Lawmaking as «Hate Spin»: The Fluid Frontiers of Religious Intolerance

In debates about freedom of expression, laws concerning religious offence have been among the most contentious. The controversy surrounding the Charlie Hebdo case is only the latest in a string of high-profile disputes that have spilled beyond national borders, with violent results. Most of the scholarly analysis of the relevant legal issues looks at the law as part of the structure within which these processes play out. Laws concerning freedom of expression, hate speech and religious offence provide the rules of the game, dictating what speech and counter-speech is permissible or prohibited, and shaping societal norms. This paper argues that the legal issues ' which already difficult enough ' are made even more complex by the fact that lawmaking as an activity is itself foisted with tremendous symbolic importance in divided societies. The law ' alongside books, videos and other cultural products ' provides objects of contention to be creatively exploited, and not just the rules of the game. This is clearly shown in the flurry of anti-Sharia bills in the US: legislators in various states have sought to protect local laws from the encroachment of Islamic law. This article analyses the November 2014 passage of one such piece of legislation, Alabama's Amendment One. Although amounting to an unnecessary reaction to a non-existent threat and unlikely to survive judicial scrutiny, such acts of legislative entrepreneurship appear to be achieving their hidden agendas: to frame Islam as a threat, and win political points for their backers. Similarly, in Indonesia, an anti-pornography law was primarily a vehicle for Muslim hardliners to assert their political power. The argument in this paper is placed in a larger theoretical frame that treats the public giving and taking of religious offence as a strategy of contentious politics, which I term 'hate spin'. Hate spin exponents around the world have been adept at manufacturing offence through or in reaction to various cultural products in order to gain political capital or weaken their opponents. Lawmaking ' irrespective of whether bills are enacted or implemented ' has become a high-level process through which political entrepreneurs practise hate spin.