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Keith Martin is on good form in this Canadian Press interview, despite the reporter Joan Bryden's desperate embrace of the feeble Kinsella angle.* If Dr Martin is relatively relaxed by the support he's getting from the white "supremacists" at Stormfront, it's because it makes his case: Free speech is a principle, not an a la carte menu. As Ms Bryden puts it:
Martin said he stands by his motion and won't be deterred from promoting it just because it happens to appeal to "some of these crazy, peripheral groups that have extremely bizarre and often offensive viewpoints."
In fact, its appeal to people with "bizarre and offensive viewpoints" is precisely the point: If you don't believe in free speech for people you find repellent, you don't believe in free speech at all.
Spinmeister Kinsella, who doesn't seem to comprehend the principle, thinks Ezra and I should be ashamed to have white "supremacists" on our side. Dr Martin shrugs it off - "I'm a brown guy," he says. Which has the right sense of proportion. And, instead of being ashamed by the support of white "supremacists" for free speech rights, Kinsella and co should be ashamed that a sicko like Richard Warman is getting rewarded by the Government of Canada's "Human Rights" racket for a creepy life of pie-inciting stunts and posting vile website messages at least as hateful as anything by the basement losers he's taking to court.
As for the white "supremacists", it would be nice if they reflected that it was the brown guy and the Jew who stood up for their rights, but, even if they don't, it doesn't matter. Freedom is messy and not always pretty. But it's prettier than Section 13 and its attendant abuses. Ezra thinks the snowball is now rolling. We'll see.
*UPDATE: The CP story is in most Canadian papers this weekend, but see this truncated version in The Globe And Mail. This is the only news report Canada's establishment newspaper has carried on the story, and you'd have no idea from it what the hell it's all about.
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