But, when it comes to: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of a traditional Judaeo-Christian religion?”, that’s another question entirely. A couple of years back, the writers of “Frasier” and various other Hollywood colossi successfully chased America’s second most popular radio host, Dr Laura, off the TV airwaves by putting pressure on Paramount over her views on the gay agenda.
That’s fair enough. If influential people want to lean on advertisers to get rid of someone they disapprove of, it’s not pretty but it’s an understandable use of muscle – although a bit rich coming from Hollywood. If you’re an aged survivor of McCarthyism who’s unrepentant about being an apologist for a totalitarian system that murdered untold millions, celebrity lefties will be relaxed and, indeed, supportive. But, if you happen to think that gay marriage is not such a great idea, then getting the major TV studios, networks and affiliates to blacklist you is in the public interest.
But what was interesting was how many ostensibly higher-minded people thought that Dr Laura’s defence of traditional Judaeo-Christian morality justified gutting the First Amendment. As the San Francisco Board of Supervisors put it: “At what point do her words become the equivalent of yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre?” – or, in this instance, yelling “Robert Mugabe!” in a crowded bathhouse.
Dr Laura has yet to yell anything in a gay bathhouse. But she might, some day. As in Ireland, British Columbia and Sweden, best to be on the safe side and shut down all debate.
Thirty years ago, in the early days of gay liberation, most of us assumed we were being asked to live and let live. But, throughout the western world, “tolerance” has become remarkably intolerant, and “diversity” demands ruthless conformity. In New Zealand, an appeals court upheld a nationwide ban on importing a Christian video, Gay Rights/Special Rights: Inside The Homosexual Agenda. In Saskatchewan, The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix was fined by the Human Rights Commission for publishing an advertisement citing not the relevant Biblical passages on homosexuality but merely the chapter and verse numbers. Fining publishers of the Bible surely can’t be far off. The coerciveness of the most “liberal” cultures in the western world is not a pretty sight.
Whatever happened to “live and let live”? If I can live with the occasional rustle from the undergrowth as I’m strolling through a condom-strewn park or a come-hither look from George Michael in the men’s room, why can’t gays live with the occasional expression of disapproval?
Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. But increasingly gays oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. Gay activists have figured that, instead of trying to persuade people to change their opinions, it’s easier just to get them banned.
As Rodney King, celebrated black victim of the LAPD, once plaintively wondered: “Why can’t we all just get along?” But, if that’s not possible, why can’t we all just not get along? What’s so bad about disagreement that it needs to be turned into a crime?
CANADA
“Human rights”… and wrongs
THE INTOLERANCE of the forces of “tolerance” delineated in the previous chapter is justified as a kind of mopping-up operation – just getting rid of a few religious bigots blocking the path to utopia. Yet illiberalism in the cause of “liberalism” can be addictive, and never more so than in the deranged Dominion.
No sooner had my little difficulties with Canada’s “human rights” commissions begun than some of my pickier northern readers demanded to know where have I been on the egregiousness of the kangaroo courts all these years. Well, I’ve been opposed to them my entire adult life. When The National Post was launched by Conrad Black in 1998, my very first column in the newspaper’s very first week started with the anti-Suharto demonstrators getting pepper-sprayed in British Columbia but wound up with…
Canada’s much-vaunted niceness is smug and suffocating, but it’s our national characteristic. It’s what all those National Lampoon non-jokes boil down to: “How do you get 40 Canadians into a phone booth?” “You say, ‘Pardon me, but would you please all go into the phone booth?’” Etc. The truth is it requires a vast panoply of restrictive legislation to shoehorn us in: Canada’s “niceness” has always been somewhat coercive. It’s not just anti-totalitarian demonstrators being denied the right to protest, but also fellows like that Mayor of Fredericton, forced by New Brunswick’s Human Rights Commission to proclaim officially the city’s Gay Pride Week.
Canada’s famous “tolerance” has become progressively intolerant. It’s no longer enough to be tolerant, to be blithely indifferent, warily accepting, detachedly libertarian about gays – as the Mayor and his voters were. For tolerance is, by definition, somewhat grudging. Instead, gays must be accorded official mandatory fulsome approval, no matter that enforcing Gay Pride means inflicting Straight Humiliation on a hapless mayor and displaying a cool contempt for his electorate. As the Queen put it a couple of Canada Days back, “Let us celebrate the unique Canadian ability to turn diversity to the common good.” But the uniquely Canadian thing about “diversity” is the ruthless uniformity with which it’s applied.
I’ll bet those BC students protesting against Suharto would approve of the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission’s ruling that Hizzoner was guilty of discrimination. But the trouble with letting the state restrict free expression in the interests of nice cuddly causes like gay liberation is that you make it a lot easier for them to restrict free expression in the interests of non-nice causes like Suharto. In Canada, we’ve let the state go too far in policing dissent. Our official niceness has led, inexorably, to official intolerance…
So I wrote in The National Post of October 29th 1998. And that’s the way I’ve always felt:
The aim of a large swathe of the left is not to win the debate but to get it cancelled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways – busting up campus appearances by conservatives, “hate crimes” laws, Canada’s ghastly human rights commissions, the more “enlightened” court judgments, the EU’s recent decision to criminalize “xenophobia”, or merely, as The New York Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the “moderate” and “non-ideological” position.
That’s from The National Post of August 6th 2002. A couple of years earlier:
When the left tried dispensing with democracy in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, it led eventually to counter-revolution and the regimes’ collapse. In the US courts, in Canada’s human rights commissions and in Europe’s bureaucracy, the left may finally have found a form of democratic subversion that works.
That’s from The Gazette in Montreal, March 4th 2000. Contemporary Canada is profoundly hostile to individual liberty, and the “human rights” commissions are the most explicit enforcers of that hostility. As I wrote in The Calgary Herald of May 2nd 1998:
The real choice in Canada is whom to be oppressed by. On the one hand, there’s the Parizeau tendency. On the other, there’s what I’ll call, in deference to the most famous gay in Alberta, the Delwin Vriend tendency.
Let’s take Jacques Parizeau first. The old boy travels around Quebec, notes that the overwhelming majority of its population is francophone and feels that this should be reflected in its constitutional arrangements and public face. He can’t understand why an anglophone, calling some Quebec City apparatchik to query why his medical card hasn’t arrived yet, should feel entitled to service en anglais. For propounding these views, Parizeau is reviled throughout English Canada as a dangerous wacko.