Professor Richard Moon of the Faculty of Law at the University of Windsor will deliver the talk – Putting Faith in Hate: Religion as the Source and Subject of Hate Speech – at York as part of the Osgoode Colloquium on Law, Religion & Social Thought.

Many recent hate speech cases involve religion either as the source of views that are alleged to be hateful or as the subject of such views. The particular difficulty of these cases can be traced to a crucial ambivalence in our conception of religious adherence: is religious commitment a personal judgment that is, in theory, revisable, or is it a central element of an individual’s identity? Hate speech regulation depends on the distinction between attacks on an individual or group and attacks on an individual or group’s beliefs, which must be open to (even harsh and intemperate) debate. Yet our complex conception of religious adherence complicates this distinction in a variety of ways.

Moon is the author of The Constitutional Protection of Freedom of Expression (Toronto 2000) and editor of Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada (UBC 2008).

Lunch will be served.

To RSVP (required), click here and enter Event Code: LRST4