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Having effortlessly swatted down the "human rights" crowd on air, Rex Murphy returns to the fray in print. It's behind The Globe & Mail's subscriber wall, but if you're at a Canadian newsstand this weekend it's worth picking up a copy. In the midst of a sterling defence of free speech, I enjoyed the mild snarkiness of this passage:
Do they really want - after Ezra's example, mind you - to call Mark Steyn, the Victoria Falls ("The Smoke that Thunders") of prolific columnists - into one of their style-less chambers to "explain himself?" If Mr. Levant contains multitudes, how to describe Mr. Steyn? He is a prodigy of immense resource and industry. Compared to him, Trollope was a slacker, Dickens a wastrel, and Proust a miniaturist. He inundates. Books, columns, blogs and obiter dicta in a thousand venues - if Mr. Steyn goes before one or all of these commissions, he will be firing off columns between questions. He'll write a column on a question while it is being asked. I urge our guardians to consider their own interests: Stay a while before essaying this profitless and useless venture.
Mr Murphy frets that, by getting tied up in the Maclean's and Western Standard cases, the Human Rights Commissions will be too busy to police everybody else:
Who will there be to read before we read, and tell us what is proper for us? Who will be there to edit the editors, to copy check the copy checkers? Who will shield our vulnerable law-students, and who will tend to the commission's most industrious serial complainant? There is one person, so eggshell brittle that he has drummed up a fierce amount of business for the HRCs. Is so loyal a customer now to be ignored because the Steyn-Levant tsunami is about to rumble mercilessly on shore?
That's very interesting, isn't it? Without mentioning the "eggshell brittle" Richard Warman by name, Mr Murphy has nevertheless managed to slide him gently from the wilder shores of the Internet into the Canadian establishment's house journal. What's next? A question in the House of Commons maybe?
And stick around for Rex's big finale:
Mostly I fear, if the HRCs are tied up, Canadians will be reading, unguided, what they choose to read, deciding for themselves what they like and what they don't, will discard a book or pass it to a friend, like a column or curse one - lit only by the light of their own reason.The horror! Before we know it, we'll have an unstoppable epidemic of free speech, free thought, and freedom of the press. And, surely, no one wants that. Otherwise, why would we have human rights commissions?
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