'Bible as hate speech' bill nearing vote

[Lady Marva]

Could this happen here...........

http://www.wnd.com/2003/09/20830/

As some U.S. Supreme Court justices look abroad for guidance on cases related to homosexuality, Canada is set to vote on a bill opponents say would criminalize public expression against homosexual behavior.

Introduced by self-described “gay” House of Commons member Svend Robinson, bill C-250 would add sexual orientation as a protected category in Canada’s genocide and hate-crimes legislation.

As WorldNetDaily reported, opponents fear if the bill becomes law, the Bible will be deemed “hate literature” under the criminal code in certain instances, as evidenced by the case of a Saskatchewan man fined by a provincial human-rights tribunal for taking out a newspaper ad with Scripture references to verses about homosexuality.

The Parliament is scheduled to debate the bill today and likely will call a vote today, or within the next few days. The legislation has the support of every provincial and territorial attorney-general in Canada.

The debate comes amid a battle over a government bill that would establish same-sex marriage. Yesterday, Parliament narrowly defeated a nonbinding motion reaffirming the heterosexual-only definition of marriage. The close margin in the Liberal Party-dominated House of Commons, 137-132, raised questions about whether the government bill would pass, especially if an election is called before it is brought to a vote.

Brian Rushfeldt, executive director of the Canada Family Action Coalition, says, ironically, his group’s opposition to the homosexual marriage bill could be construed as a punishable offense under Robinson’s legislation.

“Canadians who are speaking out against the redefinition of marriage are already being accused of ‘hate’ speech by homosexual activists,” Rushfeldt said. “When C-250 is passed into law later this fall, the activists will begin to insist on prosecution to silence their critics with criminal sanctions.”

He said many people are beginning to consider its potential implications.

“If my son went to school and said homosexuality is not a healthy lifestyle, let alone a perversion or a sin, and they asked where did you hear that, there is the possibility I could be held liable,” Rushfeldt said.

Robinson has accused Christian lobby groups of “fearmongering.”

“What this bill is all about is ensuring that a group of people who are targeted more than another group for violent hate crimes, receives equal protection to those groups already covered by hate propaganda legislation,” he said, according to the Winnipeg Sun newspaper.

Looking to ‘wider civilization’

Alan Sears, president of the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal group, says Americans should pay close attention to their northern neighbors.

“Why does what is going on in Canada matter?” he asked in an interview with WorldNetDaily. “Some of our own justices have already have told us they will be looking closely at how the ‘wider civilization’ handles these cases.”

Sears notes Justice Stephen G. Breyer said in a recent interview with ABC News that the world is growing together through “commerce and through globalization” and we will find out in coming years how our Constitution “fits into the governing documents of other nations. …”

In a speech last month, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the U.S. Supreme Court is looking beyond America’s borders for guidance in handling cases on issues like homosexual rights and the death penalty.

“Our island or lone-ranger mentality is beginning to change,” Ginsburg said during a speech Aug. 2 to the American Constitution Society, a liberal lawyers group, according to the Associated Press.

Continued at link.

[80zephyr]

From the link:

Robinson has accused Christian lobby groups of “fearmongering.”

“What this bill is all about is ensuring that a group of people who are targeted more than another group for violent hate crimes, receives equal protection to those groups already covered by hate propaganda legislation,” he said, according to the Winnipeg Sun newspaper.

Yeah, until they twist the law and force you to bake a cake.

I call bullshit.

Mark

[Michele]

Since this article is date 2003, you can probably Google to read what happened to the bill.

[Celeste Chalfonte]

Since this article is date 2003, you can probably Google to read what happened to the bill.

She's trolling, as usual, and zippy enthusiastically follows suit. Dumb da-dumb-dumb, DUMB DUMB.

[Celeste Chalfonte]

BTW, while adding a category of persons protected, it also added a GREATER exception for religious speech than was in the earlier law:

The bill also expanded one of the defences available to persons charged with the incitement of hatred, allowing for the expression of good-faith opinions based on religious texts, in addition to the preexisting defence allowing the good-faith expression of opinions on religious subjects.

[80zephyr]

She's trolling, as usual, and zippy enthusiastically follows suit. Dumb da-dumb-dumb, DUMB DUMB.

And the skank has no idea what she's talking about. As usual.

Mark

[Lanie]

Since this article is date 2003, you can probably Google to read what happened to the bill.

I thought that was a little weird since the article spoke like gay marriage wasn't legal yet in Canada when it was.

[Lady Marva]

Since this article is date 2003, you can probably Google to read what happened to the bill.

So it's okay to contemplate making the Bible hate speech............

[Newman]

She's trolling, as usual, and zippy enthusiastically follows suit. Dumb da-dumb-dumb, DUMB DUMB.

The bill passed about a year later.

[Newman]

BTW, while adding a category of persons protected, it also added a GREATER exception for religious speech than was in the earlier law:

With such an expansive loophole available it's easy to imagine this bill as fairly toothless. In practice my guess is it will provide endless grist for lawyers and judges to squabble over disagreeable speech.

Is this law the basis for the persecution of Mark Steyn in Canada?

[Michele]

So it's okay to contemplate making the Bible hate speech............

If you say so.

I don't live in Canada and have always understood that just because a country is considered part of the "Western World", it doesn't mean that it has the same freedoms that our country does.

October 6th was "Take Your Bible To School Day" and so far I haven't heard of anyone being arrested and charged with a hate speech crime.

Sent from my SM-G925V using Tapatalk

[Newman]

With such an expansive loophole available it's easy to imagine this bill as fairly toothless. In practice my guess is it will provide endless grist for lawyers and judges to squabble over disagreeable speech.

Is this law the basis for the persecution of Mark Steyn in Canada?

I think the answer is yes.

Here's a fairly lengthy (by internet standards) essay by Mr. Steyn, written now five years ago:

Gagging Us Softly

To be honest, I didn't really think much about "freedom of speech" until I found myself the subject of three "hate speech" complaints in Canada in 2007. I mean I was philosophically in favor of it, and I'd been consistently opposed to the Dominion's ghastly "human rights" commissions and their equivalents elsewhere my entire adult life, and from time to time when an especially choice example of politically correct enforcement came up I'd whack it around for a column or two.

But I don't think I really understood how advanced the Left's assault on this core Western liberty actually was. In 2008, shortly before my writing was put on trial for "flagrant Islamophobia" in British Columbia, several National Review readers e-mailed from the U.S. to query what the big deal was. C'mon, lighten up, what could some "human rights" pseudo-court do? And I replied that the statutory penalty under the British Columbia "Human Rights" Code was that Maclean's, Canada's biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth. In theory, if a job opened up for dance critic or gardening correspondent, I could apply for it, although if the Royal Winnipeg Ballet decided to offer Jihad: The Ballet for its Christmas season I'd probably have to recuse myself.

And what I found odd about this was that very few other people found it odd at all. Indeed, the Canadian establishment seems to think it entirely natural that the Canadian state should be in the business of lifetime publication bans, just as the Dutch establishment thinks it entirely natural that the Dutch state should put elected leaders of parliamentary opposition parties on trial for their political platforms, and the French establishment thinks it appropriate for the French state to put novelists on trial for sentiments expressed by fictional characters. Across almost all the Western world apart from America, the state grows ever more comfortable with micro-regulating public discourse—and, in fact, not-so-public discourse: Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, has been tried, been acquitted, had his acquittal overruled, and been convicted of "racism" for some remarks about Islam's treatment of women made (so he thought) in private but taped and released to the world. The Rev. Stephen Boissoin was convicted of the heinous crime of writing a homophobic letter to his local newspaper and was sentenced by Lori Andreachuk, the aggressive social engineer who serves as Alberta's "human rights" commissar, to a lifetime prohibition on uttering anything "disparaging" about homosexuality ever again in sermons, in newspapers, on radio—or in private e-mails. Note that legal concept: not "illegal" or "hateful," but merely "disparaging."

An excellent read, including some prescient gems, such as here,

"The lofty idea of 'the war on racism' is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology," the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said in 2005. "And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence."

and here, the concluding sentences:

John Milton wrote in his Areopagitica of 1644, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Or as an ordinary Canadian citizen said to me, after I testified in defense of free speech to the Ontario parliament at Queen's Park, "Give me the right to free speech, and I will use it to claim all my other rights."

Conversely, if you let them take your right to free speech, how are you going to stop them from taking all the others?

[Lady Marva]

Just like what happens in Mexico has no effect here.........

I don't live in Canada and have always understood that just because a country is considered part of the "Western World", it doesn't mean that it has the same freedoms that our country does.

Alan Sears, president of the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal group, says Americans should pay close attention to their northern neighbors.

“Why does what is going on in Canada matter?” he asked in an interview with WorldNetDaily. “Some of our own justices have already have told us they will be looking closely at how the ‘wider civilization’ handles these cases.”

Sears notes Justice Stephen G. Breyer said in a recent interview with ABC News that the world is growing together through “commerce and through globalization” and we will find out in coming years how our Constitution “fits into the governing documents of other nations. …”

In a speech last month, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the U.S. Supreme Court is looking beyond America’s borders for guidance in handling cases on issues like homosexual rights and the death penalty.

“Our island or lone-ranger mentality is beginning to change,” Ginsburg said during a speech Aug. 2 to the American Constitution Society, a liberal lawyers group, according to the Associated Press.

[Lady Marva]

Here's a fairly lengthy (by internet standards) essay by Mr. Steyn, written now five years ago:

Gagging Us Softly

In schools where eating a pastry into the forbidden form, could this happen here............
From the link:

Now England is Little Stasi-on-Avon, a land where, even if you're well out of earshot of the gay-outreach officer, an infelicitous remark in the presence of a co-worker or even co-playmate is more than sufficient. Fourteen-year-old Codie Stott asked her teacher at Harrop Fold High School whether she could sit with another group to do her science project as in hers the other five pupils spoke Urdu and she didn't understand what they were saying. The teacher called the police, who took her to the station, photographed her, fingerprinted her, took DNA samples, removed her jewelry and shoelaces, put her in a cell for three and a half hours, and questioned her on suspicion of committing a Section Five "racial public-order offence." "An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark," declared the headmaster, Antony Edkins. The school would "not stand for racism in any form." In a statement, Greater Manchester Police said they took "hate crime" very seriously, and their treatment of Miss Stott was in line with "normal procedure."

[Celeste Chalfonte]

I think the answer is yes.

Here's a fairly lengthy (by internet standards) essay by Mr. Steyn, written now five years ago:

Gagging Us Softly
An excellent read, including some prescient gems, such as here, and here, the concluding sentences:

I heartily agree with Mr. Steyn on the issue of laws that repress freedom of speech (although I don't know his work at all, other than what you posted in this thread). There IS such a thing as a "hate crime." When someone does violence to another for simply being who they are - lynching, for example, or the felonious attacks that put an end to the delightful Castro Halloween street fair that raised millions for medical and social services - but speech alone should never be a crime. Even assault must be accompanied by violence or a credible threat of violence.

So, I disagree with the entire law, and did so before I read a single word of this thread.

BUT, as you point out, the law passed long ago, and the bill that amended it to include affectional orientation passed over 10 years ago. Canada is Canada and the US is the US. Canada does not, Michele mentioned, have the same freedoms we do. That's what happens when you wait around for the mother country to give you your freedom, instead of wresting it from the colonial overlord.

So I stand by my assessment: trolling. LM likes to stir shit, and if she can take a swipe at gay people, people of color and/or "liberals" in the bargain, she likes it better. I don't want to make that against the law; I just call a troll a troll. We have a couple onsite here. No big deal.