Posted on 06/11/2008 6:01:20 PM PDT by shrinkermd
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.
Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.
Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self-respect.”
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated the law.
...Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”
Professor Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of efforts to use the law to limit hate speech.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
FIRE! FIRE!
i hope i don’t get banned...
we have the freedom to say anything, it is up to those hearing it to respond rationally and logically to ascertain its veracity.
if you don’t like it is not a reason to ban it.
teeman8r
i hate when i due that..
ugh
BTTT!
...other than zero-tolerance policies and hate speech legislation, among other slippery slope P.C. B.S.
That is funny, it is pretty clear to me that the Europeans are flat out stupid. Once you give the Government control of your speech (HRC) or thoughts (hate crimes) you pretty much give them control over you. Then again the EU has been trying to enslave Europe under it’s unelected politicians anyways...
You take away any aspect of free speech in the United States and very slowly small concerned groups of citizens will organize. Their activity and numbers will grow and it will not be pretty. It will happen.
Virtually every Communist and Fascist state had (and has) pleasant-sounding stuff in their constitutions about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. But there was always some weasel-words about “maintaining public order and respect” that fatally undermined those guarantees. Same thing about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Exactly!
btt
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