Deborah Gyapong has an excellent report published in the latest edition of the Western Catholic Reporter concerning, of course, Canada’s human rights commissions, this time in light of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to the UN.
Pope Benedict’s speech to the United Nations last month serves as a reminder to Canada that human rights discourse stems from a world view based on universal truths and an objective notion of right and wrong.
“Either we recover some of these assumptions and make a serious course correction,” McGill University professor Douglas Farrow said, “or we begin to encounter quite rapidly the consequences.”
Farrow sees Canada’s human rights commissions as a sign the country is in a transitional phase, because increasingly the Canadians are seeing human rights as what we say they are.
“Thus laws can be written concerning human rights that have nothing to do with universal standards.”
…
Increasingly, various individuals and groups are using human rights commissions to “generate traction” for that group’s particular construct of rights, he said. This method has often been used to suppress religious freedom, especially that of Christians.
Farrow said the real basis for human rights springs from a world view like that the pope outlined in his speech - a theistic world view that sees a benevolent Creator and human beings made in God’s image, with a capacity to distinguish between good and evil.
The pope exhorted the world body to return to its founding principles as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The declaration is based on “the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations,” Benedict told the UN.
Human rights should mean the fundamental freedoms to which all human beings are entitled, exercised within a framework of obligations and responsibilities, the burden of which all human beings must bear. The notion of human rights, however, has been abgorated and, I would say, abducted by those whose view of rights is that they are a series of entitlements which are accompanied by no reciprocal responsibility whatsoever. Whereas there should be a natural “give and take,” the view of the HRCs and their “clients” increasingly is that rights is all “take” with no “give” reciprocal to it.
To call that immoral, to call it unethical, and to call it a violation of natural law would at once be accurate and an understatement.
I’m no fan of the UN, as the regular Reader will know, but at least the UDHR recognizes that the right to freedom of expression is one of the bedrock principles of human freedom. Yes, there are responsibilities that go along with that right, and yes we do have some legal protections in place in Canada to make sure that freedom of expression does not cross the line to incitement to violence.
But in regard to freedom of expression, it is worth noting two things:
- it is nowhere written that, included among the responsibilities that accompany the right to freely express one’s opinion, we have a responsibility to avoid hurting people’s feelings or offending people’s sensibilities. Social convention encourages us to be polite even when expressing disagreement, but some ideas cannot easily be expressed in a manner that pays good observance to social convention.
- it is nowhere written that any of us has the right to not be offended, nor is it anywhere written that any of us has the right to not have our beliefs and views challenged
Perhaps the word “yet” should affixed to the end of both of those points; I don’t know.
The plain fact of the matter is that, through the existence and operation of human rights commissions, specifically in regard to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, Canada is going far beyond where it needs to go in order to ensure that so-called “reasonable limits” on freedom of expression exist. There is only one real “reasonable” limit on freedom of expression anyhow, and that is making incitement illegal. Limiting freedom of expression because some things are e.g. hurtful or offensive to others is not a “reasonable” limitation at all — such limitation is, in fact, the antithesis of freedom of expression: it is Censorship.
And as such, it has no business in Canada.
Update: Welcome, Steynians!
