A blow for human rights in Canada

Mark Steyn gave National Review Online an update on Canada's Human Rights Commission, an organization which was not interested in human rights, particularly the right of free speech.

...earlier this month, over 99 per cent of delegates to the Conservative Party convention voted to abolish Section 13 (the "hate speech" provision) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and a brave principled Liberal, Keith Martin, renewed his private member's motion in the House of Commons to do the same.

This morning, the CHRC issued the so-called Moon Report on free-speech issues. Most of us expected it to be a whitewash. Instead, Professor Moon says:

1. The first recommendation is that section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) be repealed so that the CHRC and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) would no longer deal with hate speech, in particular hate speech on the Internet.

This is a great tribute to what Ezra calls his campaign of "denormalization" of Canada's Orwellian "human rights" racket. They're not yet ready to throw in the towel completely, but it's fluttering limply on the edge of the ring. Canada may be preparing to rejoin the ranks of free nations.

Meanwhile, The Spring City Chronicle wonders if we may need some deliverance here from the speech police.

This guy sounds like a racist redneck, fine, bad man. Two things bother me: First is this notion that you can be charged with a hate crime without any underlying other crime having been committed. I can rationalize a hate crime enhancer which would increase the penalty for another crime, but that wasn’t the case here. Refuse him service, kick him out of the bar and have him arrested for disorderly conduct if he doesn’t go, but charging that words prove someone’s beliefs is, to me, charging someone with a “thought crime”. That seems more than a little Orwellian.

So much for "the Speech"

Remember "the Speech?" The one where the genius threw Grandma under the bus because she said things of which Obama was ashamed? Mark Steyn buries the speech, even as Senator Barack Obama retreats from, “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.”

It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time — which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection. Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem — the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years — and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Senator Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

That’s an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Senator Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap — indeed, full-sized canyon — that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the Senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the Reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician… He does what politicians do.”