Month: April 2004

Where’s Martin Niemoeller when you need him? That may be an exagerration, but — well, the good reverend’s famous quote is all about slippery slopes.

I find hate speech … well, hateful.

Problem is, what I consider hate speech may simply be someone’s expression of opinion or moral conviction or political belief. And, frankly, I find suppression of opinons and beliefs even more abhorrent. Because it all becomes a matter of who’s doing the defining of what’s “hate” right now.

‘Canada is a pleasantly authoritarian country,” Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said a few years ago. An example of what he means is Bill C-250, a repressive, anti-free-speech measure that is on the brink of becoming law in Canada. It would add “sexual orientation” to the Canadian hate propaganda law, thus making public criticism of homosexuality a crime. It is sometimes called the “Bible as Hate Literature” bill, or simply “the chill bill.” It could ban publicly expressed opposition to gay marriage or any other political goal of gay groups. The bill has a loophole for religious opposition to homosexuality, but few scholars think it will offer protection, given the strength of the gay lobby and the trend toward censorship in Canada. Law Prof. David Bernstein, in his new book You Can’t Say That! wrote that “it has apparently become illegal in Canada to advocate traditional Christian opposition to homosexual sex.” Or traditional Jewish or Muslim opposition, too.
Since Canada has no First Amendment, anti-bias laws generally trump free speech and freedom of religion. A recent flurry of cases has mostly gone against free expression. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission ruled that a newspaper ad listing biblical passages that oppose homosexuality was a human-rights offense. The commission ordered the paper and Hugh Owens, the man who placed the ad, to pay $1,500 each to three gay men who objected to it. In another case, a British Columbia court upheld the one-month suspension, without pay, of a high school teacher who wrote letters to a local paper arguing that homosexuality is not a fixed orientation but a condition that can and should be treated. The teacher, Chris Kempling, was not accused of discrimination, merely of expressing thoughts that the state defines as improper.

I think that Biblical teaching opposing homosexuality is wrong. I am not a believer in the inerrancy of Scripture, and even if the passages usually quoted mean exactly what they say, I don’t believe they’re applicable today (any more than any number of other Biblical injunctions). And even if they did, using the Bible as the basis per se for civil law seems unwise (if not unconstitutional).

But that doesn’t mean that I want folks who speak out Biblically against homosexuality — whether in quiet, studied tones or with the flipped-out fire and brimstone of the Phelps Gang — to be prosecuted for doing so.

When you allow the state to suppress opinions the ostensible majority find repugnant, it’s a recipe for (at the very least) a tyranny of that majority. Dressing it up as protection against “hate speech” is missing the point — a shift in the public wind, and you could as easily fine people and send them to jail for criticizing the church. It’s bad, bad, bad public policy.

The churches seem to be the key target of C-250. One of Canada’s gay senators denounced “ecclesiastical dictators” and wrote to a critic, “You people are sick. God should strike you dead.” In 1998, lesbian lawyer Barbara Finlay of British Columbia said “the legal struggle for queer rights will one day be a struggle between freedom of religion versus sexual orientation.”
It’s starting to be defined just that way in other countries. In Sweden, sermons are explicitly covered by an anti-hate-speech law passed to protect homosexuals. The Swedish chancellor of justice said any reference to the Bible’s stating that homosexuality is sinful might be a criminal offense, and a Pentecostal minister is already facing charges. In Britain, police investigated Anglican Bishop Peter Forster of Chester after he told a local paper: “Some people who are primarily homosexual can reorientate themselves. I would encourage them to consider that as an option.” Police sent a copy of his remarks to prosecutors, but the case was dropped. In Ireland last August, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned that clergy who circulated a Vatican statement opposing gay marriages could face prosecution under incitement-to-hatred legislation.

There’s a certain irony here, of course. Neither side of the political spectrum, Left or Right, has been immune to prosecution of unpopular speech. Certainly conservatives in the 20th Century scurrilously used “un-American” and “unpatriotic” and “anarchic” and “Communist” as labels under which to crack down on dissent — often abetted by Christian churches with their own social axe to grind. It’s ironic that the Left, which struggled mightily against those suppressions of opinion and belief, are so quick to institute their own now that they have the political power to do so.

The article is a bit breathless in its warnings about the situation, and there is certainly room for considered differing opinion on the wisdom of this legislation. But it’s worrisome. It echoes a trend of Goodthink that perennially infects this country, even with the First Amendment. And it makes me wonder — what sort of stuff have I written about here could be considered “incitement to hate” somewhere else?