War Handwavium

Congratulations!

Someone wants to give you an award for committing the logical fallacy known as “Equivocation”! Equivocation occurs when an important term in an argument is used with two different meanings. For example, “free speech” and “free beer” refer to two different meanings of “free” and changing them around in the middle of an argument is Equivocation.

You have been awarded the Equivocation Prize for playing fast and loose with the meaning of the phrase “Hate Speech”!

Most likely, you have taken “hate speech” and at some point changed the meaning to refer to “hate” instead. But “Hate Speech” and “Hate” do not mean the same thing.

“Hate Speech” refers specifically and only to bigoted speech.

“Hate Speech” is a subset of “Hate”.

“Hate” refers to ANY intense feelings of dislike.

Some intense feelings of dislike are justified. For example, hating the man who murdered your parents would be considered a justified reaction. (dressing up as a bat and acting as a vigilante operating above the law, while it might work in comic books would probably get you a life sentence in a mental hospital in the real world.)

If a bigot comes out and publicly declares that gays are unnatural and should not have the right to marry, that is “hate speech”.

If you are gay and publicly declare that you hate this person because of their bigotry, that would NOT be “Hate Speech”.

There is no such thing as “being a bigot against bigotry”. If someone is a homophobe, then you are NOT a bigot for publicly expressing feelings of dislike for their bigotry, nor are you a bigot for publicly opposing the bigots efforts to put their bigoted views into law.

The reason you have been awarded the ‘Equivocate “Hate Speech” into “Hate”‘ medal is because someone said they had intense feelings of dislike (hate) towards an individual, those feelings of dislike (hate) were not based on any bigotry towards the person being disliked (hate), and you, for whatever reason, argued that those intense feelings of dislike (hate) were the same as bigotry (hate speech).

Congratulations! You just attacked someone because they weren’t attacking bigotry politely enough to meet your standards! You must be so proud!

Because here is the important thing: bigotry is NOT JUST a subset of hate. One can be a bigot and express that bigotry without resorting to hate. In fact, as society stands up to physically violent bigots, what seems to be left are the bigots that express their bigotry through some less angry way. Lately, when I run into bigots these days, they often express their bigotry as some warped expression of “God’s Love”.

Their point, apparently, is it’s OK to be a bigot as long as you are polite about it, or as long as you are not ANGRY about it. It might be of interest to point out that when a woman was burned at the stake in medieval europe, the last thing said to them by the state might be something like “may God have mercy on your soul”. Apparently it’s OK to burn an innocent person at the stake if you do it out of mercy.

“Bigotry” isn’t defined by hate. “Bigotry” is defined by *intolerance*. Some very warped minds can have absolutely no tolerance for a minority group but might try to express that intolerance through feelings of love or God’s love.

And so, with all that, a Venn diagram: