Scotland’s Next Farcical Frontier

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, April 01, 2024

 

Buried within the BBC’s report on Scotland’s execrable new “hate crime” law is this little nugget of joy:

 

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.

 

The law does not protect women as a group from hatred.

 

The Scottish government is expected to include this later in a separate misogyny law.

 

Am I alone in finding this last line hilarious? I am, of course, vehemently opposed to all “hate crime” laws, because, like the Supreme Court, I think that governments should superintend speech that is inextricably tied to behavior rather than speech that reflects certain viewpoints. But, even for those who disagree, “women as a group” is a laughably broad category. What’s the intellectual justification here? “Women” are not an individual who is being targeted by a mob. They’re not a minority. They’re not even mathematically oppressable in a democratic system such as Scotland’s. They’re literally half the population. How, pray, is protecting them from mean words supposed to work in practice?

 

The Scottish government’s “Working Group on Misogyny and Criminal Justice” recommends that the country “create a new offence of Stirring Up Hatred Against Women and Girls.” Where’s the threshold, I wonder? Does observational humor count? If so, pretty much every comedian is going to prison. What about drunk talk? If some guy at a bar in Scotland has a few too many beers and says, “You know who I don’t like? Women, that’s who. And not just my ex-wife, mind you. I’m talking about the whole lot of them — including the girls.” Do the police break down the door? Or does one perhaps have to formalize one’s misogyny in book form? Harlots of Aberdeen: Why Everything Women Are Is Ghastly, And What You Can Do About It — out now in paperback, where all disreputable books are sold.

 

I often tell Americans that Britain is an interesting place when it comes to free speech because the censors are unusually ecumenical. The Christians get in trouble for criticizing the non-Christians, the non-Christians also get in trouble for criticizing the Christians, and around and around it goes. If the Scots truly want to prove my point, they’ll move full steam ahead with this “misogyny” law, and, soon after, pass an even wider statute, which makes it illegal to castigate any member of the human race for any reason whatsoever.