This story is just crazy. Professor Jacobson is quoted, talking about how this could be coming here soon.
FOX News reports:
Swiss writer being jailed for insulting lesbian journalist alarms free speech advocatesA court in Switzerland fined and sentenced a writer and pundit to 60 days in jail for calling a journalist a “fat lesbian,” alarming free speech advocates across the globe.On Monday, controversial French-Swiss polemicist Alain Bonnet, who goes by Alain Soral and is a noted Holocaust denier, was sentenced by the Lausanne court for the crimes of defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred after he criticized Catherine Macherel, a journalist for Swiss newspapers Tribune de Geneve and 24 Heures, in a Facebook video two years ago.The story caught the attention of numerous U.S. outlets and alarmed some stateside free speech advocates…Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson agrees and said Americans need to be careful.”It sounds outrageous to most Americans that someone could be sent to prison for what at worst was a crude joke. But that intolerance and repression already is present in various forms in the United States, particularly through campus speech codes and bias reporting procedures that turn one person’s joke into a punishable thought crime,” Jacobson told Fox News Digital.”The problem with punishing ‘hate’ speech is, who gets to decide what is hate speech? Free speech then becomes subject to the whims of the people with power,” Jacobson added. “Europe is just a few years ahead of us, and will be our future if we are not careful.”
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