juliawise comments on Schelling fences on slippery slopes - Less Wrong
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The Victorian law is one of those laws whose real meaning is quite different from its formal one. Read literally, it is a sweeping law that criminalizes anyone who says anything unkind about any religion. (It's literally criminal to "behav[e] in a way that encourages... revulsion or ridicule of another person, because of the other person's... religion," or to "encourage[]... severe ridicule of... [a] class of persons, because of their... religion.") Yet in practice, of course, it's tacitly clear what kinds of people should watch their mouths or else fear prosecution under this law, and who can in turn safely ignore it. (Generally, throughout the Western world, with the U.S. as a lone exception, modern speech restrictions commonly have this form, providing effectively a broad mandate for ideological censorship.)
Note also that a century ago people were tougher and had less to lose, so that much more severe penalties were necessary to get them in line. Also, a criminal or even just an arrest record of any sort is by itself a far more severe and permanent penalty for a respectable person nowadays than back then. Even defending yourself successfully in court will require a ruinous expense for everyone but the very rich, and this cost has gone up way out of proportion with income. So, while nobody in the West is facing ten-year sentences for speech these days, I don't think the chilling effects are much less severe than in the WW1-era U.S.
Edit: By the way, none of these Americans (as far as I know) actually served a full ten-year sentence. They were all pardoned in the early 1920s by Warren Harding under his policy of "return to normalcy."
I heard somewhere that for the civil rights protesters of the 60s, going to jail had a very different meaning than it does for protester types today. Respectability was a much bigger deal then than now - those people dressed up in suits to protest and be arrested. At the time, the only marginally well-known precedent for being arrested for a good cause was Thoreau. I know people now who are proud of their protest-related arrest records, but that wasn't really a thing before the 60s.