The Chris Moeller Archives

You may have already heard about this incident. His twin brother has appeared several times on Conan O'Brien this summer. Anyway, when this happened, the peculiarity about it for me was not that the video of his verbal insults had been posted to YouTube, or that it had been sold to TMZ. Rather, it was because he was arrested for it.

In France, you see, there is no freedom of unpopular speech apparently. What he did is considered there to be a crime. He was convicted in a Paris court last Thursday of making "public insults based on the origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity" against these women. Though his fine was suspended, he had been sentenced to pay 6,ooo Euros (US$8,400), he did pay $23,000 in court costs for himself and the plaintiffs he "offended," and potentially, he faced up to six months in prison for his offense. Is this for reals? Where have I been living?

Galliano also got sacked by his boss at Dior, of course, and both his professional and personal reputations have taken a major hit, but the criminal element of it blows me away. I don't know (or care) if the dude is a racist or not, but in this country, at least you have a right to be racist in your personal life, and to express yourself accordingly unless the speech in question-- such as a burning cross in somebody's yard-- is designed to intimidate, or if it's designed to incite persons to commit a specific crime. Certainly drunken pronouncements and insults in a public house along the lines of Galliano's "I love Hitler," "dirty Jewish face," and "dirty Asian shit" are protected here, and we largely have the enlightened Warren Court of the 1950s and '60s to thank for that. In France, actress Brigitte Bardot has now been convicted five times in recent years for her public expressions, most recently because of a published letter to President Sarkozy referring to Muslims as "the population that is destroying us."

This type of ugly speech adds nothing to the national conversation, but you'll never convince me that France's approach is preferable. It provides cover instead to the very concerted efforts all over the globe to chill media freedoms and to criminalize speech. Some of us get anxious these days, too, over any pleas to be "responsible" in our speech in respect to the so-called "national good." Who gets to decide?

Racist ideas can be stubbornly persistent in pockets, but on their merits, they cannot thrive, and thus, I don't fear them. I arrived at that conclusion myself also, not because my government told me to arrive at it. If the women in this bar feel they were slandered or libeled by Galliano, it seems to be they can sue him in a civil court proceeding rather than a criminal one. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution exists precisely to protect the most unpopular speech that exists. After all, popular speech doesn't require any protection.