timeimmortal

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:

1. 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.
2. 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!

It’s most interesting to note how LawIsCool shuts down the ability of people to put in opposing points of view in their comments section. That is their right. How would he feel if a human rights commission ordered LawIsCool to give equal time to opposing points of view after costing them a fortune in defending their right to close their comments section? He wouldn’t like it I am sure. But I guess, to paraphrase George Orwell, some people are more equal than others and their rights to freedom of speech more equal than others.

I’ve had commentators at the site tell me that the people going after Mark Steyn are the ones that have all their facts in line, and that Steyn’s would-be censors have consistently been gracious and non-insulting. We’ll leave aside, perhaps, mention of how — one of the key figures behind LawIsCool — accuses those who disagree with him of being mentally unbalanced, or how he has dismissed comments he disagrees with as ’spam’ (what wonders they have done for spam bots on the ‘Net if they can now respond to discussions on topic and coherently). And we’ll ignore how he has re-written yet other comments he has found fault with.

Deborah Gyapong�s commentary is worth reading in full, and is an excellent analysis of just the sort of people who are pursuing the case against freedom of speech in Canada. In some respects, it’s nice to know that Daniel Simard is as consistent in his denial of people their basic human right (as per the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document I am sure Simard is otherwise quite fond of) to free speech…but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s being an arsehole who is denying people their basic human right to free speech.

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

As I say in this week, freedom of speech only for inoffensive speech is no freedom at all. A nation free only to prance along to Barney the Dinosaur pabulum is living under a soft beguiling totalitarianism, even if it doesn’t yet know it. Take Dean Steacey, the Canadian HRC’s lead “anti-hate” investigator, and his delusion that “freedom of speech” is an “American concept“. Golly, we’d all hate it if the ghastly Yanks had invented it. But isn’t Canada a signatory to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Including Article 19?

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

No Americans need be involved, folks. Why, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is so Canadian, it’s on the back of Canada’s $50 bill - and, if the HRC doesn’t believe me, it can check the next time its doling out another cash settlement to Richard Warman. Mr Steacey and the HRCs are, in fact, abusers of the “human rights” laid out in the UN Declaration, so the only reason for me to string along with their game is to play my part in ending their regime.

More than what Steyn did or did not say, the issue in this matter is that the very process by which certain parties are now attempting to nail Steyn to the wall is — in and of itself — a fundamental violation of human rights. I will say it again, and more clearly: the Canadian Human Rights Commission is itself a violation of the rights of Canadians.

The astute reader will know that I am no fan of the Charter or the Universal Declaration, prefering British Common Law to either/both. But Canada has its Charter and is supposed to be governed by the stipulations thereof, and Canada is a signatory to the Universal Declaration. But as much as a non-fan of both of those documents as I am, I can recognize that enshrined in both is the inalienable human right to freely articulate opinions — yes, even hateful ones.

Some commentators here have asserted that Mark Steyn has his facts wrong, and that the Osgoode Hall law students have it right. My personal view tends toward the opposite of that one. But even the issue of who is actually right is unimportant. What is important is that this star chamber called the HRC is even allowed to operate in Canada, in flagrant violation of what Canadians have declared to be their rights and freedoms, and the universal rights of all human beings. Mark Steyn’s article in Maclean’s magazine might be the battleground, but the actual war is about something much more critical.

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