After witnessing a gay pride march, committed Christian Pauline Howe wrote to the council to complain that the event had been allowed to go ahead.
But instead of a simple acknowledgement, she received a letter warning her she might be guilty of a hate crime and that the matter had been passed to police.
[…]But Mrs Howe told the Sunday Telegraph her comments were an expression of her beliefs, not homophobia. She received a response from the council’s deputy chief executive, Bridget Buttinger, who said it was the local authority’s ‘duty… to eliminate discrimination of all kinds’.
She went on: ‘The content of your letter has been assessed as potentially being hate related because of the views you expressed towards people of a certain sexual orientation.
‘Your details and details of the contents of your letter have been recorded as such and passed to the police.’
This is actually pretty standard stuff – it happens all the time in Canada, and even in the United States. There is a conflict between the right to free speech and the right not to be offended by other people who disagree with your views.
And he has a plan, too. Read this post and submit your questions for the Chief Fascist, Jennifer Lynch.
Excerpt:
Jay Curry has got the ball rolling. We are proposing to forward a list of reader submitted questions you would like to see the members of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights hearing on Section 13 (1) ask Jennifer Lynch during her scheduled appearance.
We hope to do this formally with say a top ten list of reader questions e-mailed to each committee member but I also recommend you e-mail the committee members individually.
As Flea suggests you should make your questions short and sweet and back them up with publicly available evidence. You may submit your questions at the blog of your choice, or e-mail me – blazingcatfur@gmail.com if you wish. Thank you.
Previous posts
And here are some links to audio and video featuring Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. (in reverse chronological order)
I blogged before about the California school district that is indoctrinating 5-year olds with homosexual propaganda in kindergarten. Well, Canada had a similar problem in the province of British Columbia, where the entire curriculum was going to be designed by gay activists. Now, you might think that the Canadians would be a lot more leftist on such issues, you’d be wrong.
Alberta has a bill in the works to give rights to parents to opt out of programs like this.
Check out this story from the Globe and Mail. (H/T My friend Andrew)
Bill 44, which proposes amendments to Alberta’s Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act, contains two significant changes. The first adds sexual orientation to proscribed grounds of discrimination. This would bring Alberta’s human rights legislation into conformity with a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that “read in” sexual orientation after it had been deliberately omitted three times by the Legislative Assembly in Edmonton. The amendment has been widely praised.
Section 11 of the new act is more controversial. It requires that parents be notified whenever instructional materials are taught dealing “explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation.” If parents object in writing, the student can be excused from class.
According to Rob Anderson, Conservative MLA from Airdrie-Chestermere, a riding just north of Calgary, Bill 44 “is one of the most positive and meaningful advances for human rights that this province and this country has seen for many years.” Specifically, he explained, the “parental rights clause” enshrines Article 26 (3) of the United Nations universal declaration of human rights: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” Premier Ed Stelmach added that his government “supports a very, very fundamental right and that is parental rights with respect to education.”
This article was written by a political science professor at the University of Calgary, which is the school where their prime minister Stephen Harper got both his degrees in economics. They are known for their conservative views. They even have a special name: the “Calgary School” of economics, just like you might talk about the “Chicago School” and the “Austrian School”. Awesome!
Bill 44 is a response to a B. C. Human Rights Tribunal decision mandating two gay activists to commandeer the Ministry of Education in that province to impose a “social justice” course into the curriculum. Parents’ rights, never mind those of local school boards, were overridden.
The B. C. example and Alberta’s Bill 44 indicate how HRCs have poisoned politics in those two provinces.
Now everyone, not just Christian preachers, has to worry about getting dragged before an HRC. A former chairman of the Calgary School Board once proclaimed the state “owns” children who must be liberated from the supposedly claustrophobic viewpoints of their parents. This goes to show how little this debate has to do with promoting critical thinking or cosmopolitanism, as the Post’s article suggests.
If there is an upside to this, perhaps now there will be sufficient support across the political spectrum to dismantle the HRCs.
WINTERY KNIGHT 