Postscript: Facts and free speech

Should people have the right to deny historical fact? The Times’ editorial board thinks so, writing on Dec. 21 that a proposed law in France to criminalize denial of the Armenian genocide would be a “monstrous violation of free speech.”

Reader Janet Gross of Los Angeles took issue with the editorial board’s view that genocide denial is an opinion worthy of free-speech protection:

“The right to the opinion that the Armenian genocide in 1915 perpetrated by the Turks never happened should be protected? How is that an opinion?

“Here’s how dictionary.com defines opinion: ‘a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.’ There is sufficient proof to show that what happened to Armenians was, in fact, genocide.

“If you’re saying that deliberately making false statements about historical events should be protected under law, fine. I think. How inflammatory that is will be set aside for now.

“But let’s keep the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ right to freedom of opinion for things like, ‘I don’t like our right-wing dictator.’”

Senior editorial writer Michael McGough responds:

People deny facts all the time — think of creationists and evolution — and we consider that an opinion, albeit a wacky one. I don’t think we would support a law making it a crime to doubt Charles Darwin.

The Supreme Court wrote in Gertz vs. Robert Welch Inc., a 1974 libel case: “Under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries, but on the competition of other ideas. But there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.”

But this is too neat a dichotomy. It would be one thing if the genocide deniers said, falsely, that France or some other country didn’t recognize the Armenian massacre as a genocide. But “it was not a genocide” isn’t disprovable in the same sense; one can have a crazy opinion about the definition of “genocide.”

When it comes to opinion, people are allowed to be subjective even where reasonable people agree that there is objective truth, whether it’s the Armenian genocide or President Obama’s birthplace.

As we noted, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls for broad and robust freedom of opinion and expression. If the genocide denial bill passes, France will take a much narrower view of free speech than the declaration it endorsed in 1948.