Defenders of free speech must damn Pickering

Defenders of free speech have a special responsibility to damn cartoonist Larry Pickering for his despicable slurs of gays and Muslims. And shame on all the conservatives who did not howl him down when he said the one good thing about Muslims was "they do chuck pillow-biters off buildings".

Defenders of free speech have a special responsibility to damn cartoonist Larry Pickering for his despicable slurs of gays and Muslims. 

And shame on all the conservatives and libertarians who did not howl him down when he said that while "I can't stand Muslims ... they are not all bad [because] they do chuck pillow-biters off buildings".

I am talking particularly about the Australian Liberty Alliance's Kiralee Smith, who was at the Q Society meeting last night where Pickering spoke after donating a picture of a woman in a niqab being raped by her son-law.

Why didn't Smith throw the foul picture in Pickering's face? Refuse to accept the money that was  raised in auctioning it off for her legal expenses?

But, sadly, I am also distressed that my Sky News colleague Ross Cameron, the former Liberal MP, did not make a stand, either.

He spoke at the same Sydney meeting on the subject of free speech, and not only failed to condemn Pickering but said he admired him.

In his defence, though, Cameron spoke before Pickering did, and says he was out of the room when it was Pickerng's turn to comment. He has since criticised Pickering on Sky News.

But Cameron in his own speech cracked his own "jokes" about the "Sydney Morning  Homosexual", adding: "The NSW division of the Liberal Party is basically a gay club. I don't mind that they are gay, I just wish, like Hadrian, they would build a wall."

He has apologised for those comments, insisting he meant nothing homophobic, although his crack about a wall struck me as very unpleasant indeed.

There will be some deeply misguided advocates of free speech - or confused  told-you-so Leftists - who will say that condemning Pickering went exactly against what Cameron was there at the meeting to advocate and which I, too, also wish: free speech.

Didn't Cameron warn the crowd of exactly what I am doing now, telling them that too often debate is shut down by people who say "the person who doesn't agree with me is a bad, evil, bigoted, redneck, racist xenophobe".

Well, here is me saying Pickering's comments were  indeed bad, bigoted, racist, xenophobic - and homophobic, too. And that any self-respecting audience should have booed him off the stage.

This is not at all a contradiction of my stand against laws limiting our free speech - laws that are absurdly restrictive and misused to shut down debate on the new racism.

No. The argument free speech crusaders make is that the public can be trusted to decide for themselves what may be said and what crosses the line. 

Bad speech, we say, will be driven out by good speech, and there is no need to call the cops, the judges and the whole activist class, so keen to supress views they themselkves do not like. Trust the public. Trust their goodness.

But we conservatives especially must show how this works. When a Pickering speaks so fouly, we must say so. We must condemn. We must with our good speech damn the bad.

To fail in this is to give the cops-calling Left their excuse to say we've been exposed: that what we we really seek is not the freedom to speak but the freedom to vilify, free of even the restraint of any goodness.

Originally published as Defenders of free speech must damn Pickering