By Jacob Mchangama
Earlier this month, Amnesty International asked Britain’s charity regulator to review the status of 117 organizations whose views on sex and abortion it dislikes. It received the public thrashing it deserved. But the threatened libel campaign now being bankrolled against it risks converting a victory for counter-speech into a cautionary tale—one in which debates over first principles are decided by ruinously expensive litigation rather than the free battle of ideas.
[. . .]If any lawsuits financed by Rowling succeed in establishing that Amnesty’s conception of rights is defamatory, it would narrow the very space that shelters her own views. The beautiful and frustrating characteristic of a free society is that no one ever gets the final word, and that the remedy for old orthodoxies—including ones concerning identity and rights—is counter-speech, not new orthodoxies hardened by law.
For this reason, Rowling should hope Amnesty’s opinions are protected, too.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).