Free speech on the ropes

In Canada you can go to jail for offending someone with the truth.

Calling someone a bastard may not be the nicest thing, it may even hurt their feelings, but it may in fact be true, in the technical sense, if the person’s parents were never married. Truth is a great defence. It was truth that saw Oscar Wilde lose in his lawsuit against the Marquis of Queensbury. Queensbury had called Wilde a sodomite by posting a notice of such on a sign inside a prestigious gentlemen’s club in London. Wilde who was engaged in an affair with Queensbury’s son, sued the Marquis but lost because what the Marquis had said was true.

Truth has always been the journalist’s best defence as they seek to expose the failings of politicians, governments or societies leaders. Against a torrent of highly paid lawyers, journalists have always been able to rest on truth. Truth, as the Good Book says, will set you free. Except in Canada.

Those complaining don’t ever have to prove that hatred and contempt actually occurred, just that it is likely to have happened or will happen in the future.

A quasi-judicial process few Canadians have paid attention to over the last few decades is generating much international coverage of late due to at least one high-profile name, Mark Steyn (pictured on home page). The man once called “the columnist to the world”, published everywhere from Oregon to Jerusalem, London to Sydney, is at the centre of a series of complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission and two of their provincial counterparts over an excerpt published in Macleans magazine of Steyn’s book America Alone. Steyn is accused of promoting hatred and contempt towards Muslims and of spreading Islamaphobia.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/free_speech_on_the_ropes/?view

 

Tags: anti-Christian, Canada, evil, fascism, free, free speech, freedom, persecution, statism, tyranny