Time Immortal

This is a man who knows that of which he speaks, having faced the star chamber kangaroo court Alberta Human Rights Commission himself.

“Human rights laws, designed as a shield, are now being used as a sword,” [Bishop Fred Henry] wrote in a December 31 email from Calgary, in what he described as an increasingly “bizarre” series of events.

The recent filing of human rights complaints against magazine for an excerpt of Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone, and against Catholic Insight magazine for articles outlining Catholic teaching on homosexuality, are only the latest in a series of cases that have highlighted freedom of speech and religious freedom.

The Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL) described the Steyn and Catholic Insight cases as part of an “ongoing pattern in the use of human rights commissions to penalize the expression of unpopular opinions,” in a December 31 alert to members entitled, ‘Stop the use of human rights commissions in free speech cases.’

“The League is concerned about this disturbing trend, since it often involves opinions based on religious beliefs,” said CCRL executive director Joanne McGarry.

Henry agrees, stating: “The issue is rarely true Discrimination but rather censorship and enshrinement of a particular ideology through threats, sanctions and punitive measures.”

In 2005, Henry faced two separate complaints to the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for allegedly discriminatory comments in a pastoral letter on marriage. “I challenged one by one the standard arguments used to support same sex unions as the equivalent of traditional marriage,” Henry stated.

Though the complaints were eventually dropped, Henry described the process as “fundamentally flawed,” and closely resembling “kangaroo courts.” Among those flaws, he maintained, were the “presumption of guilt until you can prove your innocence; the open ended time lines for dealing with a complaint; and unjust incurring of financial expenditures for the defendant in the simple event of a complaint being lodged.”

The AHRC covers the complainants’ costs.

Human rights commissions (HRCs) were set up to protect people against discrimination when it came to housing, employment or services. Henry contended that existing human rights legislation needed to be interpreted very broadly to allow the complaints against him.

“It was surprising that the Commission accepted the complaints on the basis of ‘goods/services refused and terms of goods/services,’ as there was no explanation as to what constituted goods or services refused, or their terms,” Henry said. “Nor did the complainants set out the manner of discrimination in other areas.”

He added: “I believe these complaints were an attempt to intimidate and silence me.”

As is becoming increasingly clear, the various advocates for the establishment of Canada’s human rights commissions — at a national and provincial level — must have either been absolutely daft to not realize that such bodies would become instruments for censorship and the regulation/elimination of in Canada, or must have had that censorship and jackbooting of freedom as their goal. Out of charity, one desires to assume they were merely daft, but in the end the outcome is the same either way.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

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!