So today The Ministry of Justice issues a long “shut up, we explained” style defense of Section 13.1 — the “future crime/thought crime” section of the “hate speech” law.
A junk history-riddled, illogical and highly fiskable defense riddled with “scholarly” quotations from…
an American professor on Ted Kennedy’s payroll.
You think I’m kidding.
Nope: Teddy’s lawyer-friend has tossed our Feds, and fans of censorship everywhere, a life preserver. Too bad it’s full of holes.
It will be hard to top Ezra Levant’s incredible fisking of this pathetic document.
Nazism in Germany was odious not because of its “audaciously false propaganda”, but because it murdered people by the millions. It’s not the propaganda that killed the Jews; it was the fact that their property rights, their rights to self-defence, their economic rights, their mobility rights, their rights to life and liberty were taken away.
But look at the second half of that sentence: tolerant, liberal societies can be fragile. First, the Weimar Republic had within it the legal and constitutional seeds of Nazism, that Hitler exploited — anti-hate speech laws being amongst them, and weak constitutional protections of real rights, too. But more importantly, what is the government’s implication here? That tolerant, liberal societies are not strong? That, instead, we need the stern hand of a state political censor? Isn’t that exactly the opposite of the lessons of Nazism?
It gets even more muddled. (…) The government is arguing that we should limit speech because we’ve seen how the Nazis could limit speech. Huh?
But he’s asking other bloggers to try, so knock yourselves out.
What’s sad, and frankly insulting, is that the Feds used a clearly biased American law professor to make their points about Canadian law and society.
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