Peter Tatchell and Reggae-bashing

Peter Tatchell has in recent years been running a campaign against Jamaican dance-hall artists who use homophobic language in their songs. His most recent article attacking ‘murder music’ on the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog was a revealing demonstration of practically every dismal contemporary anti-free-speech argument and prejudice going. Let’s take a look at these censorious shibboleths.

• ‘This is not a free speech issue’

Er, yes it is. Attempting to prevent someone from expressing a view is censorship - no ifs, no buts. It’s fine if you want to argue against free speech, but you should come out and say it. Tatchell’s claim that free speech advocates are hypocrites because they don’t defend the free speech of Nazis. Er… again, often they do. Is he ignorant of the ACLU’s defence of the Ku Klux Klan’s right to free speech for instance? He’s either setting up straw men, or he’s profoundly ignorant of the position he’s criticising.

• Censoring thought as well as speech

Peter Tatchell has a great interest in whether Banton and Beenie Man have only ‘cynically’ signed up to his charter to avoid the financially costly campaign that Tatchell waged against them, or whether they’ve really converted to his nice liberal viewpoint. Who cares? He has shut them up. Tatchell’s demand that they think appropriate thoughts is worthy of a medieval Inquisitor.

• Contempt for the audience

The most degrading aspect of attempts to restrict free speech is that they are implicit attacks on the rationality of the listening (and thinking) public. He sees Jamaican reggae fans as a potential mob ready to tear people apart at the mention of the words ‘batty-boy’; a vision worthy of the most fevered white-colonial imagination. There’s no denying there are regular homophobic attacks in Jamaica, but to reduce this complex social phenomenon (hatred of, and violence against homosexuals) to some song lyrics’ supposed capacity to incite hatred is laughable.

• The campaign is chauvinistic

Like so many commentators nowadays, Peter Tatchell jet-sets around the world to find examples of foreigners being beastly to one another (see also his recent trip to Russia). There’s nothing wrong with international solidarity, but grandstanding demands that foreigners comply with our standards only strengthens the hand of our own governments to intervene abroad, and distracts from the hard work of winning the fight for equality in Russia or Jamaica.

• PC censorship sets an awful precedent

Peter Tatchell forgets the case of Canadian feminist Andrea Dworkin, who became the target of her own anti-pornography laws. If Tatchell really wants to imagine that our enlightened government might never use censorship against gays, he’s welcome to his illusions. Let us hope the rest of us aren’t so foolish. As was mentioned on this blog a few days ago, Islamists in Britain were banged-up using laws against ‘incitement’ of the same type that Tatchell argues for. Tatchell may have no sympathy with Hizb-ut-Tahrir or whoever; but his line of argument would criminalise legitimate expressions of violent thought, including everyone from old Irishmen singing Fenian songs in a pub, to angry young rappers insulting the police.

The lesson of the UK to Jamaican gays is that they need the solidarity of the wider community to win freedom and equality. The censorious arguments of Tatchell and other British ‘liberals’ who see their peers as violent idiots, do them a disservice.

Robin Walsh