 Next Tuesday, at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in Ottawa, one of Canada's most prominent white supremacist propagandists, backed by the legal team that defended Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel, will put the country's entire human rights bureaucracy on the witness stand.
| I may have mentioned this before, but I'm still curious as to how "human rights" came to represent something other than individual liberty. Through some sort of antilogic, we've arrived at a point where "human rights" means strangling the freedoms of most of us to ensure the primacy of the opinions of some of us. Occasionally it's in a good cause -- I'm certainly not fond of holocaust deniers and their assaults on logic and truth -- but it seems to me that you've got to allow most of that sort of thing on the assumption that the right to express your opinion is nearly absolute. Once that freedom is curtailed it's like the loss of virginity: you don't get it back. Instead you end up with the straightjacker of political correctitude, which leads in its turn to rule by the holier-than-thou. |
After months of closed-door wrangling, a constitutional challenge, an appeal to federal court and a blizzard of legal motions, Marc Lemire can now interrogate, under oath, two investigators of the Canadian Human Rights Commission about why they posted provocative comments on his and other ultra-conservative Web sites. Much credibility hangs on their answers.
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