Brazil is Wrong To Imprison Homophobes
Currents
A great victory has been won for the LGBT community in Brazil — or so we are told. The Brazilian Supreme Court ruled in August that the use of homophobic slurs and “hate speech” are now crimes punishable by prison sentences ranging from two to five years. Brazil, which had previously criminalized other forms of hate speech, has joined the growing list of over 30 nations in which expressing certain views considered hateful could land someone in jail. News of this ruling has been cheered on by the usual suspects in LGBT and left-leaning media, but this isn’t the great leap forward in progress its supporters imagine. Banning hate speech on pain of imprisonment isn’t just a misguided and dangerously reckless step that moves society backward. It’s also one that will end up hurting LGBT people in the long run.
No decent person, it goes without saying, is in favor of bigotry or the use of homophobic slurs directed at other people. But the freedom of speech, as a human right, has never been “the right to voice approved opinions.” Such speech needs no protection, and what is “approved” is both subjective and constantly changing. The value of free speech is in protecting the speech we disapprove of, thereby protecting all speech, including our own. As Noam Chomsky once said, “If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
By eroding the foundations of free speech in service of protecting the LGBT community, Brazil — along with the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, and every other country with similar laws — is playing a perilous game. They are constructing a zero-sum dichotomy where LGBT rights and free speech are mutually exclusive concepts that cannot coexist, where protecting LGBT people must come at the cost of free speech. From the standpoint of anyone who has the best interests of the LGBT community at heart, asking people to choose between LGBT rights and free speech is an incredible strategic blunder. Free speech is not only fully compatible with LGBT rights — it’s what helped enable those rights to begin with!
It was generations of activism, speeches, protests, marches, op-eds, books, talks, and conversations that led to equal rights, anti-discrimination laws, same-sex marriage, and a profound change in culture. None of that could have been possible if the people involved were not free to speak their minds and voice opinions that were, at the time, very much not approved of. Without free speech, there is no LGBT movement, no community, no Pride, and no rights. Think long and hard before deciding that this is worth throwing away in order to slap bigots with more punitive forms of retribution.
I spoke with Eli Vieira, a Brazilian biologist and journalist who is also a gay man. He recounted a time in his closeted youth when a family member, in a fit of mania, screamed that he was a “veado” (Portuguese for “deer”, and a homophobic slur in Brazillian culture akin to “faggot” in the Anglosphere) at the top of her lungs.
“My father, who didn't know that I was gay at the time, was present,” Eli Said. As painful as that experience was, he still loves his family, and they him. “If such expression had been criminalized in Brazil back then, this would have caused me much more distress than my relative ever could. To see her imprisoned for calling me ‘veado’ would have caused untold harm to her mental health and mine.”
Suppressing hateful speech does not, of course, actually eradicate the sentiments behind them. State power can and must be used to safeguard people’s most fundamental rights, such as equality before the law, protection from physical danger, and freedom from discrimination in housing or employment. But while laws may alter behavior, hearts and minds are not changed by government decree, and attempting to police the thoughts of the public through courts or legislatures is a treacherous road to go down. Criminalizing anti-LGBT expression will ultimately serve not to get rid of homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and the like, but to force them underground and away from the public eye, where they will fester in darkness, fueled by a narrative of victimization. And for what? Anti-LGBT bigotry has already been declining across the world, as measured both by opinion polling and legal rights. Persuasion works. Coercion doesn’t. We know this.
Graph shows the rising acceptance rates of homosexuality by people in various countries around the world. Source: Pew Research
Freedoms are always easier to take away than they are to establish. It is tempting, when we hold power, to create authoritarian tools for imposing our will and agenda on others. What happens, however, when our side no longer occupies the halls of power? What happens when our successor, whose politics may be diametrically opposite, picks up these tools and begins using them to advance their own ambitions? We must be prepared to see every governmental or institutional power we create eventually wielded against us by our political or ideological adversaries. And providing the state with the ability to jail citizens for voicing verboten opinions is a potent tool indeed.
Frederick Douglass once said, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power.” Douglass, a former slave fighting for abolition in a nation where legal slavery still existed, knew a thing or two about tyranny. He also knew a thing or two about history. Free speech is the keystone right upon which all others depend. Weakening speech rights today arms our persecutors of tomorrow.
It has become increasingly common to hear people in leftist political circles equate the very idea of freedom of speech with “right-wing dog whistles” and “hate speech.” This indicates not only an ignorance about how societies flourish but a lack of principles. And a lack of principles is, at bottom, a lack of discipline. It’s the inability to see past the short-term gains to the farther-spanning implications and precedents down the road. Now is the time not for chest-pounding but for foresight and liberal principles. If we fail this political marshmallow test and trade the immediate gratification of seeing our opponents jailed in exchange for the deterioration of our most fundamental rights, we sow the seeds of our own destruction. If high-minded principles don’t move you, what about your sense of self-preservation?
Published Sep 11, 2023
