Tag Archives: Free Speech

News

Canadian judge bans pro-life ads, because free speech makes people feel bad

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This pro-life ad was banned because it hurts people's feelings
This pro-life ad was banned because it hurts people’s feelings

This is from Heat Street. It reminds me what a joke of a country Canada has become since their 50 year slide into secular left fascism.

Excerpt:

A Canadian city was “proportionate and reasonable” in censoring a pro-life ads from the sides of its buses because the banners were “likely to cause psychological harm to women who have had an abortion,” according to a ruling.

Justice C.S. Anderson has ruled that the city of Grande Prairie in the province of Alberta “reasonably” balanced the freedom of speech rights of the pro-life advertiser with the city’s own policies of providing a “safe and welcoming” space for bus passengers and pedestrians with its advertising.

According to the judge, the ruling won’t prohibit every pro-life ad in the city, but he stressed that it was reasonable to ban banners specifically produced by the Calgary-based Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform (CCBR) because they might upset women and children.

The pro-life group’s ad showed unborn babies at seven weeks’ and 16 weeks’ gestation followed by an empty frame filled in red to represent an aborted baby. Underneath the images were the captions: “growing,” “growing” and “gone.” The ad also read: “Abortion kills children” and showed the group’s website.

Judge Anderson said that CCBR website includes messages such as “Now is the time to put an end to the slaughter. Now is the time to look evil in the face and say, enough. Now is the time to join together, and lend our voices to those who had theirs brutally taken from them.”

“These are strong statements that vilify women who have chosen, for their own reasons, to have an abortion; they are not merely informative and educational,” Anderson added.

Now, it’s true that I am a bit of a “hold women accountable” person. In the past I’ve blogged about how women are more supportive of abortion rights and gay marriage than men. So, naturally, I wanted to know if the pro-abortion, anti-free-speech judge was a man or woman. Answer: she’s a woman:

The Honourable Charlene S. Anderson, a lawyer with Ross Smith Asset Management Inc. in Calgary, is appointed a judge of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta (Calgary) to replace Madam Justice B.L. Veldhuis who was appointed to the Court of Appeal on February 8, 2013.

Honorable!??? That’s not the word I would use for an anti-free-speech fascist, but I know that Canada is a third-world banana republic, where the right to free speech is not guaranteed in their founding documents. It’s a tax-and-spend nanny state, where the government micromanages the words of the citizens.

Commentary

Canadian professor warns Americans about conflict between gay rights and free speech

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Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties
Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties

This editorial by a Canadian university professor from the far left University of Toronto appeared in the non-partisan The Hill.

He writes:

Two weeks ago I posted three YouTube videos about legislative threats to Canadian freedom of speech. I singled out Canada’s Federal Bill C-16, which adds legal protection for “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal code.

I noted that the policy statements surrounding similar legislation — most particularly those on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website — were dangerously vague and ill-formulated. I also indicated my refusal to apply what are now known as “preferred” pronouns to people who do not fit easily into traditional gender categories (although I am willing to call someone “he” or “she” in accordance with their manner of self-presentation).

These videos attracted a disproportionate amount of attention — online, in the Canadian national media, and beyond. A demonstration at the University of Toronto protested my statements. Another was held in support of free speech. The latter was met by counter-demonstrators who drowned out the speakers with white noise and assaulted a young female journalist — an act now viewed by half a million people on YouTube overall.

Here is the video:

He continues:

If you are wondering, reasonably, why any of this might be relevant to Americans, you might note that legislation very similar to Bill C-16 has already been passed in New York City.

Authorities there now fine citizens up to $250,000 for the novel crime of “mis-gendering” — referring to people by any words other than their pronouns of choice (including newly constructed words such as zie/hir, ey/em/eir and co).

The issue is government forcing us to use words that do not reflect reality:

Bill C-16, and its legislative sisters, are particularly insidious constructions.

[…]There is… a crucial difference between laws that stop people from saying arguably dangerous words and laws that mandate the use of politically-approved words and phrases. We have never had laws of the latter sort before, not in our countries. This is no time to start.

So, a note from a Canadian friend. The citizens of your great country, and ours — and of our allies across the Western world — are at risk.

Careless, ideologically-addled legislators are forcing us to use words we did not freely choose. We have to draw a line in the sand. That’s why people are watching. It’s a vitally important issue. We cannot afford to get it wrong.

This is actually the mainstream Democrat view. We should expect this view to become federal law whenever Democrats are elected (often with the votes of Catholics and liberal Protestants). This is what Democrats mean when they say “tolerance” and “equality”. They mean an end to free speech. You don’t have to be a conservative to be alarmed by this, especially when we have so many other more pressing problems, e.g. – the national debt, national security, the dangerous foreign policy situations worldwide, etc.

For those looking to science on the transgender issue, I recommend this peer-reviewed paper published in The New Atlantis journal. It’s balanced, and I disagree with some of the conclusions, but you have to at least know what science says about this issue right now.

News

Google censors conservative video lectures from Prager University on YouTube

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Google and YouTube censoring mainstream conservative viewpoints
Google and YouTube censoring mainstream conservative viewpoints

Jay Richards tweeted this story on Twitter, which appeared in the Washington Examiner.

It says:

In the latest example of bias against conservatives, YouTube is censoring videos from conservative group PragerU by placing them on “restricted mode.”

The category, which is applied to videos that may contain “potentially objectionable content,” was applied to 21 PragerU videos, the groupannounced on its Facebook page on Tuesday.

The group has created a petition to get YouTube to stop the censorship, and has already received more than 20,000 signatures. The 21 videos account for 10 percent of PragerU’s video collection, and include videos asking: “Are the Police Racist?” “Are 1 in 5 Women Raped at College?” and “Is America Racist?”

PragerU, or Prager University, is the brainchild of radio host Dennis Prager, and offers short, five-minute videos about a range of topics presented from a Judeo-Christian and conservative perspective. The videos use slick graphics and statistics to summarize complex issues such as racism and foreign policy.

Jared Sichel, communications director for PragerU, said in a statement that the organization has been communicating with YouTube, which is owned by Google, for “several months” trying to get their videos uncensored. Sichel explained what placing the videos in “restricted mode” does.

“Restricted mode is something that many parents and schools use so that children don’t watch explicit adult and sexual content — not so they can’t find animated, educational videos on topics ranging from history and economics to happiness and philosophy,” he wrote.

Because YouTube and Google has refused to relent, Sichel said, the organization started the petition. Another spokesperson for the organization told the Washington Examiner that news reports generated Tuesday about the petition have so far not resulted in the videos becoming uncensored.

For comparison, PragerU posted to its Facebook page that videos addressing similar topics from the liberal Vox are not placed in restricted mode. For instance, the PragerU video “Is America Racist?” is in restricted mode, while Vox’s “The racist history of US immigration history” is not.

In case you haven’t heard about Prager University, these are just 5-6 minute courses taught by scholars who teach atmajor universities or who do research at major think tanks.

Here is a quick video introduction to the series:

The courses are meant to convey truth on complicated subjects in an easy to understand way. I have featured some of them on this blog, and I watch them and share them all the time on social media.

Here are the 21 videos that were deemed unacceptable to the far left activists running Google and YouTube:

  • Are The Police Racist?
  • Why Don’t Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?
  • Why Did America Fight the Korean War?
  • Who’s More Pro-Choice: Europe or America?
  • What ISIS Wants
  • Why Are There Still Palestinian Refugees?
  • Are 1 in 5 Women Raped at College?
  • Islamic Terror: What Muslim Americans Can Do
  • Did Bush Lie About Iraq?
  • Who NOT to Vote For
  • Men and the Power of the Visual
  • Is America Racist?
  • Israel: The World’s Most Moral Army
  • Radical Islam: The Most Dangerous Ideology
  • The Most Important Question About Abortion
  • Why Do People Become Islamic Extremists?
  • Don’t Judge Blacks Differently
  • What is the University Diversity Scam?
  • He Wants You
  • Israel’s Legal Founding
  • Pakistan: Can Sharia and Freedom Coexist?

And it’s not just Google censoring conservative views. Just last month Twitter censored professor Glen Reynolds for criticizing criminals who block highways. And earlier this year we heard about how Facebook editors deliberately push conservative stories down in their “trending topics” section.

These companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) couldn’t be successful in far left countries like North Korea and Cuba, but they love to bash the country that gave them success anyway. Ingratitude is everywhere on the left. Ingratitude and narrow-minded intolerance of free speech that disagrees with their own prejudices.