us groups would hurt their feelings, and might promote hostility toward them.
In recent years, Western European democracies, and Canada, have enacted legislation banning "hate speech" [Liptak][Greenwald]. This is defined typically as, "publicly making statements by which a group is threatened, insulted or degraded due to race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation." (This is the Danish version.) Truth is not an acceptable defense.
The law was invoked not long ago in Denmark to convict Jesper Langballe, a right-wing member of the Folketing (parliament), who, in a newspaper column, made statements about honor killings and other abuses of Muslim women. He was fined about $1000 (the maximum sentence under the law is 2 years imprisonment.) In France, actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000, for criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep [Maines]. (Almost all the European hate crime cases I have found involve Muslim targets.)
More generally, the European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that free speech protection does not extend to "concrete words constituting hate speech that might be offensive to individuals or groups." [Lopas]
Free expression advocates believe that outlawing hate speech, in addition to opening the door to widespread censorship, it is not an effective way to respond to bigotry [Mchangama]. A principal effect would likely be to allow bigots to play the role of heroes persecuted by a dictatorial government. The appropriate response to a nasty, or false, statement is a valid rebuttal. Where such rants have been widely disseminated, and might have significant effects, appropriate organizations can mount educational campaigns to counter them.
Laws against holocaust denial are of a similar nature. About 17 nations have such laws. These include Austria, Belgium, Canada,, France, Germany, Hungary, and Switzerland, but not the UK or any of the Nordic countries. As an example, David Irving, a right wing British author of history books, was convicted of this crime in Austria, in 2005, and served 13 months of a 3 year prison sentence.
Since such laws would obviously violate the First Amendment, they do not exist in the US. More generally, expressions of opinion are not subject to legal sanctions in the US, where hurt feelings are not considered adequate legal grounds for restricting speech.
In the UK, under The Official Secrets Act, a government employee who discloses material that has been ruled as secret, for any reason, by the government, is subject to criminal penalties [TalkTalk]. Furthermore, a journalist who reports on such material is also subject to prosecution. Arguments that the material in question has already been published, or that the release and/or publication is in the public interest are not acceptable defenses.
There are similar laws in almost every country--except the US, where the First Amendment protects journalists, or others, who publish material of this type. However, there have been times when this was not the case. The 1917 Espionage Act was used on a large scale to prosecute people for such acts as making speeches calling for the US to end its participation in the ongoing war (WW I), or arguing that the draft was unconstitutional [Wikipedia-Esp]. Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for a speech condemning the war.
These events prompted the formation, in 1917, of the Civil Liberties Bureau, which, in 1920, was renamed The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As a result of lawsuits brought by the ACLU, Supreme Court decisions, starting in the 1920's, greatly strengthened First Amendment protection for journalists and news media. The Pentagon Papers case made it clear that simply classifying a document as secret is not enough to justify outlawing its publication [Wikipedia-Pent].
However, in recent years, the Obama Administration has been making heavy use of the Espionage Act to prosecute government employees who reveal "secrets" embarrassing to