Speaking of “deliberate provocations”
A senior SNP politician has accused JK Rowling of wasting police time and attacking Scottish “societal values” by testing new hate crime laws.
Rowling is wasting police time? I’d say it’s the SNP lawmakers who are wasting police time.
Karen Adam, who is convener of Holyrood’s equalities committee, launched a thinly veiled attack on the Harry Potter author in a defence of Humza Yousaf’s controversial legislation, which she hailed as an “incredible example of our commitment to justice”.
It’s incredible all right, but not as an example of any kind of commitment to justice.
On the first day that the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into force, Rowling deliberately “misgendered” a series of high-profile trans women, calling them men and challenging Police Scotland to arrest her.
You mean Rowling called some men “men.” What’s your point?
Writing in her column in The National, a pro-independence newspaper, Ms Adam took aim at “deliberate provocations seen in recent times where individuals had tested the boundaries of the legislation”. She added: “[They] do more than just waste police time, they strike at the very core of our societal values. These actions aren’t just about challenging a legal framework, they question our collective resolve to build a community where hatred finds no home.”
Hatred finds lots of homes in Scotland: hatred of women who know what a man is and won’t shut up is rampant there. Ms Adam is demonstrating it herself.
Seems to me that one of the following must be true:
1) The new hate crimes law clearly covers what Rowling did, in which case Rowling has provided the authorities with a perfect opportunity to demonstrate how their new toy will build “a community where hate finds no home.”
2) The new law clearly doesn’t cover what Rowling did, in which case the only people who are wasting the time of the Scottish police are those flooding them with complaints — who somehow (it’s a mystery!) have gotten the impression that the law does cover it. To the extent Rowling is doing anything, she’s providing a public service in educating a citizenry that is apparently badly misinformed about this wonderful new law.
3) It’s unclear whether or not the law covers her statements, in which case she is providing a useful test case should the authorities wish to do so.
If you want to say that Rowling is being transphobic, mean, etc., have at it, but not sure how she’s the one wasting police time.
I’ll have to agree with this to some extent – to the extent that “our societal values” include denying biology, affirming delusions, and treating women’s rights as disposable.
What exactly do trans “rights” have to do with Scottish independence? What do they have to do with Green politics? Why embrace a cause irrelevant to your core mission that might put off enough voters that your party becomes unelectable? How prevalent are the hobby horses of Twitter activism to the elecctorate as a whole? Those immersed in it might believe it’s crucial, but chances are, most people either don’t care, or disagree with the stance taken. Does anyone within these parties check to see (in an objective way) whether there is a greater likelihood of losing voters than gaining them before shooting their feet off? Once you abandon reality (say, by pretending that men can be women, and ignoring the real-world consequences to women of enforcing compliance with the impossible), why bother with matters of practical policy at all?
Screechy Monkey @1:
I’d take this one further. If the law is unclear about what sorts of statements it covers (and I’d argue that it is), then it’s the lawmakers who are wasting police time, since they wrote a law that is hard to parse.
Freemage,
Well, that too. And it’s not like they weren’t warned about it. Sometimes the ambiguities in a law don’t become clear until years later, but these were issues that were raised throughout the legislative process.
Freemage, re
I posted the following in the Miscellany Room last night but it seems relevant here.
The Scottish police are not at all happy about the new hate law. The general verdict is that it is completely unworkable. They’re also pretty miffed at the sheer volume of reported hate crimes – 8000 in the first week of April – all of which have to be investigated to some degree. To put that figure into context, for the last 10 years they received between 6000 and 7000 reports of hate crimes per year, so this is more than a year’s worth in one week.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/08/scotland-hate-crime-law-police-embarrassed-snp/
So it seems a tad rich for Karen Adam to accuse Rowling of wasting police time when her own party’s ridiculous new law has tied up so many officers who have to look at every single one of those 8000 reports, and do so despite not even knowing for sure what does or does not count as a hate crime because they cannot make head nod tail of the law as written.