In November, the Daily Sceptic reported that a policeman had told a Christian preacher that some words painted on his van “could be seen as hate speech in the wrong context”. The words were a Biblical verse: Chapter 3, verse 16 of the Gospel according to John, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Of course, the Free Speech Union observed that for such words to be prohibited or penalised would violate free speech, and that if a police officer is even suggesting they might be, we’re not in a good place. But there is also something else going on: the evacuation, through misuse, of the meaning of the word “hate”.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines hate as: “A feeling of intense dislike or aversion towards a person or thing; hatred, loathing, animosity.” For “hatred”, it gives “A feeling of intense dislike or aversion towards a person or thing; an emotion in which such a feeling is experienced; loathing; hostility; malevolence.”

The alleged (potential) problem with John 3:16, one infers, is that it proclaims Christ to be God, and if you are a Muslim – or, actually, a believer in Judaism – you believe that is not true, and that the claim is blasphemy. The ‘context’ of a Muslim reader could make those words hate speech. But making a statement that someone else considers blasphemy is not intense dislike or aversion for that someone.

Maya Forstater said that “I don’t think people should be compelled to play along with literal delusions like ‘trans-women are women’”, and that “radically expanding the legal definition of ‘women’ so that it can include both males and females makes it a meaningless concept, and will undermine women’s rights and protection for vulnerable women and girls.” Disagreeing firmly with someone else’s (even sincere) claim about himself is not loathing or wishing ill to him.

Felix Ngole, the social worker, said that he “believes that marriage is a divinely instituted lifelong union between man and woman, and that the expression of sexual relationships only accords with Biblical teaching when expressed within a monogamous marriage of one man and one woman.” Saying that things other people do – indeed, some of their fairly major life choices – are wrong is not malevolence or aversion.   

Definitions of ‘hate speech’, ‘hate crime’, or ‘non-crime hate incident’ are not immediately straightforward. One self-described equality and human right charity notes that “there is no legal definition of hate speech under UK law”, but quotes the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s definition of “forms of expression which incite violence, hatred or discrimination against other persons and groups, particularly by reference to their ethnicity, religious beliefs, gender or sexual orientation, language, national origin or immigration status… Hate speech is not protected by freedom of expression, and the state can lawfully prevent and punish expressions of hate speech.”

Meanwhile, the Government’s Code of Practice tells us that “A non-crime hate incident (NCHI) means an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.” I’m not sure “hostility or prejudice” are the same as hate; but even so, hostility (OED : “2. transferred and figurative. Opposition or antagonism in action, thought, or principle”) to certain claims or actions does not necessitate hostility to the persons making or doing them. 

Attempting to make ‘hate’ actionable at law is problematic, because hate is in the mind. It might co-exist with, or even motivate, all kinds of statements. Maya Forstater might have felt, or wished to incite, hatred for men who call themselves women when she was disagreeing with their claims. A Christian might hate Muslims, Jews, atheists and liberal Anglican prelates while stating that Jesus Christ is divine. For that matter, a teacher might hate a student when telling him that he’s spelt a word incorrectly. So to be sure no unlicensed hate is hiding in any heart, law enforcement calls on subjective perception. It means they can indict as hatred words which aren’t hateful, as well as words that are. 

Because some words are inherently hateful, and we should not allow anyone to forget the difference. 

This, for example, is inherently hateful: laughing at a man’s murder, and proclaiming contemptuous indifference to his family’s grief. If you do that, you hate him – and them. It fits the definition, unarguably: dislike, loathing, malevolence. George Abaraonye, for example, did not just say he didn’t care that Charlie Kirk had been killed, nor express indifference to the fate of a living opponent (“I wouldn’t care if someone shot him”). He laughed that the man had been murdered (“loool”), and he and his friends then verbally bullied people who suggested that this wasn’t right. If someone’s death prompts that from you, you hate him. If you respond with praise or endorsement to advertised glee at a person’s murder, you hate him. If, two months later, you are yelling “F*** your dead homie” at attendees of an event organised by the murder victim’s organisation, you hate him – and you hate persistently and deliberately, not just in a brief and thoughtless moment.

The outpouring of hatred for Charlie Kirk (RIP) on the part of people he disagreed with led to disagreements among the anti-woke crowd (an unscientific term, but we all know what we mean). Some said that people like George Abaraonye shouldn’t suffer, because it’s a matter of free speech; our opponents will then be right to cry hypocrisy. Others said that this really crossed a line, disgusted by the heartlessness, the amorality, the gloating – in short, the hatred in his words and behaviour.

It may be said that sometimes hatred is the correct response: to, say, the perpetrators of genocide, to rapists and child abusers, to sadistic torturers. Even with indisputably evil actions, though, it is right to try to keep our hate for beliefs and actions, rather than for people. There is still a difference between righteous – even righteously wrathful – desire for just retribution, and vindictive hatred. And of course, once we say that “Ok, the really evil types that no one would defend you can hate as much as you like,” it only takes a lobbying group to say that, actually, according unborn children legal protection basically is torturing women, or that Israel bombing Gaza actually is genocide, and we’re back where we were. You can spew whatever bile you like at those who disagree with you, and remain the kind one.

Full-fat free speech does demand that speaking hatred should not be illegal. Only actual incitement to crime or violence should be legally prohibited. In any healthy society, expressing vindictive hatred for a murder victim may (for example) cause most members of a debating society to prefer that you didn’t run their society anymore; it may deter decent people from being your friends. But not everything that’s wrong should be criminal.  

The difference between hatred and disagreement – even with someone’s deeply-held beliefs and life-defining actions – matters, though. The distortion of words corrodes justice and public life. It’s not unlike the insistence that offensive words are violence, which can enable people to respond to words with actual violence, while telling themselves they’ve really done nothing worse than their victim did: “My words were no less insensitive than his,” Abaraonye half-apologised. Allowing dissenting beliefs to be described as ‘hatred’ enables actual hatred to be passed off as no worse than disagreement. It allows the suggestion that you can’t object to personal, vindictive hatred if you defend the free articulation of beliefs. It also trivialises the nastiness of, and the insult to the victims of, actual hatred. I don’t need to imagine what it’s like to become very suddenly a widow with fatherless young children, because I know. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have your husband quite deliberately taken from you, and then to know that dozens of people have gloated at the fact, and hundreds more have laughed self-righteously at their gloating.

Hatred can be, and sometimes is, expressed by people of all persuasions – Left, Right, conservative, ‘woke’, etc. But any claim that disagreement is ‘hate’ must be firmly denied. And I think that claim is made more often by those ‘on the Left’ than by conservatives, and is more readily entertained by officialdom. The argument may be that some beliefs, and their consequent actions, are so central to people’s identities and life choices that voiced disagreement therewith necessarily distresses and devalues them; and therefore you’d have to hate them, and want others to hate them, in order to say things such as that it’s impossible for a man to become a woman, or that marriage only exists between a man and a woman. Or, in the fears of the Burnley PC at any rate, that Christ is divine.

It’s sometimes said that the problem here is the over-centralisation of feeling: if someone says he feels hated, you hate him. Your intention is measured by his feeling. I strongly suspect, though, a selective centralisation of certain feelings. I mean, a devout Catholic could claim that the belief that the Bread and Wine at Mass are transubstantiated into Christ’s Body and Blood is central to his Catholic faith, that Catholicism is central to his identity and shapes his whole life, and that therefore for anyone to say out loud that this doctrine is untrue is so very distressing and devaluing to his entire life choices that it’s basically hate speech and shouldn’t be allowed. I doubt one would get very far with reporting that even as a non-crime, though. If we allowed everyone to play that sort of game equally, almost anything worth saying would become unsayable. So we shouldn’t enable anyone to play it.

But if people insist on ‘hate’ laws, we must demand that they keep them for words that cannot convey anything other than hatred. Because we all know, though it may sometimes suit some people to pretend they don’t, that there is a difference.  

The meaning of words matters. The difference between disagreement and hate matters. Let’s keep watch on ourselves and our own hearts, and on our friends and allies, that we do not fall from disagreement or opposition into hatred. Let’s go on insisting that free speech is a key principle, that not all that is wrong should be illegal. But when the word ‘hate’ is misused, let’s remember what actual hatred is like; and as we rush to stand under the free speech banner, stop off on the way to demand that the word ‘hate’ is reserved for hate.

We all know the difference between “God so loved the world, that he sent his only Son” and “Right-wing stupid fuck maga activist shot unalived… Poor little girl and wife my ass”.