In a democratic society such as Bermuda, where the rights to freedom of belief and expression are bedrock principles enshrined in our Constitution, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But not to their own facts.

Absolutely no one is entitled to be wilfully and grossly ignorant, let alone given a free pass to broadcast that ignorance under the guise of truth.

Our constitutional system entitles and encourages us to develop informed opinions by exercising another, generally underutilised, right — our freedom of thought.

Objective, inarguable facts are an indispensable part of the thought process, no matter how often some opportunistic politicians and members of Bermuda’s various alternative-reality-based communities may rail against them.

Over the past week or so, Bermuda has witnessed facts going ignored on a wholesale basis to serve the agendas of both political and religious extremists.

The most deliberately misleading and corrosive falsehoods have instead been put into widespread circulation, what amount in many instances to the crudest imaginable incitements to hatred.

Both parties to ongoing negotiations between Government and the Island’s public sector unions have been routinely slandered, racially insensitive and inflammatory stereotypes have been put into widespread circulation, and gay people, those all-purpose scapegoats for whatever social or cultural ill happens to be ailing Bermuda, have once again found themselves on the receiving end of especially detestable vilification.

The cranks, like the poor, will of course always be with us. So we can expect no respite from the more rabid callers to radio phone-in shows and the blog commenters and newspaper letter writers who hide their identities under the assassin’s cloak of anonymity. They will continue on with their cavalier disregard for both common sense and common decency.

But when widely known and followed public figures and their propagandists feel free to say anything, without any regard for the truth (or any concern about the damage their lies may cause), it becomes increasingly difficult for a democracy to rationally address the major issues it is confronted with.

Shading, or simply making up, the truth is hardly an effective means of creating an engaged and informed citizenry.

This is happening on an increasingly regular basis in Bermuda.

There are legal limits to uninformed opinions and malicious misrepresentations in Bermuda, as in all other societies, based on the rule of law and respect for human rights.

This is precisely why slander, libel and hate speech laws exist.

These and other restrictions on unconstrained freedom of speech are intended to rein in the very worst excesses of our proclivity for confusing bloody-minded dogmatism with absolute certainty.

Such legal remedies are intended to protect the targets of ignorance without fundamentally compromising the underlying civic liberties of even the most ignorant among us.

The bottom line is there’s no collective wisdom to be found in wholesale individual cluelessness. Repeat a lie a thousand times and it does not become the truth. It is still wrong. Such lies are being deployed too often in Bermuda either by members of the lunatic fringe or those who do know better but who are becoming increasingly well practised in the cold calculus of political expediency.

But proscriptions on free expression are, by necessity, only loosely enforced.

Most people naturally interpret freedom of speech to mean they are free to say exactly what they like and it’s only offensive when someone says something back they disagree with.

So the acid-test for what constitutes unacceptable speech remains deliberately vague, except in the most conspicuous and extreme cases.

This is and has to be the case in any democratic society worthy of the name. After all, history demonstrates just how easy it is for a community to go crashing down the slippery slope into what’s rightly been called “cascading censorship” like a derailed train.

Consequently there will always be everyday examples of free speech in its most despicable form in Bermuda which will have to be endured through gritted teeth.

It’s always been present but is far more prevalent now given the rise of social media and the ongoing popularity of phone-in radio shows. It’s likely to become increasingly more common.

We can only hope that while both the fringe players and our more unscrupulous public figures are exercising their right to be heard, the rest of the community is exercising its democratic right to ignore them. Or, indeed, to laugh at them.

For it’s been argued that the final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

Let’s hope this is so and the highly developed Bermudian sense of the ridiculous is indeed enough to cope with this latest onslaught of political, racial and religious demagoguery kitted out as truth.