There are laws against incitement to violence and there are laws against offending people. And then there are the laws protecting personality (from personal insult, defamation, etc).

So inciting people to burn down a church is not the same as insulting churchgoers, which is not the same as saying Mother of God, Virgin, become a feminist in front of the churchgoers.

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa

If you want to be technical about it, yes.

If you want to be technical about it, quotas for women on corporate boards is discrimination.

If you want to be technical about it, requiring employers to have a union contract with a real union is a restriction of their freedom of association (at least that's what the court in Strassburg thinks).

But of course in the real world, the point of hate speech laws is not to censor honest opinion, it is to prevent a politically and socially dominant group from intimidating and legitimizing violence, discrimination or repression against a politically and socially dominated group.

It is, in other words, about redressing an imbalanced power relationship between non-state actors.

Which is totally irrelevant to a Russian punk band offending the Russian Orthodox Church, because the Orthodox Church is the dominant, and punk culture the dominated, group in that power relationship.

This should not be difficult to understand. But apparently it is.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.