timeimmortal

I alluded, yesterday, to the possibility that a conviction of Maclean’s by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal could have sweeping, national implications — despite the fact that in theory, HRCs don’t recognize or rely on precedent, and despite the fact that the BCHRT has no jurisdiction outside of British Columbia.

Ezra Levant today gives an example of a ruling handed down by the Alberta Human Rights Commission that demonstrates what that effect could possibly look like. It’s…damning, really, as it demonstrates that an HRC has appointed to itself the power to, in effect, demand that a person renounce his beliefs (because let us be honest: if one is not free to articulate one’s beliefs, is one really free to hold them in the first place?).

A Christian pastor [Stephen Boissoin]has been given a lifetime ban against uttering anything “disparaging” about gays. Not against anything “hateful”, let alone something legally defined as “hate speech”. Just anything negative.

So a pastor cannot give a sermon.

[Rather,] he must give a false sermon; he is positively ordered to renounce his deeply held religious beliefs, and apologize to his tormentor for having those views.

And then that pastor is ordered to declare to his entire city that he has renounced his religious views, even though he has not.

That’s Alberta’s human rights commission. That’s the group where 15 bureaucrats are busily beavering away against me, because I published some Danish cartoons two years ago.

That’s the same “law” under which Maclean’s and Mark Steyn are charged.

I got into an argument once in which I made a crack about American ignorance of all things Canadian (the specific assertion I was responding to was my opponent’s implication that all of Canada experienced a two-month (8 week) stretch of the year in which the Sun did not rise). My opponent responded that I should be careful about making such cracks, in case the Yanks ever decided to invade hapless Canada.

I joked to him that he was presuming too much; specifically, I said, he presumed that I would view American invasion as a bad thing.

Would I? Especially in light of these rulings, I have to ask: would I?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

~ by Kenneth on June 7, 2008.