In South Africa we’re taught from a young age that while everyone has a “right to x”, codified in the Bill of Rights, each right comes with a “responsibility”.
My “right to free speech” should not limit your “right to religion” or your “right to political association”, and in this case “your right to safety”.
While South Africa has a lot of improvement to do, the understanding that rights need to be self-limiting in order to remain sustainable is a very good starting point in a constitutional democracy.
I’ve always thought about it like this: one person’s freedom stops where another person’s freedom begins. When freedoms start conflicting, a negotiated compromise is needed and thus legislation is often involved. So, for example, it should be illegal to threaten somebody’s personal safety, because otherwise there isn’t a good balance between freedom of speech and freedom of security.
The corollary to this is that as population density increases freedom gets more limited, because people’s circles of freedom overlap more. Modern society has a lot more limitations on personal freedom because that is the only way to equally provide access to freedom to everyone in a denser world.
> So, for example, it should be illegal to threaten somebody’s personal safety
Even this seemingly-simple example is complicated in practice: who decides whether safety is threatened? I have seen people claim to feel physically unsafe whenever someone raises the question of how specific women's sports should handle participation trans women, and I have seen other people claim to feel physically unsafe when someone suggests raising taxes to fund more public services (immediately reaching for comparisons to the USSR in the 1930s).
Is the test then whether someone feels unsafe as a result of the speech? Or whether a "reasonable person" would feel unsafe? And so on, and so forth.
There's really no good way to win completely here: either some people are going to feel unsafe, or you have to have _quite_ draconian speech restrictions to try to avoid that (and probably still fail). You might be able to do something that works for neurotypical-enough people, but that's the best I can see.
IANAL but in South Africa the Constitution and Bill of Rights specifically outline limitations and how rights interact.
So for example, it is explicit that freedom of expression cannot limit another’s freedom to practice their religion [2].
Furthermore it has been determined that freedom of religion is not absolute [3], for example that religious objections cannot prevent a women from seeking an abortion, or for a same-sex couple to marry. And indeed these two examples are protected by law.
So yes you can say that “your right to religion should not limit my right to free speech”, but there is no conflict of interest or ambiguity in terms of how these two rights interact. In South Africa the line is drawn in the sand already. While this may seem like a hardline (pun not intended), it’s important to understand South Africa’s dark history with selective rights and freedoms, and that the one of the lessons learnt is the explicit outline of rights and their limitations in the Constitution. South Africa is a young democracy and these limitations are a feature of fairly recent history.
The anti-Semitic rhetoric we see from certain groups is “free speech” that is likely to at least make Jews feel unwelcome in certain spaces, and potentially force them to conceal their religious and racial identities for fear of violence. See also the anti-Muslim rhetoric.
These are in large part motivated by racism but much of the language used is religious and about religion.
My “right to free speech” should not limit your “right to religion” or your “right to political association”, and in this case “your right to safety”.
While South Africa has a lot of improvement to do, the understanding that rights need to be self-limiting in order to remain sustainable is a very good starting point in a constitutional democracy.