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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Why banning a political party and not the political views? It seems easier to punishing people based on what they say and write and throw them into prison, rather than trying to keep the same people from assembling together as a group and having people vote for them.

Make it illegal to hold and express the view that people should not be allowed to wearing the burqa. If someone is express that they are against same-sex marriage or against circumcision for non-medical reasons, let them sit in jail for a few years. Why allow people to legally hold those view and express them but then forbid them from being political about it?

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let me introduce you to this slope, its pretty slippery but i am sure its fine. Nobody has ever slid down such a slippery slope before...

refresher course on reality: you want these views out in public so you can publicly ridicule the people expressing them. You send them to jail they learn from the real criminals how to be really criminal with their views and come out worse than before. That these views are taking hold more and more now tells you there is a legitimate problem not being addressed and either the view is some shade of correct or, more likely, the view is an incorrect solution to the actual problem that won't work. Either way you have to figure it out and fix it. Repressing the view just makes the eventual result more violent without solving the underlying issue causing the view

Or… there is an intentionally manufactured problem, amplified and misrepresented by foreign adversaries through the internet and the mouths of the complicit elite, in an attempt to subvert democracy and rot societies from the inside out.

It seems quite worrying for the government to forbid certain views. For instance, some religious groups teach that same-sex marriage is wrong; would banning such views not infringe upon their religious freedom?

If those religious groups has views that undermining the constitutional order, then Germany could prosecute them. That is the underlying legal argument. The basic law give every German the right to any belief or non-belief, but then it also limit that freedom in case it undermines the law itself. Does the religion opposes human dignity, do it support democracy, and do it support the rule of law in Germany. Teaching that say that same-sex marriage is wrong could be seen as opposing human dignity, thus not allowed under the basic law.

Because you need the organization to cause change. China figured this out. If everyone wanted something to happen, say the end of Covid restrictions, even the CCP wasn't capable of stopping that uprising. But if it's just a few weirdos spouting their ideas online or off, the local police can easily handle them. Looking at the videos out of France, it's not as bad as it looks, but also, organized via group messages/texts, but they're not trying to get people to get people to pass laws in a calm, diplomatic fashion.

As far as jailing people because they think or say the wrong thing? omfg no thank you! Saudi Arabia almost just beheader someone for that kind of WrongThink.

Do we have any example of a "good" country that has banned political parties for holding the wrong political views? The most recent example I can remember is Russia when they prevented a anti-war party for participating in the election, but I doubt that is example that people want Germany to follow.

The German constitution allow the legal system to limit the fundamental rights of individuals who are found to be undermining the constitutional order. It can punish people as well as preventing people to form political parties. If the political views are so bad that they are seen as undermining the constitutional order, allowing people to hold those views and express them but not to form parties seems odd and counter-intuitive. If the views are that bad they should not be expressed regardless if its done with or without a party hat.

Spain banned parties that didn't explicitly condemn terrorism (in the context of Basque independece-related terrorism, but applies to all terrorism in Spain).

Up until then, certain politicians wouldn't explicitly support, but also wouldn't condemn Basque-independence-related terrorism when asked. Thankfully we're now past this! The terror group was dissolved.

Probably the law was a good thing? The danger being 'who decides what terrorism is', but I suppose the definition in the law is fairly clear (haven't read it nor plan to).

Two examples come from Germany's past - The KDP/Communist Party was banned in 1956, and by counterexample, Germany considered banning the neo-Nazi NPD party, but decided they were too politically irrelevant to bother banning them (2017). Turkey had the Welfare Party banned in 1998 but that one's a bit stickier.

That is a strange collection of hills to die on or to defend by blatantly illiberal means.

If Western Civilization prides itself on classically liberal freedoms, it cannot claim to do so while limiting them, especially for the sake of religion which is antithetical to the French forefathers of classical liberalism. The right to be "Free" from all religion is given, and therefore speech must be stronger than the right to practice any religion.

It's classically liberal to allow anyone to follow their religion, it's not classically liberal to restrict freedom of speech for the sake of religion, much less for the sake of a foreign religion.

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