Free Expression

Kevin Steel has a good rundown of the insanity of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its provincial counterparts. In our ironically-named “Human Rights Tribunals”, the notion of free expression has for some time been subordinated to the sacred cow of political correctness. Prohibitions against “hate speech” and the like tend inevitably to the loss of individual liberty; the rationale always begins with neo-nazis and their ilk, but the urge to stifle never ends there. The purpose of our human rights commissions now seems to be to prevent over-sensitive Canadians from being offended, and to punish the insufficiently sensitive people who offend them. The CHRC needs to be put out of business, and soon.

This paragraph is particularly telling:

On August 16, the online publication WorldNetDaily quoted CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, whose actions dictate whether a complaint goes to a tribunal, stating how the CHRC approaches the liberty to speak freely. "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value," he quipped to a lawyer representing a website. Apparently, Steacy has never heard of John Milton or Martin Luther, and with that kind of ignorance at the CHRC, it should be obvious the commissions can't be reined in soon enough.

Steacy’s comment is, of course, nonsense. Yet Martin Luther, fascinating chap that he was, should not be misconstrued as a defender of free speech. Luther was a proponent of a particular interpretation of Christian revelation; his advocacy of freedom of worship for the Reformers and their followers should not be confused with a kind of 16th century proto-liberalism. He was certainly not an advocate of freedom for the Jewish people, to take an obvious example. One might get the impression of Luther as a kind of romantic revolutionary leader who merely by coincidence stands for the same ideals as modern Americans from watching the Ralph Fiennes movie Luther. That film stands in the tradition of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (though it is not nearly as well-made): it is intriguing but largely historically bogus.

If Steel wanted examples of non-American defenders of free expression, he might have looked up J.S. Mill, who advocated broad free speech against the many dangers of censorship. He might have also have brought in Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), another philosopher of note. Given our current cramped political climate, one hopes that Canadian thinkers will begin speaking out in favour of free expression, without which a free society is not possible.