To The Age
Greg Barns and Anna Talbot do not sufficiently value intellectual freedom as an indispensable bulwark against the political correctness that so easily slides into tyranny ('Turnbull attack on 18C case based on serious error', 14/11). Laws allegedly aimed at preventing vilification and hatred have been ruthlessly used overseas in a number of nations in order to suppress honourable intellectual dissidents and revisionist historians. That may happen here one day if 18C is not repealed.
'Protecting people's rights' is not ethical if it tramples on other people's different rights; nor does it produce 'social cohesion'. Appeals to the UNO are unconvincing because that body has been tainted from its inception; and playing the Nazi card while saying nothing about the tyrannies of the Soviet Union and Red China suggests that Barns and Talbot actually have a partisan political agenda in defending 18C.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic