Rowling’s challenge clears things up for us all
Hopefully it will all calm down and we can go back to sniping at each other, free from fear of arrest
Scotland’s new Hate Crime laws came into being on Monday, and brought with them a tidal wave of outrage.
Not least was JK Rowling, who I was delighted to feature on our front page on Tuesday, "daring" the police to arrest her. Her refusal to back down in the face of intimidation, including rape and death threats, and now to a change in the law, shows not only how brave she is but also how strongly she feels about this subject.
I refuse to believe that she is a bigot. Her written works repeatedly champion the underdog. The problem is that by giving rights to transgender people, the law is taking away some of the hard-fought rights that women have gained, very slowly and painfully, over several centuries. Giving rights to one subsection of society by taking away rights from another can't be a good thing.
While the new laws cover a wide range of potential victims of hatred (although women are conspicuous by their absence), the most contentious group is people with a transgender identity, and whether biological ideology is a hate crime or a matter of opinion that can be openly discussed.
Ms Rowling has done us all a huge favour, including those who despise her, by challenging the laws on Day One, and receiving a very quick response from Police Scotland. They have ruled that she has done nothing illegal and that her comments won't even be recorded as a noncrime hate incident – whatever that is... we're still trying to get to the bottom of that one.
So this has cleared things up very quickly – free speech is not affected by this law. Reasoned arguments, however flawed some might feel they are, do not count as stirring up hatred.
Hopefully it will all calm down and we can go back to sniping at each other, free from fear of arrest. While words can be very powerful and cut us to the core, it is vitally important that we retain the right to say them. Debate is what moves the world along. Challenging the norms is key to finding solutions to problems and – hopefully – creating a fairer society. Just because someone is saying something you fundamentally disagree with doesn't make it wrong or irrelevant.