Canadian Fair Play

Canadian Fair Play

Free speech is all fine a dandy unless it is something the gov't disagrees with.

Remember folks, this article is abOOt FREE SPEECH, not homosexual rights. I hate to break it to you on the Left (and the Right for that matter) but you DO NOT have a RIGHT to silence people who disagree with you. Deal with it.

When two people disagree with what each other is saying, say one is a pro-choice activist and the other a pro-life activist, who would get to stifle the other? According to the principle above, EITHER one could claim that the other was saying something they did not like and which, they felt, oppressed them. So who would win? The first guy to the courthouse?

It's happening here as well, folks.

Stomping on free speech

'Canada is a pleasantly authoritarian country," Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said a few years ago. An example of what he means is Bill C-250, a repressive, anti-free-speech measure that is on the brink of becoming law in Canada. It would add "sexual orientation" to the Canadian hate propaganda law, thus making public criticism of homosexuality a crime. It is sometimes called the "Bible as Hate Literature" bill. . . . It could ban publicly expressed opposition to gay marriage or any other political goal of gay groups. The bill has a loophole for religious opposition to homosexuality, but few scholars think it will offer protection, given the strength of the gay lobby and the trend toward censorship in Canada. Law Prof. David Bernstein, in his new book "You Can't Say That!" wrote that "it has apparently become illegal in Canada to advocate traditional Christian opposition to homosexual sex." Or traditional Jewish or Muslim opposition, too.

Since Canada has no First Amendment, anti-bias laws generally trump free speech and freedom of religion. A recent flurry of cases has mostly gone against free expression. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission ruled that a newspaper ad listing biblical passages that oppose homosexuality was a human-rights offense. . . . a British Columbia court upheld the one-month suspension, without pay, of a high school teacher who wrote letters to a local paper arguing that homosexuality is not a fixed orientation but a condition that can and should be treated. The teacher, Chris Kempling, was not accused of discrimination, merely of expressing thoughts that the state defines as improper.

That anti-free-speech principle, social conservatives argue, will become explicit national policy under C-250, with criminal penalties attached. Religious groups say it would become risky for them to teach certain biblical passages. . . . And since C-250 does not mention homosexuality but focuses broadly on "sexual orientation," Canada's freewheeling judiciary may explicitly extend protection to many "sexual minorities." Pedophilia and sadism are among the conditions listed by the American Psychiatric Association under "sexual orientation."