such as workplaces. None of them represent a “hate speech” exception, nor have they been defined in terms of “hate speech.”
For this very reason, “hate speech” also doesn’t have any fixed legal meaning under U.S. law. U.S. law has just never had occasion to define “hate speech” — any more than it has had occasion to define rudeness, evil ideas, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn but that does not constitute a legally relevant category.