And it bothers me every single day that someone who entered office with a 44% approval rating and a 42% disapproval rating won 49.9% of the vote. He was over 50% disapproval within 1 month of his term, and under 40% approval by his second month. This was someone that even his political allies called a racist and dangerous demagogue before continuing on to endorse him.

My position is that harm is a consequence of hate, as I’ve already stated. While it is not the only antecedent to harm (harm can occur without hate being involved), it raises the probability of harm occurring to the group who is the target of hate. Hate leads to harm - again, not a novel concept, and something which has been demonstrated ad nauseum over the course of history.

I do not see how this is moving goalposts. As this is a Canadian instance, it might be instructive to read the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as some of the court cases which fleshed out how hate speech is treated in Canadian law. This is one element of the position I’m coming from here.

In terms of my painting with a broad brush, there’s some merit to that, given I was referring to members of a specific American political movement. This is probably still overbroad, but let me restate it: “For every well-intentioned, humanistic person voicing a legitimate concern related to a given group of people who share a minority characteristic, there are many more who use those concerns as a front to promote hate.” I stand by the rest of my statement in the prior post, acknowledging that this does create a problem for those well-intentioned people too - when hateful ass-clowns repeat your talking points to serve their purposes, it tarnishes the legitimacy of your concern.

I’ll close with an example getting a lot of press in my neck of the woods - Drag Storytime. A children’s event where someone in drag reads a storybook to kids. A well-intentioned person may ask if it’s appropriate to introduce young children to the concept of drag so early. They may ask what protections are in place for screening volunteers working with children. They may decide that they do not want their children to participate. This is all well and good. But barring children whose parents have decided they are OK with this event, or creating a threatening environment for those participating - these are actions typically couched in hate, and are not good. And they take away from the guy saying “Yeah, people dress in drag sometimes, but I don’t know that I want my 5 year old introduced to the concept quite yet.”