 [American Thinker] As a college student, I spent a wonderful year in Leeds, England, a rugged British town in Yorkshire. Unlike England’s south, which had an international feel, Leeds felt untouched by that trend. Now, though, Leeds has a distinctly Soviet or Maoist feel. Or, in homage to one of England’s greatest writers, an Orwellian feel. At least, that’s the takeaway from a horrific video that shows a terrified autistic girl being arrested by seven officers. Her crime: Saying that a butch-looking female police officer reminded the girl of her lesbian grandmother.
You’ll need a bit of historic and legal context to understand what’s happening in the video: It was England that gave our Founders the idea that free speech is essential for a free nation. The English Bill of Rights, which Parliament enacted in 1689, held that "it is the right of subjects to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal." There’s the genesis for our First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech..."
However, the same Revolution that gave Americans a much broader speech right than existed in Britain actually destroyed free speech in the mother country. That’s because, when the colonists began to speak freely against the draconian laws that Parliament imposed on them, Parliament announced that the Bill of Rights of 1689 did not apply to it; it applied only to the king. That meant that there were no limitations on Parliament’s ability to attack speech.
Despite Parliament’s 18th-century renunciation of free speech, the tradition nevertheless persisted in England for a long time, right until leftists really got their talons into the British government. Now, England has "hate speech laws" that make it a criminal offense to engage in speech that the government dislikes.
In 1986, England made it a felony, punishable by up to seven years in prison, to make negative remarks about race that were intended to or likely would stir up racial hatred.
In 2006, England made it a felony to do anything that could be perceived as "stir[ring] up religious hatred." The law was a muddy mess that tried to allow members of one faith to attack another faith’s doctrine and to say one disliked that faith, as well as to advocate for one's own faith. The real kicker to that law, though, came in 2008, when the act was amended to make it illegal to incite hatred on the ground of sexual orientation. In 2013, another act silenced any criticism of same-sex marriage.
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