- Is the dam breaking? The NY Post published a stellar
piece called "Canada's Thought Police" about a prominent writer
yanked before Canadian tribunals on hate speech charges. The piece wonderfully
alerts Americans to the nightmare of hate speech prosecution in Canada,
and warns that our own freedom of speech faces the same Orwellian horror.
"Speech cops in America, too, are forever attempting similar efforts
- most visibly, on college campuses."
-
- It's heartening that on Dec 17 this
story topped the Post's list of "most emailed" stories. Everyone
should know. Another paper, the Washington Times, recently published a
biting column by the indicted author, Mark Steyn, himself which leads with
hate speech stupidity in Australia, where Santas are told not to say "ho
ho ho" at Christmas.
-
- I'm excited that hate speech stories
are making it into these papers. But still, that's only two papers, only
one in the top ten of U.S. circulation. You'd think the Canadian goons
went too far by indicting Steyn, who's hardly a backwoods KKK member. But
humans seem willing to allow any evils that don't harm them directly. In
a poetic piece for the Ottowa Citizen, columnist David Warren says Steyn's
case "should clang alarm bells right across Canada. Yet all we have
heard is a couple of modest tinkles."
-
- Steyn, a prolific and widely published
conservative, wrote a book on Islam that became a Canadian number one bestseller.
Five Muslim law students want him silenced. They claim his thesis--Islamic
culture is incompatible with the values of the west--is wrong and exposes
Muslims to "hatred and contempt." Two thought police tribunals,
the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights
Commission, are going to hear the case. You might want to read Rebecca
Walberg's great dissection of the HRC. A Canadian herself, Walberg warns,
"Publishing controversial articles and adhering to one's religion
can now lead to time-consuming, stressful, and expensive dealings with
Human Rights Commissions."
-
- In his Citizen column, David Warren
says not even Canadian conservatives have truly opposed hate crime laws.
Instead they legitimized the thought police by lodging their own complaints
against anti-Christian or -conservative defamation--complaints that were
predictably ignored.
-
- Why would Christians or right-wingers
expect assistance when defamed with words? As I wrote in my last article,
even violent attacks on Christians and conservatives hardly merit a mention.
Conservative students at Princeton face death threats if they speak up
for traditional values. Last Friday one of them was brutally beaten. You
probably haven't even heard of this story! A Princeton senior commented
that the student body was "noticeably silent". Imagine the outcry
if the beaten student had been a gay rights, Jewish, or black activist
instead of a conservative.
-
- But it's still astonishing. Most Canadians
sit on their hands while thinkers as mainstream as Mark Steyn are hauled
before courts. Warren rewrites a fitting quote: "First they came for
the redneck trolls, and I did not speak out because I was not a redneck
troll. Then they came for the male chauvinist pigs, and I did not speak
out because I was not a male chauvinist pig. Then they came for Mark Steyn,
and I did not speak out because I was not Mark Steyn. Then they came for
me, and there was no one left to speak out for me."
-
- Another Ottowa Sun columnist (I'm liking
this paper!) named John Robson also wrote against the hate speech case,
with bitter sarcasm that still makes you laugh. Robson wonders what he
can even get away with saying about the case. "All in all it's much
safer to write about daisies. Such pretty flowers. They are members of
the Asteraceae family, the second-largest family of flowering plants after
Orchidaceae... None of them file hate speech complaints with aggressive
paralegal tribunals either. What's not to like?"
-
- But maybe there's hope, maybe the US
can hold it for a few decades more. If only there could be more columns
like the one in the NY Post. It would be even better if writers went a
step further and pointed out the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
and the Jewish supremacist activists who wrote up these laws in the first
place.
-
- We've already seen hard-core, militant
erosion of Christian culture and values in the US since the 1960s. The
only question now is whether we'll let our ancestors' values be actually
made illegal. The conversation about hate laws has begun. Let's keep it
going!
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