timeimmortal

I think we’ve all heard that saying before.

With regard to yesterday’s news about Bill M-446 introduced by MP Dr. Keith Martin, Mike Brock notes that the majority of blog support for Bill M-446 is coming from the political right. (Or from racist nutbars, who do also stand to gain from Section 13 being struck down…but that’s a necessary consequence of freedom, as I’ve been saying…)

The political left has been largely silent. Or, alternatively, they have chosen, like blogger BigCityLib, to turn on Dr. Martin and label him a Nazi sympathizer.

With friends like these…

Not that I’m all that surprised to see Liberals turning on one of their own who just happened to dare to depart from the established narrative. God forbid that a member of the Liberal Party of Canada be an actual liberal, in the classical meaning of the word. But then, that’s the nature of fascistic ideologies, I suppose; eventually, they turn the guns on their own followers.

The continued existence of Section 13 is an affront to the Charter-ensured right of every Canadian to freedom of expression. There is also, within that same , a sufficient framework in place for dealing with those rare occasions where what is expressed is genuinely harmful (i.e. to deal with torts and incitement). Hurting someone’s feelings, however distasteful the act might be, is not illegal. That is why Section 13 has to go: not because there is a large segment of the Canadian population that is anxious to freely and openly express Nazi sentiments, but because the best way to combat those sentiments is to let them be expressed in the light of day so that the rest of us, reasonable folk all, can reject them as the rubbish that they are.

That is, I think, the real problem with progressives like BigCityLib: they don’t trust the ability of the average Canadian to think for him/herself, and would that Canadians leave the thinking to their “betters.”

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

~ by Kenneth on February 1, 2008.