It's hard to believe I have to do this again, but here we go. Having freedom of speech means that you enjoy the freedom to speak, not some fondly imagined freedom from having to listen to people who disagree with your stupid opinion.
To be fair, it's not surprising that a TV personality like Sonia Kruger has trouble with this. She is not, to my knowledge, a professor of linguistics, or political philosophy. She boasts no degree of higher learning from any of the internet's fine universities of hairdressing, although she is blonde and she is on the telly so there's that.
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Kruger wants borders closed to Muslims
When asked on the Today Show whether she would like Australia's borders to be closed to Muslims, Sonia Kruger answered yes. Vision: Today Show, Channel Nine.
She would also insist on reminding you that she is a mother, but other than qualifying her to discuss the care and feeding of her own spawn, that's not much of an appeal to authority. We'll let it pass though, because there are probably three or four hundred people in the whole country who can claim to bring anything like an expert opinion to discussions of migration policy, national security, or the psychopathology of religiously-motivated violence. And yet we all like to have our say. Who are we then to tell Sonia she can't have hers.
So yes, Sonia Kruger is entitled to go on TV and share with us whatever small isolated thought might be rattling around inside her head, even if it's not an actual thought but more of a sympathetic brain fart that leaked out after she read Mr Andrew Bolt's column and thought, "A pogrom? Why, yes. That sounds lovely."
She is even free to further qualify her initial remarks on the basis that she once gave birth. But, here's the rub, anyone who disagrees with her is free to do so too. If they were as charming and intelligent as Mariam Veiszadeh, a lawyer, and a Muslim, who arrived here as a refugee, they might simply invite Ms Kruger to "meet for a coffee and discuss your concerns about Muslim immigration." If they were not so charming and intelligent, they might call her hurtful names. It is even possible that the very real hurt Ms Kruger experiences as a result might approximate the very real hurt she occasioned when she made her ignorant and dangerous remarks; ignorant because she was not speaking after having studied the issue in any real detail, and dangerous because by amplifying calls for religious discrimination she plays into the hands of the Daesh who desperately want to isolate and radicalise the Muslim minorities within the west.
This is the irony of these so-called free speech disputes. The greatest allies our enemies have imagine themselves their greatest foes. But every time someone stands up for division, for separation, for the tearing apart of all the ties that bind us, they do the work of ISIS or al Qaeda or whatever the murderous psychos are calling themselves this week.
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