This is exactly the kind of situation I was talking about in
my posts about Free Speech on March 12 and March 17. The group (The American Freedom Defense Initiative) that hosted the Prophet Muhammad cartoon
contest in Dallas was within their legal rights to do this. Free Speech covers this quite easily. They should not be subject to criminal prosecution
or civil penalties. I would have said
that they should be billed for all of the extra police work they have caused,
but the 40 officers serving as security guards were already paid for by the
group.
On the other hand, legal is not the only criterion that they
should have used when setting this up, or that we should use when evaluating
their choices. The next criterion is
ethical speech. Speech that is
intentionally designed to insult without a strong and valuable justification is
not ethical. I wish that instead of a
drive by shooting, there was a huge throng of protesters condemning the group,
the contest and its content. The caterer
could have boycotted selling them any food.
The sign company could have refused to make their signage. The AV team could have refused to set up
their audiovisual tech. As I said in the
previous post, the legal right to Free Speech does not include the legal
requirement to do business with you. Not
only would this have been the right thing to do, but it would have prevented
the shooting as a nice side effect. I also
wish the building management that rented the space to the group for this event had
thought better of it, but I also suspect that they had an agenda also. Although
I don’t know what that might be, so it is just speculation.
Finally, we have practical speech. I have a feeling that the group intended for
exactly this outcome. It instigates
Islamaphobia and shows that the “problem has reached our shores.” But the rest of us should be practical
too. Just as the group is promoting
their legal rights to this speech, we should be promoting the unethical dimension
and the fact that it is impractical for everyone except the haters.