Back to Black
We must defend the right to offend even if comments seem stupid or offensive.
Iwas trawling through the store at one of my favourite local attractions, the Newseum news media museum, when a fridge magnet caught my eye. “Freedom of speech is not a licence to be stupid,” it read.
The quote was attributed to the ever-eloquent Anonymous, who, over generations, has had a lot to say on a great many topics. But in this case, Anonymous is wrong. Freedom of speech is a license to be stupid. And irresponsible. And even incorrect.
It seems rather a waste of a good freedom to use it that way, but that’s freedom for you. Gay Welsh rugby referee Nigel Owens has suggested Wallabies player Israel Folau should have kept to himself his view that gay people who did not repent would go to hell. But Folau was honestly answering a question he was asked in a public forum. That is permissible.
As someone who does not believe that hell exists – if you do not count being caught in peak-hour traffic on the Capital Beltway – I do not understand the fuss. Believers, I assume, would say it is God, not
Folau, who gets to put the sorting hat on people come Judgment Day. No one is going to hell because of Folau.
On so many levels his comment was not worth the attention it attracted. Here in the US, there has been a great outcry about the rapper Kanye West’s pronouncement that slavery was a choice. This, to me, is far more offensive than Folau’s comment, but West is equally entitled to say it.
There is a mass of well-documented and irrefutable evidence that slavery was a system enforced with unimaginable cruelty and brutality. However, if West believes the victims had a choice, then the rest of us are free to judge his ignorance. We can say so because freedom of speech is for all of us. Protecting that right is a shared responsibility, too.
New Zealand is no stranger to trade disputes, but they are usually about butter and milk powder, because other countries want to protect their farmers from efficient Kiwi producers.
New Zealand’s aluminium production would not, you would think, strike terror into the world’s largest economy. It is therefore disappointing and perplexing that the US has chosen to exempt other allies, but not New Zealand, from new tariffs on imported steel and aluminium.
US President Donald Trump is inclined to see things as black and white when almost everything in public policy is a shade of grey. He divides the world up in his mind. There is America First, allies second and “shithole countries” third.
It would be surprising if he thought New Zealand was in the third tier, but under this administration nothing can be taken for granted. Perhaps the decision on which countries should have tariffs imposed on them was based on one of those world maps that missed out New Zealand. Trump and his officials may have looked across the map, got down to Australia in the bottom right-hand corner, tick, then the map ended.
Or, possibly, New Zealand was there but they thought it was part of Australia. Well, there have been a lot of cuts in the State Department recently. The decision is all the more galling coming from a country that cannot even pronounce – or spell – aluminium correctly, but so be it.
Somehow, New Zealand counts as an ally that US governments can dial up when they want support for ill-judged forays into the Middle East, but not one worthy of exemptions from tariffs.
The NZ Government should remember that the next time Washington calls.
Believers, I presume, would say it is God, not Folau, who gets to put the sorting hat on people come Judgement Day.