Letters to the Editor
-
Re: submission - Well said...
“When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.”
-- LynChi
That is perhaps what both Islam and Christianity have in common: the individual's submission to God. Some people in both religions get it backwards and run around thinking it has to do with making everyone else submit to their idea of God. As far as I can tell it is only those two branches of the Abrahamic religions. The Jews don't seem interested in converting people. And Scientology. They want your money.
-
Zaxtracks
Glenn, I may have missed something, but other than a reference to the 1990 Keegstra case, the links you provided are all to other provincial human rights commission cases. Those aren't criminal cases.
As you suggest, I'm not sure the differnece is that important -- the State's ability to impose fines is just as offensive, and potentially dangerous, as the State's ability to prosecute. But I also agree with you, for the sake of accuracy, it's important to get the distinction right.
I'm not an expert in Canadian law, but here are passsages from Law Professor David Bernstein's article I linked to:
The decline of freedom of expression in Canada began with seemingly minor and understandable speech restrictions. In 1990, the Canadian supreme court upheld the conviction of James Keegstra, a public-high-school teacher, for propagating Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic views to his public high-school students, despite repeated warnings from his superiors to stop. Keegstra was convicted of the crime of "willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group," which carries a penalty of up to two years in jail. Criminalizing hate speech, the court stated, was a "reasonable" restriction on expression, and it therefore passed constitutional muster.
Two years later, the same court held that obscenity laws are unconstitutional to the extent they criminalize material based on sexual content alone. However, any "degrading or dehumanizing" depiction of sexual activity — including material that the First Amendment would protect in the United States — was deprived of constitutional protection to protect women from discrimination.
Even the most zealous advocates of freedom of expression often feel uncomfortable defending the right to engage in Holocaust denial or to propagate degrading pornography. But, not surprisingly, the inevitable result of allowing these initial speech restrictions has been the gradual but significant growth of censorship and suppression of civil liberties across Canada.
In many cases, the speech that is suppressed conflicts with the Canadian government's official multiculturalist agenda, or is otherwise politically incorrect. For example, the Canadian supreme court recently turned down an appeal by a Christian minister convicted of inciting hatred against Muslims. An Ontario appellate court had found that the minister did not intentionally incite hatred, but was properly convicted for being willfully blind to the effects of his actions. This decision led Robert Martin, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Western Ontario, to comment that he increasingly thinks "Canada now is a totalitarian theocracy. I see this as a country ruled today by what I would describe as a secular state religion [of political correctness]. Anything that is regarded as heresy or blasphemy is not tolerated."
That all suggests that hate speech is criminalized, not just punished with fines. Is that accurate?
-
Zaxtracks
From the same article:
In another incident, after Toronto print-shop owner Scott Brockie refused on religious grounds to print letterhead for a gay-activist group, the local human-rights commission ordered him to pay the group $5,000, print the requested material, and apologize to the group's leaders. Brockie, who always accepted print jobs from individual gay customers, and even did pro-bono work for a local AIDS group, is fighting the decision on religious-freedom grounds.
-
Aych
A heavy pot smoker can go through an ounce in a week easily.
-- Aycharaych
Well, they sure as hell ain't smokin' the pot I grew. "Hundreds of thousands", Aych. That's what you said. And that is specifically what I disagreed with you about. You need to come clean once in awhile. There are not "hundreds of thousands" locked in cages in the United States for simple possession. That is just not true.
-
Glenn..
But the questions I asked would be perfectly appropriate ones for someone who did actually advocate the reasoning set forth in that comment.
True enough, but since shannonr did not advocate that reasoning then he/she has no need to respond to your questions.
Don't take me wrong, I'm very much on your side, I just thought it was sort of ironic to see you do to someone else that which happens to you continually.
I'm also taken wrong continually, often deliberately so, I therefore am quite attuned to catching it when it is done to others.
-
Balance needs to be restored
Punishing or harassing someone for causing offence through choice of words or actions invites a bureaucratic and legalistic nightmare. Punishing or harassing someone for advocating violence is quite another thing. Where it is hard to separate these two activities, the tendency should be to lean towards free speech, even though at times that will provide cover to advocates of violence. Put another way, enforcing civility is inappropriate, but enforcing public and private security, within reason, is a necessary function of government and other institutions. I believe in Canada we have collectively gone too far, because those taking the initiative in such matters have tended to be extremists.
One of the problems with political correctness is that the people who are most driven to fight for legislative and policy changes are the radicals with an axe to grind. Who would fight so enthusiastically to sit on a sexual discrimination panel as a person who sees hatred of women in every man’s heart?
The pendulum is always in motion. Time will tell, but I believe that in Canada the high point of the politically correct movement was in the ‘90s, when the highly politicized boomer generation arrived at the corridors of power and instituted laws and policies they hoped would put an end to discrimination. Quite apart from the question of whether people with bees in their bonnets should be making rules for others to live under, the law of unintended consequences kicked into gear immediately.
I recall a related incident from the mid ‘90s at a local university where a manifestly gay man, exuberant by nature and prone to touching the people he spoke with, was brought before a panel accused of sexual harassment. He had touched a woman, and she had felt uncomfortable, and that was enough to initiate proceedings. An additional irony was that a key player in his persecution was a Christian who felt homosexuality was an affront and loathed the overt sexuality of the accused.
Legislation and policy lag behind social attitudes, sometimes considerably, but my sense of itis that Canadians realize things have gotten out of hand. Institutional policies are already beginning to change, but laws are slower to adapt, and it will probably be decades before a sensible balance can be established.