Tag Archives: Southern Poverty Law Center

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Darren Lund loses second attempt to punish Canadian pastor for exercising free speech

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Dr. Darren Lund, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary
Dr. Darren Lund, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary

From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

Pastor Stephen Boissoin, who was found guilty in 2007 by a provincial human rights tribunal of “hate speech” for writing a letter to the editor expressing his views on homosexuality, has been strongly vindicated after the Alberta Appeals Court dismissed an appeal of a lower court decision in Boissoin’s favor.

The court also ordered Boissoin’s accuser, homosexual activist Dr. Darren Lund, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, to pay Boissoin’s attorney fees.

Appeals Court Justice Clifton O’Brien concurred with the lower court that Boissoin’s letter “was not likely to expose homosexuals to hatred or contempt within the meaning of the Alberta statute.”

In 2009, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Earl C. Wilson overturned the 2007 ruling by the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC), which ordered Boissoin to desist from expressing his views on homosexuality in any sort of public forum, ordered him to pay damages equivalent to $7,000 to Lund and called for Boissoin to personally apologize to Lund via a public statement in the local newspaper.

[…]“Matters of morality, including the perceived morality of certain types of sexual behavior, are topics for discussion in the public forum,” concluded Justice O’Brien. “Freedom of speech does not just protect polite speech.”

Boissoin’s lawyer, Gerald Chipeur, Q.C., who is an allied attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), pointed out that not only did Justice O’Brien throw out the AHRC’s decision, but ruled that a human rights panel had no constitutional authority to preside in such circumstances.

“This was a watershed case,” Chipeur said. “Very important, in terms of freedom of expression and religious liberty. Going forward, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for religious or political debate to be found in breach of Alberta’s current human rights laws.”

“Christians and other people of faith should not be fined or jailed for expressing their political or religious beliefs. There is no place for thought control in a free and democratic society,” Chipeur remarked. “The tools of censorship should not be available to prohibit freedom of religious expression in Canada. The court rightly found that this type of religious speech is not ‘hate’ speech.”

Gay activists can sometimes go too far and end up suppressing basic human rights like free speech and freedom of association.

Consider the case of the gay activist Floyd Lee Corkins II and the recent shooting at the Family Research Council that he was involved with. We need to be careful in the United States about encouraging gay activists like Floyd Lee Corkins II, who are hostile to basic human rights like free speech and freedom of association. The fascistic tendencies of the secular left have resulted in much violence in the past century, and you can even see it today in places like North Korea, where free speech and freedom of religion are not allowed. I’m sure that Stalin thought that what he was doing to the millions of people who disagreed with his agenda was “social justice”, too.

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Gay activist who vandalized Chick-Fil-A restaurant will not be charged

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From the radically left-wing Los Angeles Times.

Excerpt:

A West Hollywood artist who allegedly painted the words “Tastes like hate” on the side of a Chick-fil-A restaurant because of the company president’s stand against gay marraige won’t be criminally charged by the L.A. County district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors announced Wednesday they were declining to press charges after Torrance police submitted a case.

[…]The graffiti — accompanied by a representation of a cow holding a paint brush — appeared during a week of demonstrations at Chick-fil-A restaurants nationwide sparked by company President Dan Cathy’s public denunciation of same-sex marriage.

Discovered about 6:40 a.m. Friday at the Hawthorne Boulevard restaurant, the vandalism coincided with “National Same-Sex Kiss Day,” when gay rights supporters asked couples to take photos of themselves kissing at Chick-fil-A locations.

Castro took credit for the graffiti in an interview with the Huffington Post.

“Everybody is entitled to free speech, but it seems like for the gay tribe, this is more of an issue of equal rights — human rights,” he said. “I’m against what these people stand for, what this company stands for. They’re trying to take away what little rights we already have.”

A day before he was taken into custody, Castro made another statement to the Huffington Post, telling his critics the act was “meant to further a discussion about tolerance and acceptance.”

“I didn’t use violence. I used paint. Artists for centuries have expressed their opinions through this medium and I am no different,” he said. “I am happy to pay for the costs of repainting the wall, but I am not — nor will I ever be — happy to sit quietly at the back of the bus.”

The left-wing media thinks that a crime can only be a hate crime when the right kind of people are victimized. Oh, oh, and Christians aren’t being persecuted for their faith in places like the Sudan, China or North Korea, either. Only secular leftist people can be victims, don’t you know? And if you disagree with this double standard then you’re a racist bigot, so there.

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News

Floyd Lee Corkins II is a left-winger, admired atheist philosopher Nietzche

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More details of the Family Research Council shooting from Life Site News.

Excerpt:

The suspect, a 28-year-old male from Virginia named Floyd Lee Corkins II, said, “Don’t shoot me, it was not about you, it was what this place stands for.” AP later confirmed that Corkins is a liberal activist who volunteers with a left-wing group in the D.C. area.

Now, Corkins has been charged with assault with intent to kill and with bringing a firearm across state lines. According to an FBI affidavit, Corkins allegedly said words to the effect of “I don’t like your politics” when he encountered Johnson.

“The FBI said Corkins had 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches, a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol, two additional magazines loaded with ammunition and an additional box of 50 rounds of ammunition when he came into the building,” according to a report on the FBI intel. “His parents told the FBI that Corkins “has strong opinions with respect to those he believes do not treat homosexuals in a fair manner.”

Corkins definitely comes from the left side of the political spectrum.

According to the Washington Post: “Allan P. Chan, 28, a former George Mason student, said he met Corkins at a campus gym about six years ago. They worked out together, lifting weights, and began to socialize and watch television together. Chan described Corkins as secretive and somewhat odd. Corkins’s Facebook page included no photos, not even his own, and he displayed an intense interest in the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.”

Militant atheism may also be a factor in the shooter’s motives. Nietzsche is the well-known atheist philosopher who decried the “slave morality” of Christianity and proclaimed “God is dead”. The shooter in the Garielle Giffords case (Jared Lee Loughner) was a militant atheist. Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and the American Atheists group have even called for the eradication of Christianity. But the vast majority of atheists are not violent.

On the other hand, aggressive violence is forbidden to authentic Bible-believing Christians because Jesus did not shed anyone’s blood. Authentic Christians debate and persuade using evidence, because that’s what Jesus did. The most we could do is participate in a just war like the Korean War or the Gulf War. Christians stopped slavery. Christians save unborn babies. We’re for strict non-violence.

American Power Blog has more on the left’s continued smearing of the Family Research Council as a “hate group”:

More from Kerry Picket, “Human Rights Campaign posted Ryan would speak at ‘hate group’s annual conference’ day before shooting at FRC.” And At Twitchy, “Dangerous: Left screeched about Ryan speaking at ‘hate group’ FRC; HuffPo labels FRC hate group again.” And, “Shooting at Family Research Council, suspect in custody; Update: Bomb squad enters building; Update: Mitt Romney issues statement; Update: Shooter ID’d.”

More at Legal Insurrection, “HuffPo attacks Family Research Council just hours after shooting.”

At this point, I think that anyone who uses the word “hate” to describe supporters of traditional marriage should be careful that they are not inciting anyone to violence. We have to do more to promote tolerance and oppose anti-Christian / anti-conservative bigotry on the extreme left. Almost no one on the right calls people who disagree with them names like “hater”. We need to stop with the name-calling and just discuss things civilly and agree to disagree. Every person deserves respect no matter what they think.

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