Gay horse homophobia flackfest.

British police arrested a man for "homophobic comments" after he said to a policeman riding a horse, "Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?"

The act under which he was charged was apparently this one:

A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—

(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour . . . .^[1]

The prosecutor decided not to prosecute because there was "not enough evidence to prove Mr Brown's behaviour was disorderly." ^[2]

The prosecutor got it right but the cops suffer from a serious case of self importance and proved entirely willing to abuse their powers of arrest. No supervisory officer in that sorry affair was able to summon basic common sense to deal with the overreaction of the mounted officer.

"Homophobic," of course, means "afraid of homosexuals" and the arrested man did not express fear of homosexuals. Nor did he express hatred of homosexuals. Nor can calling a person or animal "gay" be objectionable according to the logic of homosexuals themselves since, by definition, there is nothing wrong with being gay.

The fixation in Europe and Britain on hate speech and the loss of an ability to deal with frank expression of views in public life is sad and is a major turning away from one of the bulwarks of the Western experience -- robust debate.

We have our own problems in the U.S. with government trying to create a new category of "hate crimes" and we hope that the stupidity of these efforts will eventually be made plain. We've not made a study of hate crime legislation here but we will hazard a guess that its deleterious effects are limited to circumstances where there is at least an underlying instance of what is plainly conduct that most folks would recognize as criminal.

The hate crime aspect appears to serve as a means of enhancing the punishment. Sort of saying that my plunging my knife into your throat and depriving you of your life for no reason whatsoever (or because you irritate me or because I'm drunk) is deserving of a lesser penalty than when I stick a knife into you because I hate it that you are a homosexual.

I suppose there is a qualitative difference in the mens rea involved. I am sure the family of the deceased killed for no reason, or on a personal whim, feels much better knowing that the killer didn't kill their loved one with contemporaneous thoughts of hatred.

Notwithstanding this wrinkle in our politics, we can still give thanks that our First Amendment rights are intact and are an effective defense against idiots with thin skins or malodorous agendas. Or stupid, weak, thin-skinned, or abusive cops.

Notes
^[1] Public Order Act 1986 (offences relating to public order), C. 64, Part I, section 4A.
^[2] "'Gay horse' case dropped." By Angus Howarth, Scotsman.com, 1/13/06.