Queer Life: September 2005

On Banning Hate Speech

June 2004 This column is for all those people who say: "I believe in freedom of speech, but...."

It's a mantra in the gay and lesbian community. We believe in freedom of speech, but... not in outpourings of outrageous hatred. Hatred must be banned.

What crap.

To believe in freedom of speech means protecting the rights of others to speak appalling things. There is no but. If you believe in a but, then accept the consequences of that. Accept that you do not believe in freedom of speech. You believe in censorship.

I believe in freedom of speech.

That means I say more power to shock jock Howard Stern, campaigning hard to get U.S. President George Bush out of office because, under Bush's leadership, the Federal Communications Commission is constantly fining and censoring Stern's bad words until radio stations and signal distributors find him too much of a headache to allow on air.

I believe the government agency that controls broadcasting here in Canada should be nuked out of existence. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) recently pulled a Quebec City radio station's license because of repeated offensive comments.

It's the highest rated station in its geographic area. Only in Canada, with its long and honored history of sanctioned state censorship, is the populist drivel of the majority banned from the airwaves.

Then the CRTC approved the Arabic television station Al-Jazeera for rebroadcast in Canada. But only if content is monitored 24 hours a day, and bleeped if offensive (generally anti-Semitic) words or ideas are expressed. No cable or satellite provider is interested in paying for non-stop baby-sitters for Al-Jazeera, so that station is never going to be seen.

In Canada, we stick our fingers in our ears so we aren't exposed to what some in Arabic society are thinking. So much better than coping with, and understanding, an actual sub-culture and point of view.

I believe that Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel should be allowed to broadcast his loathsome comments about Jews over the Internet.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission regularly orders Zundel's hate-mongering sites off the Internet. Every time he has a new start-up, someone dutifully files a complaint and the human rights commission, with the full support of Canada's ill-named Charter of Rights and Freedoms, carefully places even more tape over Zundel's mouth (creating a friggin' martyr for the cause of Naziism). "It bears repeating that the expression in those documents does nothing to advance the underlying values of freedom of expression," a 2002 commission ruling states. Nowhere is there an understanding of how rational thought has been overwhelmed by the complete illogic of this sentence.

Zundel left Canada for the United States in 2000, but was deported back to Canada three years later. He then spent more than a year in jail up here, without being convicted. In fact, he has no criminal record here.

He was being held on a national security certificate, which means he posed some sort of danger to Canada, but the evidence against him was secret. Zundel was forced to testify at hearings, but didn't get to see what he's accused of.

Without any proof to the contrary, I can only assume that Zundel was jailed (and later, deported to Germany, where he's again in jail) for speaking what he believes. In Canada, naughty speech has gone from being something that you pay for with ever-increasing monetary fines, to something that now lands you in jail, with no release date required. Every Canadian who cares about civil rights should be concerned about Ernst Zundel's fate.

So, to all you but-ists out there: freedom of speech means the whole ball of wax. What's the point of free speech if it only allows mainstream opinions that you personally don't agree with? That's a philosophy that only allows your rigid definition of "acceptable" dissent to prosper. And it keeps you in happy ignorance of the ugliness of life. Ignore reality at your peril.

The next time you find yourself saying "I believe in free speech, but..." stop yourself. Think about what you're saying.

But it's not your politics that truly offend me. It's your hypocrisy.