Courtney McGrailDear Editor, The Ashers Bakery case in Northern Ireland has shown a depressing number of self-proclaimed liberals in a chilling and most revealing light.
As you say in your editor’s comment of October 27, the North’s equality legislation was fashioned after decades of discrimination against the minority Catholic community, and it was never intended to force people to endorse or publish messages or sentiments with which they disagreed.
You argue that though it would be an extreme case, the logical extension of the judgement against Daniel and Amy McArthur is that “a family member of someone who perished in the Holocaust now has no defence before the law for refusing to print T-shirts for a neo-Nazi organisation claiming that the extermination of six million Jews in the Nazi death camps is a myth”.
In recent days I have heard others rebutting such arguments by saying the situation is different as such a claim would be considered hate speech, and therefore illegal.
Not every jurisdiction recognises the concept of hate speech, however, and there are those who would claim that arguments about history, however absurd or offensive, are not in any case hate speech. While Holocaust denial – or minimisation – is illegal in Germany, I am not sure that it is in the UK.
But more importantly, this is an admission that only special protections can prevent such a situation from arising. It still allows that – in principle – people should be compelled to speak and publish against their most deeply-held values.
Yours etc.,
Peter O’Brien,
Cabra, Dublin 7.