Supporting free speech is easy when it’s speech you agree with. The real test of your convictions and your desire to protect our God-given rights is when the speech to be protected is that which you view as abhorrent.
In Canada, they are failing that test. The star chambers known as the provincial human rights tribunals has decided to strip yet another person’s right to free speech for failing to pay obeisance to homosexuality. A Protestant minister has been fined $7,000 and ordered to “cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals.” Michael O’Brien’s novel “”Plague Journal (Children of the Last Days)
” is eerily prescient.
Boissoin was first hauled before the Human Rights Commission to answer to a complaint filed by Lund, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. Lund made his complaint after Boissoin published a letter to the editor in the Red Deer Advocate, in which he denounced homosexuality as immoral and dangerous, and called into question new gay-rights curricula permeating the province’s educational system.
So where is the ACLU? I know, it’s Canada, not the US, but you hear liberals extol Canada as a progressive paradise so often, it’s curious that they overlook this jackbooted thuggery. Or maybe it’s not so curious.
Many liberals treat human rights as a construct of the state, meted out like treats for well-behaved children and taken away from those who transgress accepted standards. (Yes, some speech—like “fighting words” and yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater—are unacceptable, but those are the extremes. This is a trampling upon religious and political speech.) But our rights are not given to us by law or by courts or by tribunals or even by the Constitution. Those institutions merely guarantee our rights and enumerate them for all to understand. As the Founding Fathers so clearly understood, we are endowed with rights like freedom of speech and religion by our Creator.
Yet when you’ve cast out God and replaced Him with the Nanny State, which is controlled by whichever party gins up the most votes, then rights become privileges which can be granted, revoked, or simply trampled at the latest fashionable trend.
The United States is not Canada, especially in the way our Constitution is written and our rights guaranteed, but don’t grow complacent in your certainty that your rights will never be stripped from you. In many it’s already happening, if not yet upheld by the highest court in the land, and those who would bend you to their will are hard at work, looking for ways to change the laws of God and man without any of that messy democracy.
