A year in jail for private comments
I guess I’d better never go to Norway.
Bi, trans, and nonbinary folks in Norway are celebrating a huge win after the country recently expanded its penal code that previously only protected lesbian and gay people from hate speech to include gender identity and all forms of “sexual orientation.”
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The penal code states that those who are guilty of hate speech face a fine or up to a year in jail for private comments, and a maximum of three years in jail for public remarks. Furthermore, those charged with violent crimes that are motivated by a victim’s orientation or gender identity will receive harsher sentences.
Since all disputing the dogma around what “trans” means is treated as “transphobic” that means gender critical feminists will be forced to shut up, even in private.
Or will it.
Still, not everyone is happy about the aggressive approach Norway is taking when it comes to LGBTQ+ protections. Some opponents believes the amendments threaten free speech. But as Anine Kierulf, an assistant professor of law at the University of Oslo, explained to Reuters, the statements have to hit a lot of benchmarks to be prosecuted.
“There are a lot of very hateful things you can say about the protected groups,” she said. For prosecution comments must be direct attacks against LGBTQ+ people or include language that intentionally dehumanizes them to the public.
How can remarks in private include language that intentionally dehumanizes people to the public? And who decides what “direct attacks against LGBTQ+ people” means?
I have a question – how do these laws affect Internet postings?
If the laws apply to private remarks they’re bound to apply to internet postings, I should think.
So how long will it be before Norway locks someone up for saying that women exist?
But in all seriousness, how is this supposed to work when there are conflicts in ideas between the LGBTQ+ letters and symbols? Gays and lesbians believe and say stuff trans activists consider transphobic. Trans activists believe and say stuff that gays and lesbians consider homophobic. And there’s a bunch of intersex people who are really tired of all the dehumanizing stuff trans activists say about them.
How are these laws any different from blasphemy laws that you’d find in a typical illiberal theocracy?
I am skeptical of the whole concept behind “hate speech”. To me, it is a way of weaponizing thought crimes. It should not be a “crime” to have hateful thoughts. Nor do people have the right to demand the State protect their feelings. (And as a member of (multiple) hated groups, I understand many people, even in the past the mainstream, hated me for multiple reasons).
Note if you are a hate-spewing asshole, my above remarks do not mean your (private) employer cannot decie to be rid of your bigoted ass. Jail time? No.
Maybe this is what we need for peak trans. Someone…let’s say a biology professor…gets up and says that XX means woman and XY means man. They then proceed through their lecture about how males produce sperm and females produce eggs. They discuss the differences in the structure of the urinary system and the reproductive system. Then they reach the final criminal act: they identify the penis as a male sex organ.
Some student complains, the prof is arrested. Comments are public, so up to 5 years. The video of his trial goes viral; derision and scorn flow in from everywhere in the world, and the outrage is palpable. Everyone suddenly wakes up from their collective sleep (this isn’t something that concerns me, right?) and realizes they could get in serious trouble just for posting pictures of their infant “daughter” on the internet…because how do you know she’s a “daughter”? She might identify as a “son”.
To be honest, most of the people I talk to don’t know this is happening. They may be vaguely aware of trans, but the idea that men could look like men, dress like men, and act like men, but say “I feel like a woman”, and be accepted into all of women’s spaces – most of them don’t know this is happening. It hasn’t happened to them (yet), so they aren’t paying attention. But let someone…better yet, a Christian minister (people care more about their rights to free expression than they do those of college professors) say something about men and women, and get arrested…that would start the outrage machine.
I’m afraid the repercussions of that will not be good for progressives. They have tied themselves so tightly to this issue that when peak trans does happen, the whole edifice could be destroyed in the conflagration.
Hmm, this one actually flew below my radar. However, we definitely have not come to the point in Norway where saying that women exist could be considered hate speech against trans people! I say that with some confidence, as I have only ever encountered this notion in stories from other countries. I suspect, though, that Sweden has gone much farther down that path than Norway has, culturally at least. But I don’t know much about Swedish law.
I’d go look for more information, but I have an early morning lecture to prepare for, so there is no time for that tonight.
“I’m afraid the repercussions of that will not be good for progressives. They have tied themselves so tightly to this issue that when peak trans does happen, the whole edifice could be destroyed in the conflagration.”
This is a concern I have more generally speaking. The left tying itself to ever more finely parsed group identity politics, losing sight of far more important issues like economic collapse and CLIMATE CHANGE. The left used to be more universalist, more class-based. Now it is all tied to which marginalized group you “identify” with”.
After a quick search, I did not find the changed text. It seems not to have made it into the online version of the law yet. However, I discovered an “official, but unofficial“ English translation of the relevant paragraph (§185 of the penal code) as it was before the latest change. The difficulty here is, of course, who determines what is “insulting”? If that is left up to the insultee, we have a problem. (Yes, “insultee” is not a dictionary word. So what.) But I think the standard is more along the lines of “if most people would consider it insulting, then it is indeed insulting”. As in referring to a black person using the N word, especially if preceded by words like “damned”, “fucking”, etc.
You can read the law in English here: https://lovdata.no/dokument/NLE/lov/2005-05-20-28/KAPITTEL_2-5#%C2%A7185
It doesn’t include anything about gender-identity currently, but I’m guessing “homosexual orientation” will be rewritten and/or expanded. The “private comments” part basically means you can be prosecuted for insulting someone to their face if it’s deemed hate speech.
It’s somewhat surprising to me (as a non law-talking-guy) how vague the law is.
Oh, well, that’s okay. We’ll still be able to call women “cunts”, “bitches”, and “whores”. Oh, and Karens. Because women aren’t average people, so we don’t usually get a say. Average = white, male, straight…in the US, also Christian, though I don’t know so much about that in Norway. Those are the ones we judge everything against. They are people; the rest of us are hyphenated-people.
I hate to say it, but it turns out the conservatives were right… the slippery slope was real.
Women are in fact not given special protection by this section of the law. But in any case, raw misogyny of that kind does not fly in Norway, at least not to a great extent. Violence, especially domestic violence, is still a common problem, however. But that is covered by other parts of the law. So yes, you can call a woman all those things without fear of the law, but you would face some social repercussions.
I do find the law a bit troublesome, myself, but I expect the courts to apply it with great restraint and only apply the maximum penalty in extreme cases. Looking through some recent cases reported in the media, it seems that the most common punishment is on the order of a few weeks’ suspended sentence. In a case that went all the way to the supreme court recently, a woman was found guilty by this paragraph for saying something like “go back to Africa, you damned foreigner”. (Apparently, not a single sentence, but a longer harangue of that nature.)
Thanks Harald and Der Trond; helpful.
If “private” means things said to people’s faces I don’t object, unless the things are of the type “You’re not literally a woman though.” I don’t object to rules against personal abuse or harassment. I can think of circumstances when a woman would want and need to tell a man he’s not a woman (in a women’s restroom/toilet for instance), but in general, leave people alone if they’re leaving you alone. That’s fair.