A new poll shows just how far support for free speech has fallen, especially among young people.
A plurality of millennials thinks “misgendering” — not using someone’s preferred pronouns — should be criminalized, according to a survey Newsweek published Saturday.
The Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll finds that 44% of those aged 25 to 34 think “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense.”
Just 31% of this demographic disagree, while 25% were undecided.
This radical position is more popular than you’d think among those aged 35 to 44, too, with more of these respondents supporting the criminalization of “misgendering” than opposing it.
In a somewhat surprising twist, Gen Z respondents were significantly less likely than millennials to support pronoun censorship.
Among those aged 18 to 24, only 33% supported making “misgendering” a criminal offense; 48% disagreed.
All these groups of young people were much more likely than Americans overall to support the suggested censorship.
The poll found just 19% of the public overall agrees with making “misgendering” illegal.
This survey, and the many like it, suggests young Americans are turning their backs on freedom of speech in pursuit of “inclusivity” and “tolerance.”
But they clearly haven’t thought this out very well, or they wouldn’t be making this dark shift toward censorship.
For one, the courts would almost certainly strike down such a proposal as a violation of the First Amendment.
While misinformed progressives sometimes suggest otherwise, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, and it clearly protects words others find offensive, even slurs.
There’s no reason to believe that, if litigated, pronouns would be treated any differently — so they really couldn’t do this even if they wanted to. (Unless, of course, progressives are successful in their attempts to pack or otherwise delegitimatize our judicial system and remove its ability to block their unconstitutional proposals.)
But constitutional hurdles aside, young Americans shouldn’t even want to start banning or criminalizing offensive speech.
Such a Pandora’s box might be first opened by progressive politicians seeking to protect transgender people’s feelings from being hurt if they are “misgendered,” yet it certainly wouldn’t stop there.
