speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Excesses of State Regulation
Negroes and Asiatics have been brought into Britain to pollute and
destroy our Celtic-Anglo-Saxon race by mongrelisation." 75 The
severity of sanctions diverts attention away from the heinousness of
the crime and toward procedural niceties. American death penalty
litigation offers an extreme example; the electric chair, to paraphrase
Samuel Johnson, concentrates the mind wonderfully, but on the
wrong issues. Like prosecutors, juries find legal penalties disproportionate
to the wrong and rarely convict. 76 Because 1500 reports of
racial hatred in Austria between 1984 and 1992 produced only 21
convictions, the government has drastically reduced the minimum
sentence. 77 Law's glacial pace distorts and diminishes the remedies
eventually awarded. Nearly five years after a professor allegedly
began to sexually harass a student the University of Washington
finally settled a complaint that had consumed hundreds of hours of
hearings in four separate proceedings. 78
All regulation encourages evasion, but the very ambiguity of
speech that makes law such a crude response further facilitates
evasion. A gamut of poetic techniques is readily available to disguise
and multiply meanings: simile, metaphor, conceit, personification,
hyperbole, litotes, synecdoche, metonymy, paradox, and irony.
Effective advertising cleverly manipulates ambiguity to suggest what
it cannot or will not declare. A romantically out-of-focus photograph
of a couple embracing by a fountain iscaptioned: "The Art of French
Kissing. Pour two glasses of Martell Cognac: one for you and one for
someone you love. Then proceed to kiss in whatever manner pleases
you." 79 Similar devices can convey proscribed political messages.
When General Jaruzelski banned Solidarity, slogans appeared on
walls, pamphlets, and banners throughout Poland in the distinctive
script of Solidarnosc. Sympathisers of the PLO, ANC, IRA and other
outlawed groups express defiance by displaying the colours of their
organisations. Forbidden songs are given new words or the tunes
simply hummed. Chinese youths revive memories of Tiananmen
Square by wearing t-shirts bearing slogans like: "I'm bored" or "I'm
the emperor." One simply displayed a black cat, elliptically referring
to an epigram by the discredited 1960s reformer Deng Xiaopeng:
"It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white. As long as it catches
mice, it's a good cat." 80
Commercial speech uses similar strategies to stymie regulation.
When Quebec outlawed any language but French on outdoor signs a
billboard advertising a self-storage operation in English sought protection
as political speech by adding: "Before Bill 101, This Sign
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