Amnesty International offered its take on freedom of speech and of the press in a statement earlier this month, saying, “the right to freedom of expression is not absolute – neither for the creators of material nor their critics. It carries responsibilities and it may, therefore, be subject to restrictions in the name of safeguarding the rights of others. In particular, any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence cannot be considered legitimate exercise of freedom of expression. Under international standards, such ‘hate speech’ should be prohibited by law.”

This would make a hole in the First Amendment large enough to drive an army through. We see the point about incitement to violence, and we don’t advocate racial or religious hatred. But to say that speech that can be interpreted as advocating racial or religious hatred should be outlawed would open the door to bans on all sorts of useful endeavors – from the study of American civil rights history to the republication or public reading of the Bible. Why, back in the presidential campaign, some critics of Senator Lieberman tried to accuse him of religious discrimination because he expressed a preference that his children would marry within his faith.

Amnesty isn’t wrong in its reference to “international standards.” The Washington Times reports that the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, more or less endorsed last week a proposal by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference to write into a U.N. human rights charter the claim that “defamation of religions and prophets is inconsistent with the right to freedom of expression.” America’s ambassador at the U.N., John Bolton, yesterday came out against that proposal. Meanwhile, with the exception of some ill-fated speech codes on American college campuses in the early 1990s, America has functioned pretty well under the First Amendment – a lot better than some of the Islamic countries that are calling for stricter rules against hate speech.

It’s a reminder that for all the posturing of Amnesty International and the United Nations, the international standards they want to impose on Americans are often inferior to the standards that Americans have prospered under and that are embodied in the Constitution. One reason may be that the American standards have the advantage of being imposed by the consent of the governed, rather than by unelected, self-appointed human rights advocates or the dictators who are members of the United Nations and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.