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Since my little difficulties with the Canadian Islamic Congress and Canada's Human Rights Commissions, some of our pickier northern readers have demanded to know where have I been on the egregiousness of the Human Rights kangaroo courts all these years. Well, I've been opposed to them for years:
The aim of a large swathe of the left is not to win the debate but to get it cancelled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways -- busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate crimes" laws, Canada's ghastly human-rights commissions, the more "enlightened" court judgments, the EU's recent decision to criminalize "xenophobia," or merely, as The New York Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the "moderate" and "nonideological" position.
That's from The National Post of August 6th 2002. A couple of years earlier:
When the left tried dispensing with democracy in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, it led eventually to counterrevolution and the regimes' collapse. In the U.S. courts, in Canada's human-rights commissions and in Europe's bureaucracy, the left may finally have found a form of democratic subversion that works.
That's from The Gazette in Montreal, March 4th 2000. A couple of years earlier:
No other western nation has so lost its sense of the dividing line between the public realm and the private space. To be sure, there are still peripheral variations: No doubt if Ontario-style public toplessness ever came to Quebec, the provincial government would insist the French breasts had to be at least twice the size of the English ones. But, otherwise for all our smug self-congratulation about Canada's "diversity" and "tolerance," the distinguishing feature of this "tolerance" and "diversity" is the increasing intolerance and uniformity with which it's applied.
Recently, the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission ruled that the mayor of Fredericton was guilty of discrimination for refusing to proclaim an official Gay Pride Week; similarly, the Ontario Human Rights Commission fined the city of London $10,000 after its mayor refused to lend municipal approval to Gay Pride Day. It seems that municipalities throughout the diversified Dominion are legally obliged to celebrate Gay Pride. No matter that in our great cities, many gays themselves find the annual Gay Pride marches, with their prancing drag queens and capering transvestite nuns, an embarrassing cavalcade of all the most tired gay cliches.
We are passing way beyond the much-vaunted Canadian virtue of "tolerance" -- for surely, by definition, "tolerance" is a pejorative term, implying something wary, indifferent, grudging, non-approving. So it's no longer enough for municipalities merely to tolerate gayness; they must be compelled actively to celebrate it.
That's from The Ottawa Citizen, January 10th 1998. Contemporary Canada is profoundly hostile to individual liberty, and the Human Rights Commissions are the most explicit enforcers of that hostily. This column is from The Calgary Herald of May 2nd 1998:
I wonder if the Boston Globe's fax machine has run out of paper yet. The other day in Montreal, CJAD Radio was giving out the Globe's numbers and urging its listeners to write to the editors suggesting questions they might like to put to Lucien Bouchard, soon to descend on Beantown (la ville des haricots). Needless to say, the questions are mostly -- stop me if you've heard this one before -- about Quebec's oppressive language laws, the removal of English signs from the hospital at Cowansville, etc.
I suspect Bostonians take a relaxed view of Quebec's oppressive language laws. After all, Americans already think Canada is full of oppressive laws, starting with the one banning private health care. If you accept that the government has the right to run all the hospitals, it surely has the right to decide what language to run 'em in.
So it's a bit late to start moaning about being oppressed. The real choice in Canada is whom to be oppressed by. On the one hand, there's the Parizeau tendency. On the other, there's what I'll call, in deference to the most famous gay in Alberta, the Delwin Vriend tendency.
Let's take Jacques Parizeau first. The old boy travels around Quebec, notes that the overwhelming majority of its population is francophone and feels that this should be reflected in its constitutional arrangements and public face. He can't understand why an anglophone, calling some Quebec City apparatchik to query why his medical card hasn't arrived yet, should feel entitled to service en anglais. For propounding these views, Parizeau is reviled throughout English Canada as a dangerous wacko.
The other tendency is represented by Vriend, the human rights commissions and the courts of Canada. It believes that municipalities should be compelled to lend official support to gay pride days, that religious colleges should be compelled to hire people whose behavior they consider an abomination before God, and that a spouse is no more or less than (in the felicitous words of the Ontario Court of Appeal) someone you "designate" as such -- husband, wife, gay partner or, presumably, a favorite goldfish or budgerigar.
For its willingness to break up Canada on a 50-per-cent-plus-one vote, the Parizeau tendency is denounced as profoundly anti-democratic; for their willingness to break up ancient institutions such as the laws of marriage and contract on the basis of no social consensus whatsoever, the Vriend crowd is hailed as reasonable persons of a progressive tolerant bent. That's why we'll have gay marriage long before an independent Quebec: in Canada, it's easier to come out than get out. But which tendency would you say was more intrusive and coercive? The one that tells you what size of sign you can put in your shop window? Or the one that tells you what size of gay you can rent the bedroom over the garage to?
At which point, to avoid the attention of the human rights commission myself, I'd better issue the usual disclaimer: some of my best friends are gay; I'm entirely relaxed when it comes to penetrative sex with other men. Hang on, that didn't come out quite right. Anyway, the point is being gay -- in the modern, professional, litigious sense -- is not primarily about penetrative sex with other men. Rather, it's about the construction of a round-the-clock identity accorded special protection under the law. The courts and commissions do not extend this consideration to all groups. Quite the opposite. If, following Vriend's example, a devout Catholic were to get a job in a gay bath-house and wander around the cubicles saying Hail Marys, he'd receive short shrift from the courts. We all know that, in media commentary on the Supreme Court decision, "religious," like "rural," is code-speak for "bigot."
In fact, these religious bigots are surprisingly tolerant. For example, I have before me a copy of the Easter edition of The Mirror, a Montreal weekly of vaguely leftish views and entertainment listings. On Page 3 is an advertisement for Resurrection, "the queer dance event of Easter weekend," featuring an oiled, muscular hunk, nude except for several phallic symbols over his washboard stomach and a neon cross over his crotch, his glistening thighs flanked by two urinals. This queer dance event was a benefit party for Montreal Queer Pride/Divers Cite 98, whose, corporate sponsors proudly display their logos underneath the twinkling stud: Canadian Airlines, American Airlines, Glaxo Wellcome. . . . In the diversified Dominion, we must be properly sensitive toward persons of color, persons of orientation and persons of gender, but we can be sneeringly contemptuous of persons of faith, appropriating their most sacred imagery for the crassest of purposes even on the holiest day in the Christian calendar.
Personally, I'm an English Common Law man. In my dealings with employers, landlords and governments, I expect to be treated as an individual, a citizen under the law like any other. But both the Vriend tendency and the Parizeau tendency favor group rights: they wish to treat me on the basis of my ethnic origin, language and sexual orientation. If we must go down this slippery slope, I'll take Parizeau: the Quebec "collectivity" is, at least, a majority. In the rest of Canada, the majority -- any majority -- is a vanishing breed. |
