Otherwise how will our taxpayer-funded hate police manage to keep their cozy sinecure?
Last week's letters page included a missive from Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., chief commissioner of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, defending her employees from the accusation of "improper investigative techniques" by yours truly. Steyn, she writes, "provides no substantiation for these claims," and then concludes:
"Why is this all important? Because words are important. Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why
Hmm. "History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes." Commissar Lynch provides, as she would say, "no substantiation for these claims." But then she's a "hate speech" prosecutor and, as we know,
It's true that "hurtful actions that undermine freedom" and lead to "unspeakable crimes" usually have some fig leaf of intellectual justification. For example, the ideology first articulated by Karl
Ah, but that's the Good Totalitarianism. What about the Bad Totalitarianism? You know, the one everybody disapproves of: Nazism. Isn't it obvious that in the case of Adolf Hitler, "hateful words" led to "unspeakable crimes"? This argument is offered routinely: if only there'd been "reasonable limits on the expression of hatred" 70 years ago, the Holocaust might have been prevented.
There's just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi
"Remarkably, pre-Hitler
Inevitably, the Nazi party exploited the restrictions on "free speech" in order to boost its appeal. In 1925, the state of
The idea that "hate speech" led to the Holocaust is seductive because it's easy: if only we ban hateful speech, then there will be no hateful acts. But, as professor Anuj C. Desai of the University of Wisconsin Law School points out, "Biased speech has been around since history began. As a logical matter, then, it is no more helpful to say that anti-Semitic speech caused the Holocaust than to say organized government caused it, or, for that matter, to say that oxygen caused it. All were necessary ingredients, but all have been present in every historical epoch in every country in the world."
Just so. Indeed, the principal ingredient unique to the pre-Hitler era was the introduction of Jennifer Lynch-type hate-speech laws that supposedly protect vulnerable minorities from "unspeakable acts." You might as well argue that
Continue: http://www.macleans.ca/canada/opinions/article.jsp?content=20080423_31672_31672
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Biased and Unfair | TRUTH is NO Defence | 100% Convictions | Lifetime Speech bans
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Stop Section 13: http://www.StopSection13.com
Marc Lemire Legal Case and CHRC Documents
FACTUM - Written Submissions on Constitutional Challenge of Section 13 and 54 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (This is a
| The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal Active and Past cases: 46 | Cases the tribunal ruled on: 37 · NOT A SINGLE respondent have ever won a section 13 case · 98% of cases have poor or working class respondents · 90.7% of respondents are not represented by lawyers · $99,000 has been awarded in fines and special compensation since 2003. · 35 respondents have lifetime speech bans (Cease and Desist) orders and if not followed the victims could face up to 5 years in prison. |
Groups and Writers that Support Repeal of Section 13: http://www.stopsection13.com/repeal_sec13.html
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