1 The reasonable audience of religious hatred — The semiotic ideology of anti- vilification laws in Australia 1 Massimo Leone, Department of Philosophy, University of Torino School of English, Communication, and Performance Studies, Monash University 1. Introduction: religion, violence, and rights. The history of the idea of ‘human rights’ spans over several centuries (Flores 2008). The history of the legal discourse seeking to bring about the conditions for the full exercise and protection of such rights is equally long. The inclusion of religion within the protective frame of the legal discourse on human rights is not recent either (Leone 2007a). Examples are plentiful. For instance, the 1310 Roman statutes already proclaimed: “Judei sint et esse intelligantur cives Romani”, “the Jews are and are to be considered as Roman citizens”, in order to discourage discrimination against Jewish citizens in the pontifical State (Toaff 1996). In this as well as in other circumstances, the mere presence of a legal statement declaring the illegitimacy of discrimination based on religion indicated the necessity of such statement: the citizenship of Roman Jews had to be affirmed de jure exactly because it was denied de facto. Such irony characterizes the entire history of the legal discourse on human rights (Zizek 2006) and it is particularly evident in the religious domain: the urge to define and protect the exercise of the human right of religion has often been a consequence of historical periods in which religion has turned into ground for discrimination, violence, and even death (Leone 2007b). The history of human rights is inseparable from the history of human violence. By this, it is not meant that the legal discourse on human rights, including that on the human right of religion, should be discarded as an ironic, or even hypocritical, by-product of violence. It is meant, instead, that such legal discourse must be described, analysed, and assessed in relation to the conditions of violence that determined its elaboration. 1 This article was written thanks to the support of an Endeavour Research Award by the Australian Government. I thank Elizabeth Coleman and Richard Mohr for their comments on a previous version of the article.