Australia’s Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, is drafting hate speech laws that will impose criminal penalties for vilification based on a person’s race, sexuality, gender, disability or religion. While I agree broadly that this is needed, there is a massive flaw in the argument that religion should be included with the rest. My position is this: race, sexuality, gender and disability are something each individual has no choice about. Religion is not.
Each of us is born with a particular race, sexuality and gender (and sometimes a mixture of these) and we might be born with a disability or acquire one through accident or sickness. We have no choice about it. Obviously, vilifying someone over something about which they have no control, is a form of gratuitous cruelty and, in my view, should be punished.
However, religion is very different. Each of us may be raised in a particular religion but, as soon as we are old enough to think for ourselves, we can choose to change it, keep it, or drop it altogether. Vilifying someone because they choose to belong to a religion that teaches, practices and encourages hatred of others seems like a completely reasonable thing to do. If you choose to be a fundamentalist Christian, or a Muslim, to hate gays and to subjugate women, I’m going to vilify you – because you deserve it.
A law that removes my right to vilify people because of the evil choices they have willingly made, is a bad law. It removes my moral agency. I do not support this law and I do not support any government that promotes it.
Just a final note on atheism in this context. Over time, I have come to believe that all religious beliefs – in fact, all supernatural beliefs – are a form of mental illness. That this illness afflicts so many people is one of the great tragedies of the human condition. It is arguable, therefore, that religious people should be viewed as victims of their illness and, therefore, as having a disability. If this is the case, then including them in the anti-vilification laws would be OK, on the grounds that they can’t help it any more than a schizophrenic can. However, since no religious person I’ve ever met will admit they are mentally ill, and the general opinion of all humanity is that they are perfectly sane, I’m happy for them to be excluded from the vilification laws until such time as they do admit it and begin seeking treatment.