Williams: Defending his right to be hateful

Buz trolls concern about campus codes against hate speech, but he doesn't call it hate speech, he calls it "debate."

He wants to be able to say racist things about the President and be protected (by whom, I wonder?) from being called on it.

The bottom line is that teaching kids to use accurate descriptions of people rather than demeaning slurs and epithets improves debate. Discouraging hateful and demeaning language against others is how we help ensure that everyone can safely participate, and it's always been what adults do.

Buz argues only for the poor downtrodden assholes who believe that the Bill of Rights is a Bill of Licenses to do whatever they want, whenever and to whom they want. This is nothing more than another spasm of nostalgia for the days of the unquestioned social supremacy of the white Protestant male, and no one should have any doubts about the exclusivity of that club.

If you want to argue that rights are impaired, you have to show the impairment. Buz doesn't bother, of course, as then we'd be talking about facts, which is just too hard for him.

Some commenters want to set him up as a martyr in a tricorn hat. The Americans who actually wore those tricorn hats would never have tolerated the boorish behavior he advocates outside the beer hall. Perhaps the whites-only, male-only beer hall is Mr Williams' idea of utopia.