Telling someone they're wrong is not the same as persecuting them. Telling someone that they CANNOT say certain things, or else they'll face criminal charges and be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars by the state, that's persecution.


I don't much like Christians, and I completely disagree with their social agenda. I have no doubt that the people who run this radio station would love to burn me and my life-sized Rainbow Dash plushies at the stake, if they could. But in this case, the Christians are right. Hate speech laws are nothing more than blasphemy laws wrapped in language that makes them palatable to "enlightened" "modern" progressives; they're one of the worst classes of laws in modern society, possibly THE worst, in the sense that they have a nasty habit of illiciting no protest whatsoever from the sort of people who can usually be relied upon to take a stand against authoritarianism.


Now, in the sense that the Canadian Supreme Court is upholding their nation's law, yes, I suppose the Court is in the right. I don't know much about the Canadian Supreme Court, but if it's anything like Supreme Courts in the rest of the world, their job is not to *make* to legal policy, but rather to *enforce* it. In other words, the Court is simply doing it's job; the problem here is with the legislative body responsible for making these hate speech laws in the first place, not with the Court which has to deal with said laws. But this is a rather stupid and disingenuous defense that fails to acknowledge the broader problem: that Christians - and through precedent, potentially every other group in the nation - no longer have a right to freedom of speech under Canadian law.

The other point that I see people making, that Christians have a history of persecuting others, and that THESE particular Christians WANT to persecute others (and probably would, if they ever came to power!), is one well taken, but is also irrelevant. Does society have a right to persecute people who want to persecute others? I say no, and I don't think any of you believe that, either. Maybe classic period Cena Mark would make that argument, but most of us are intelligent, humane liberals. Aren't we?



Is anyone here Canadian? I'm assuming Canada has a constitution, so does it have provisions safeguarding free speech? If so, why wasn't this law struck down as unconstitutional? Also, does Canada have their own version of the ACLU?

Considering America's tolerance of outright bigotry and love of violence has given us a government of 50% + fascists who have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths (just in my lifetime), yes, I think hate speech should be persecuted. It seriously pisses me off that fascism is protected by the state in this country.

These stories always make me sad, because I start by thinking "good, about fucking time" and end up with "oh, it was a lie and is not really happening."

The Supreme Court of Canada's ruling did, in fact, strike down part of the law that prohibits speech that "ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity of any person or class of persons on the basis of a prohibited ground," but upheld that the defendant produced two flyers that were "exposing or likely to expose persons of same-sex orientation to detestation and vilification."

My recounting of the case is cursory at best, so EvilHomer might want to dig up the decision.

That said, I find it very odd that there are some who don't believe in hate speech. We have intent for other crimes, which is why if you break into someone's house with a loaded weapon, you've opened yourself up to attempted murder charges. Accidentally killing someone is a lesser crime than plotting and carrying out a murder plot.

It may be hard to prove in court in some cases, but if someone burns a cross on your lawn, they ought to be charged with something more than vandalism via arson.

SPK- I guess the important point of what I'm saying here is, speech should NEVER be a crime. Full stop. While the notion of intent might indeed carry some weight for circumstances in which real criminal actions have occurred, no one has the right to police the thoughts and opinions of anyone else, not you, not I, and certainly not the state. That's *fascism*, to call back to and counter meme's argument. Or rather, it's a central tenet of fascism, and one of (if not the) worst aspects of fascists systems.


Another point I'd like you to consider is the INTENT of intent. That is, why our legal system has degrees-of-intent in the first place. You'll find that the reason we divide certain crimes into different levels, such as first-degree murder, second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter etc, is to LESSEN penalties and offer provisions for mercy. "Intent" is there for *mitigation*. Shifting intent from being mitigation for a crime, to an outright excuse for criminalizing behavior that would not otherwise be held criminally liable, is completely contrary to the purpose of intent.


The most worrying thing here, though, is this underlying premise that certain arguments, certain world views, are not just WRONG, but are quite literally criminal. That is, certain people are sooo evil, sooo far outside the accepted social norm, that what they say should not merely be opposed, discredited, or even mocked, but stamped out through state-sponsored violence. Again, this. Is. Fascism. Hate speech laws may SEEM nice at first, at least to certain segments of the population, because hey! Our thought-policing is being used to support things we like! Such as gays, or blacks, or fat kids who get bullied. But thought-policing is thought-policing, whether we agree with the thought-police or not, and I really don't see how people can sit back and nod their heads in approval over such rubbish.


What ever happened to the old saying, "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it"? As I said earlier, I think of us are still operating under a broadly liberal mindset; we value freedom of expression and freedom of thought. How can anyone POSSIBLY reconcile blasphemy laws with a belief in free societies?

Quick hypothetical question here. What if a hate speech law was used to fine Richard Dawkins? To mandate that copies of his book, "The God Delusion" (which quite clearly vilifies and demeans people on the basis of their religious and cultural affiliations), be rounded up and destroyed?

Intent didn't actually factor into it. The court's opinion was that "Whether or not the respondent intended his expression to incite hatred against homosexuals, it was reasonable for the Tribunal to hold that, by equating homosexuals with carriers of disease, sex addicts, pedophiles and predators who would proselytize vulnerable children and cause their premature death, Flyers D and E would objectively be seen as exposing homosexuals to detestation and vilification." It's the difference between saying Jews have funny noses and saying Jews are infiltrating your society and sacrificing the blood of babies.

EvilHomer, who's talking about policing thought? I'm talking about speech where one group is inciting the threat of violence against another. Let's pick on gingers for a moment. You can rail on gingers all you want, 24/7. You can talk about how they have no souls, how they're awful people, how their genetic code is sub-standard, etc.

It's when you start encouraging people to harass them, to threaten violence against them, to call for them to be rousted from their homes and given over to vigilante justice just because they've got red hair, that's when you've committed a crime.

A lot of Christians have been taught that their persecution is indeed a good thing and the less rational ones would ingrain a martyr complex in their life decisions, mainly because it is supposed to equate them on the suffering of Jesus.

Denial allows for them to upkeep their martyr complex with "NO U" arguments and ad hominem because most think that they are better because they actually believe that they are suffering at the hands of the oppressive majority like Jesus did.

That's one of the reasons people like that continue to trot out the story about them being fed to lions.

This book pretty much covers the behavior of false persecution and the relation to Christianity: http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution- Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

(Bonus: Read some of the the one-star comments - a lot of false persecution going on in there from angry bible humpers who equate this book to "9/11 deniers and Holocaust deniers" despite the degrees the author has in Theology.)

It's this odd adherence to literalism that's going to wind up marginalizing, if not destroying, evangelical religion. If they could embrace their holy book as metaphor, they wouldn't tie themselves into knots over everything and drive out people who are repelled by those who deny reality and are willing to lie about it out loud in order to maintain their illusions.

Thank you for the link Xenagama! Times like this I wish poe news was still around so I could post stories of all the fucked up things I was taught in Catholic highschool. For instance, did you know that the residential schools in Canada that took Native children weren't really that bad? Those children learned valuable real world skills!