Potential Censorship in Europe

[David Bernstein]

I've maintained for some time that more and more censorship is inevitable in countries that do not share the United States' constitutional commitment to freedom of speech, but instead allow restrictions on such freedom in the name of equalitarian concerns.  According to an article in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,11812,984416,00.html

a draft proposal for the EU states "that while freedom of _expression_ must be respected, sex discrimination and affronts to human dignity should be banned from media and advertising." 

"The purpose is to avoid throughout all forms of mass media all stereotypical portrayals of women and men, as well as any projection of unacceptable images affecting human dignity and decency in advertisements," an internal commission document says.

Exactly who is going to be charged with deciding what images are "unaccepable" because they affect "human dignity and decency?"  Undoubtedly, if this proposal passes lobby groups will form to get the EU to declare anything that goes against their own ideology as "unacceptable." 

Professor David E. Bernstein
George Mason University School of Law
http://mason.gmu.edu/~dbernste
blog: http://bernstein.blogspot.com
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My latest book, You Can't Say That!
The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties
from Antidiscrimination Laws, will
be published in October
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