Tag Archives: Political Correctness

News

Conservative MP’s bill to repeal Section 13 moves to committee

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Canada 2011 Federal Election Seats
Canada 2011 Federal Election Results

Andrew sent me this article from the Chronicle Herald.

Excerpt:

To protect freedom of expression in Canada, sometimes you need a majority government in Ottawa.

That’s the moral of the story of a Conservative backbencher’s private member’s bill — which has now cleared second reading in the House of Commons and gone to committee — seeking to repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Let’s recall the exact wording of that infamous clause. Hate messages, according to Section 13 (1), are communications “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”

In other words, if I were to write something critical about Islam, for example, and someone reading my column felt it “likely” that my words could provoke “contempt” towards Muslims, they could lodge a complaint against me with one of Canada’s government-created human rights commissions.

Truth would not be a defence. Neither would my intent. And the person complaining wouldn’t even have to be a Muslim.

That’s because, on top of the appallingly loose wording of this section of federal human rights law — a clause echoed in its provincial counterparts — any complaints are adjudicated by government-appointed tribunals, where the standard protections afforded any accused in a court of law don’t necessarily apply.

When complainants’ cases go forward, taxpayers pick up the tab. Meanwhile, those accused must pay to defend themselves out of their own pockets.

It’s a system ripe for abuse. And that’s exactly what has happened. We’ve seen comics fined for insulting hecklers (B.C. human rights tribunal), former publishers spend $100,000 in legal fees over three years to defend themselves for printing “offensive” cartoons (Alberta human rights commission), and Maclean’s magazine investigated by three human rights bodies (federal, Ontario and B.C.) for running an article on Muslim demographics in Europe.

The Conservatives have long opposed Section 13, but didn’t feel they had the support they needed from the other parties, as a minority government, to push the issue legislatively.

They also were concerned, with good reason, that some opponents might twist the issue for political advantage, slamming the Tories for being soft on hate.

Yes, Bill C-304, which aims to repeal Sections 13 and 54 (dealing with penalties under S.13), was put forward by Alberta MP Brian Storseth (Westlock-St. Paul) and is a private member’s bill, but the legislation has the justice minister’s endorsement. So there’s a good chance the bill will be back in the Commons this spring for final reading, then on to the Senate and, hopefully, passage and royal assent.

The bill, if made law, would take effect a year after receiving royal assent.

Canada does not protect free speech right now. Repealing Section 13 would be good, but Canada is not a good place for families to raise children. Even if they get Section 13 repealed, there is still the recent unanimous Supreme Court decision affirming that the provincial governments have a right to decide what children will believe – not parents. The Supreme Court was mostly selected by the previous Liberal governments.

News

How the left uses “bullying” to restrict free speech that offends them

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From Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Full text: (links removed)

A school superintendant has labeled a column in a school newspaper thatcriticized homosexuality as “bullying.” (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as “bullying” answered the question “no.” The school district also publicly apologized for the column, and said that it is “taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.”)

Whatever the wisdom (or lack thereof) of featuring something like that in a school newspaper, it seems strange to argue that a viewpoint in a student newspaper is “bullying.” (The Shawano School District’s bullying policy provides that “bullying” may lead to “warning, suspension,” “expulsion,” etc.) A conservative Christian who thought that homosexuality was immoral successfully challenged a school “harassment” code that punished students with such viewpoints in Saxe v. State College Area School District(2001), a case in which a federal appeals court ruled that there is no “harassment” exception to the First Amendment for speech which offends members of minority groups. Speech cannot be banned simply by labeling it as violence, either: for example, in Bauer v.Sampson, another federal appeals court ruled that a campus newspaper’s illustration depicting a college official’s imaginary death was protected by the First Amendment, even though the college declared it a violation of its policy against “workplace violence.”

But schools and anti-bullying activists have adopted incredibly overbroad definitions of bullying. The anti-bullying website NoBully.com, and schools like Fox Hill and Alvarado Elementary, define even “eye rolling” and other expressions of displeasure or hostility as bullying, even though doing so raises First Amendment problems.

The Obama administration claims bullying is an “epidemic” and a “pandemic.” But in reality, bullying and violence have steadily gone down in the nation’s schools, as studies funded by the Justice Department have shown. The Obama administration’s StopBullying.gov website defines a vast array of speech and conduct as bullying: it classifies “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.” Since “creating web sites” that “make fun of others” also is deemed “cyberbullying,” conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition. (Law professors such as UCLA’s Eugene Volokh have criticized bills by liberal lawmakers like Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) that would ban some criticism of politicians as cyberbullying.)

It’s very important to understand what liberals mean when they say “bullying” and how they use it to silence those who might offend them. It’s using government power to force individuals to accept the morality of the state. There’s a word for that.

News

New PLOS study finds that men and women have major personality differences

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From Science Daily. (H/T Levin)

Excerpt:

Men and women have large differences in personality, according to a new study published Jan. 4 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

The existence of such differences, and their extent, has been a subject of much debate, but the authors of the new report, led by Marco Del Giudice of the University of Turin in Italy, describe a new method for measuring and analyzing personality differences that they argue is more accurate than previous methods.

The researchers used personality measurements from more than 10,000 people, approximately half men and half women. The personality test included 15 personality scales, including such traits as warmth, sensitivity, and perfectionism. When comparing men’s and women’s overall personality profiles, which take multiple traits into account, very large differences between the sexes became apparent, even though differences look much smaller when each trait is considered separately.

However, the study indicates that previous methods to measure such differences have been inadequate, both because they focused on one trait at a time and because they failed to correct for measurement error.

The authors conclude that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has therefore been consistently underestimated.

This has implications for many questions, not the least of which is gay marriage. If men and women are different, then children get the benefits of those differences, and they get the benefit of seeing the two sexes interact in a love relationship that’s about commitment and cooperation – not just lust and attraction.

I really appreciate it when my readers send me great articles like this that I can use, where we can all learn something about the way the world really is.