It was the last day of winter break when my cousin and I were snuggling up on the bed watching “10 things I hate about you” on Netflix when a particular scene caught my attention. When Katarina, the antisocial shrewish high school senior voices her opinion in her English class, the teacher, being really offended, tells her to leave the classroom immediately. This made me ponder if freedom of speech was truly free, and if it was wrong to speak out your views even if it was labeled as “hate speech.”

According to Wikipedia, hate speech is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability or sexual orientation. Lately,hate speech has been a popular topic to debate on because people are offended by even the most trivial things. Many people believe that there should be some kind of punishment for people who use hate speech and argue that it should be prohibited by the law. On the contrary, I think that hate speech is imperative because people can express their viewpoints verbally and it’s evident that if they aren’t able to express their feelings through words, they will express it through action. This would certainly pose a great threat to everyone.

Moreover, one of the main problems of hate speech is the fact that it’s subjective because every person has a different way of understanding things. For instance, person A is a Hindu and person B is an atheist. If person A gets aggrieved just because person B expressed their ideologies regarding religion, then it’s not justifiable. A person should have the right to express their ideas without the fear of getting arrested. If we place restrictions upon hate speech, we are basically telling people that they are wrong for believing what they believe and expressing it verbally.