{"id":11037,"date":"2011-09-07T09:19:27","date_gmt":"2011-09-07T13:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11037"},"modified":"2011-09-07T09:19:27","modified_gmt":"2011-09-07T13:19:27","slug":"if-they-take-away-your-freedom-of-speech-you-cant-defend-any-of-your-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/09\/07\/if-they-take-away-your-freedom-of-speech-you-cant-defend-any-of-your-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"If they take away your freedom of speech, you can’t defend any of your rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn<\/a> on the rapidly constricting “right” to free speech in most of the western world:<\/p>\n

\n

To be honest, I didn\u2019t really think much about \u201cfreedom of speech\u201d until I found myself the subject of three \u201chate speech\u201d complaints in Canada in 2007. I mean I was philosophically in favor of it, and I\u2019d been consistently opposed to the Dominion\u2019s ghastly \u201chuman rights\u201d commissions and their equivalents elsewhere my entire adult life, and from time to time when an especially choice example of politically correct enforcement came up I\u2019d whack it around for a column or two.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t think I really understood how advanced the Left\u2019s assault on this core Western liberty actually was. In 2008, shortly before my writing was put on trial for \u201cflagrant Islamophobia\u201d in British Columbia, several National Review<\/em> readers e-mailed from the U.S. to query what the big deal was. C\u2019mon, lighten up, what could some \u201chuman rights\u201d pseudo-court do? And I replied that the statutory penalty under the British Columbia \u201cHuman Rights\u201d Code was that Maclean\u2019s<\/em>, Canada\u2019s biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth. [. . .]<\/p>\n

And what I found odd about this was that very few other people found it odd at all. Indeed, the Canadian establishment seems to think it entirely natural that the Canadian state should be in the business of lifetime publication bans, just as the Dutch establishment thinks it entirely natural that the Dutch state should put elected leaders of parliamentary opposition parties on trial for their political platforms, and the French establishment thinks it appropriate for the French state to put novelists on trial for sentiments expressed by fictional characters. Across almost all the Western world apart from America, the state grows ever more comfortable with micro-regulating public discourse\u2014and, in fact, not-so-public discourse: Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, has been tried, been acquitted, had his acquittal overruled, and been convicted of \u201cracism\u201d for some remarks about Islam\u2019s treatment of women made (so he thought) in private but taped and released to the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn on the rapidly constricting “right” to free speech in most of the western world: To be honest, I didn\u2019t really think much about \u201cfreedom of speech\u201d until I found myself the subject of three \u201chate speech\u201d complaints in Canada in 2007. I mean I was philosophically in favor of it, and I\u2019d been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,62,10,28],"tags":[491,186,46,477],"class_list":["post-11037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-cancon","category-europe","category-liberty","category-media","tag-bc","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-hrcs","tag-magazines"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2S1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11038,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11037\/revisions\/11038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}