...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

America alone: What sets the U.S. apart from the rest of the West, including Canada? As Adam Liptak writes on the Terrorism Awareness Project site, it’s a commitment to individualism and free speech:

…The distinctive U.S. approach to free speech, legal scholars say, has many causes. It is partly rooted in an individualistic view of the world. Fear of allowing the government to decide what speech is acceptable plays a role. So does history.

"It would be really hard to criticize Israel, Austria, Germany and South Africa, given their histories," for laws banning hate speech, said Schauer, the professor at Harvard, in an interview.

In Canada, however, the laws seem to stem from a desire to promote societal harmony. Three time zones east of British Columbia, the Ontario Human Rights Commission - while declining to hear a separate case against Maclean's - nonetheless condemned the article.

"In Canada, the right to freedom of expression is not absolute, nor should it be," the commission's statement said. "By portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to 'the West,' this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice toward Muslims and others."

British Columbia human rights law, unlike that in Ontario, does appear to allow claims based on statements published in magazines.

Steyn, the author of the Maclean's article, said the court proceeding illustrated some important distinctions. "The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they're not about facts," he said in a telephone interview. "They're about feelings."

"What we're learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins," Steyn added. "Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world."

America has freedom; Canada has a totalitarian nomenklatura that’s in the business of assuaging “hurt feelings” for the sake of imposing an artificial societal harmony. In other words, Americans have a state that treats them like grown-ups, while Canadians have one that treats them like errant, misbehaving kids.

Time for Canadians to come of age, grow a pair, and tell Mommy to lay off, I’d say.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:43 | link | comments

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