U of A law prof gets it
June 13, 2008
BCF links to an article by Russ Brown, a professor of law at the University of Alberta (my alma mater) has an article up on the Faculty of Law blog concerning Pastor Stephen Boissoin’s “conviction” by the AHRC. And while Prof. Brown doesn’t agree with Boissoin’s views, he definitely understands Voltaire:
An earlier post referred to a recent case in British Columbia and argued that the functionaries who staff the country’s human rights commissions have no competence to determine the constitutional limits of expression.
The problem is not, of course, confined to British Columbia. The Alberta case involving Ezra Levant is notorious, and now comes the Boisson case - in which the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission ordered a youth pastor in Red Deer to write an apology abjuring (I presume untruthfully) his views on homosexuality and has also ordered him to refrain from making “disparaging” remarks about homosexuals. (It has been observed that for him to give a sermon in his church citing the biblical injunction against homosexuality probably violates the Commission’s order).
…
What is astonishing about the Commission’s order is that it goes beyond what is, in my view, the already illegitimate regulation of expression by functionaries. This man is being ordered to actually engage in expression: specifically, to recant and, by abjuring his own views on homosexuality, to say something which is presumably contrary to the dictates of his own conscience.
It’s no small step to move from ordering thou shalt not say to ordering thou shalt say. Let’s hope a real court gets ahold of this.
Indeed.
He hits the nail exactly on the head. It’s one thing for the court to say to Pastor Boissoin: “you can’t say that anymore.” That would be bad enough, seeing as how it is Censorship of expression that does not appear to meet the necessary — and sole legal — criteria for the due limitation of expression: incitement to violence. But actually forcing Pastor Boissoin to speak something which is not a viewpoint he holds for himself is quite another thing, and then much more serious.
Update: Welcome, Steynians!
