(LifeSiteNews) — With the further advancement of the latest hate speech legislation in Ireland comes the realization of a warning — published in the Catholic Herald last November —that “Ireland’s proposed ‘hate speech’ laws will lead to the criminalization of religious beliefs and Church teaching.”
The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offenses) Bill, 2022, which has been described as the creation of “thought crime” by Irish Member of Parliament (TD) Paul Murphy, provoked an outraged response from Independent Irish Senator Ronan Mullen, who remarked on Twitter on April 30:
Awaiting Seanad debate on flawed Hate Bill that (1) doesn’t define hate, (2) seems to penalise ‘thought crimes’ and (3) gives legal force to mad new definition of ‘gender’. Where are the civil liberties people, @ICCLtweet, @_IHREC, and @fiannafailparty @FineGael – all captured? https://t.co/tMO5c3LUhy
— Senator Rónán Mullen (@RonanMullen) April 30, 2023
As Dubhaltach O Reachtnin wrote in November 2022:
The Catholic Church has long-standing objective positions on issues, which, if they are to be uttered in public (and that may include the pulpit), may cause the priest or other adherent to be made subject to prosecution.
This law, as with those in other nations, simply redesignates objection to the progressive agenda as a criminal offense. This is the only means of legal self-preservation for an ideology that cannot survive a rational argument.
An international trend
This draconian law echoes similar moves elsewhere. The recent publication of a RAND report in the USA presages a further crackdown on free speech – which frames facts at variance with those of the State and the mainstream media as “Truth Decay.”
In Canada, perhaps the most draconian censorship measures have been proposed, with the C-11 bill giving Trudeau’s regime the power to censor any online content in violation of their algorithm of control.
A March 2023 piece in Newsweek described the effects of Trudeau’s digital censorship regime, which would enable the State to remove user generated content without warning.
As currently written, the law would grant federal government bureaucrats the power to deem a student’s YouTube channel insufficiently diverse, or to find a rapper’s music guilty of spreading ‘disinformation.’
Everyday Canadians could have their social media and streaming accounts shutdown or shadowbanned for creating content that’s rejected by a government-controlled algorithm.
No definition of ‘hate’
In no case with any hate speech law is the term “hate” clearly defined. Its explanation in Britain includes “dislike” and “disagreement.” In Ireland, the law makes illegal “…hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.”
The bill, which is passing through the Irish Parliament, replaces the presumption of innocence with the presumption of guilt.
It is international in scope (“in the state or elsewhere”) and it reduces to the fact you can be imprisoned for memes on your phone in Ireland – or reading from the Bible.
As we have seen in the U.K., Christian speech is not protected speech and does not enjoy the same legal privileges and protections as the advertisement of disordered sexual behavior to children, for example.
It is plain to see that what is meant by “hate” includes the disgust of the uncorrupted for the widespread celebration and practice of vice, including the murder of the unborn.
The law of projection
Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee’s remarks about hate speech could be better employed as a description of the aim of the new law he celebrates:
Hate speech is designed to shut people down, to shut them up, to make them afraid to say who they are and to exclude and isolate them.
This of course is the effect of “hate speech” laws upon anyone sufficiently God-fearing or otherwise normal. These laws are always described as applying only to the worst cases of extreme hatred, but are routinely abused to punish not only words of disagreement, but silence.
It is the hate speech legislation under which pro-life Christians in Britain have been arrested for praying – in silence – outside child destruction facilities.
These laws do not prevent “hate.” they are in fact blasphemy laws in defense of a cult of grave moral evil.
To accurately describe our morally inverted world is to risk prosecution, as it is to publicly – if silently – beg for God’s help in the salvation of souls.
The gender agenda affirmed
This legislation gives legal force to the latest definitions of “gender” – affirming a culture in which children are corrupted by an openly satanic agenda into life changing medical procedures.
This culture presents the most serious organized danger to children in the Western world, and its intentions – being informed by power, profit and sexual perversion – are entirely corrupting. It is hard to imagine a more sincere expression of “hate” than the sale of self-harm and sterilization to children as a form of “care.”
The transgender culture is incubated and spread online, and it is through this means it is effectively reproducing in the minds of the impressionable.
To describe this process accurately is of course a form of “hate speech.” This indicates the purpose of hate speech laws – to make the description of diabolical evil a crime. It is a sign that not even silence is sufficient to protect anyone from persecution who rejects the replacement of virtue with the valorization of vice. In Ireland, the mere possession of images on a mobile phone could now be grounds for imprisonment.
Hate speech laws are therefore intended to take effect in the absence of both “hate” and “speech.” They are enacted to defend the degradation of our civilization from debate.
The purpose of this Western Liberal trend of censorship is to silence the enemies of evil with the threat of imprisonment, in defense of sweeping cultural changes for which no one ever voted.