Time Immortal

Patent stupidity from the HRC:

Hatred is a feeling, and feelings, until recently, couldn’t be crimes.

“Vicious” comments are punishable by fines now, my fellow Canadians — blog accordingly, or else.

“Discrimination” is merely the act of observing that some things, ideas or people are different than others, and until the 70s was known as “common sense“.

John David Beck is probably a big jerk. Regardless, he should refuse to pay this imaginary, arbitrary fine, impossed by a kangaroo “court”, and we should all protest this latest decision by our unelected, unaccountable, self-appointed Thought Police.

Beck’s ‘crime’ was using the Internet to publish material offensive to Jews, minorities, and the disabled. The name of the website was bcwhitepride.com. Is John David Beck a nice guy? No, very likely not. Is what he was saying very nice? No, absolutely not…in fact, it wouldn’t be hard at all to say that what he was publishing was, indeed, hateful and immoral.

But was it a crime, what he did?

The Canadian Human Rights Commission evidently feels so; they would not have fined him otherwise.

But what Beck did was no crime. Ugly as all sin, yes, but not a crime. Indeed, he was exercising a right that Canada purportedly ensures for him both in its Charter and through its commitment to international human rights agreements — that of the freedom of expression.

PENCanada — a Canadian non-profit organization that lobbies on behalf of writers, internationally, who have been forcibly silenced or imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of expression — defines freedom of expression thusly:

What do we mean by “freedom of expression?” Many definitions are out there. However, although the wording varies, the substance is the same. In its essence, freedom of expression is the right to say freely what you please, as well as the related right to hear what others have stated. This includes the freedom to create and distribute written works, movies, pictures, songs, dances and all other forms of expressive communication.

And on their list of obstacles to freedom of expression, the fourth item (after assault, threats, and murder) is:

Censorship (State or otherwise imposed)

Canadians lobby — and in many cases risk their freedom or their lives — on behalf of writers world-wide who have been denied what even the UN recognizes as a basic human right. Will these same Canadians now lobby on behalf of their fellow countrymen, who are being subjected to what amounts to state censorship?

Now, it’s easy to lobby for the release of writers who have been arguing, themselves, for noble causes, such as writers who have been imprisoned for criticizing the Chinese government and its brutality. It’s measurably harder to lobby for the freedom from censorship of writers who have very distasteful things to say. But there’s the rub: a human right — which freedom of expression most certainly is — is only a right, and only worth defending, if it is defended in every instance it is trampled upon, and in every instance where a human being is denied that right. Defending only those people who have something nice to say is meaningless, and actually destroys the concept of freedom of expression; what we are free to express, in that paradigm, is only that which is palatable to a majority of members of society.

There’s one further implication. Yeah, they only went after a racist website; so what? Well, a lot of people confuse criticism of Islam with racism, and I do a lot of criticism of Islam on this site (well, on some days I do). Does that make me a racist? Perhaps not objectively, but in the eyes of some people it certainly does. And a ruling like this tells me that someone could only too easily send government goons to my door…or to the door of any Canadian blogger who publishes something offensive to someone else (i.e. most conservative bloggers, who are called ‘racist’ by way of greeting by many on ).

Relatedly:

Update: Welcome, nohippo readers. Thanks, Winelreid, for the link!