Swompdonkey

The nature of censorship

Steve Paikin has a great show. Here he discusses Bill C-10 and the limits of censorship with Len Rudner, Rebecca Shechter, Jon Kay, and Charles McVety.

I find one part very revealing: about halfway through where Rebecca responds to Charles about his opinion on what is in bad taste and offensive (and his right not to have to pay taxes for this type of stuff) "YOU have a problem, Canadians don't have a problem" to which Steve Paikin says "Rebecca, you think he is the only guy in the whole country who has a problem with this?"

Rebecca's freudian slip speaks to the reaction that some otherwise very nice and reasonable people have when confronted with a guy like Charles McVety, who tends to speak in language very alien to progressives, using terms like judgment, decency and morality when making his points. They marginalize him because his point-of-view sometimes appears to be bizarre, reactionary, and completely outside the "mainstream", hence her attitude: of course a bible-thumper like McVety is going to object to an entirely reasonable proposition.

And yet, notwithstanding the alien "morality" rhetoric, his point is solid: McVety is simply saying that as a general rule, the government should not be empowered to decide what movies get made, but that it is the arbiter of taste when it comes to deciding which movies get funded; a proposition you may not agree with, but an entirely legitimate viewpoint.

Jon Kay, the journalist who speaks the language of "the mainstream", makes a valid point too: As a free-speech advocate, he doesn't like the idea of government mandarins making decisions of any kind relating to censorship, whether it is deciding what movies get funded, or what he can and can't say. As an opponent of Human Rights Commissions as they are currently run, he also thinks that people need to "toughen up and lighten up" when it comes to getting offended and seeking redress through quasi-judicial bodies.

Len Rudner disagrees with him on technical grounds, i.e. the HRCs do a good job of screening out the vast majority of "nuissance complaints", so therefore they are not a problem... although I don't see how this supposed bureaucratic efficiency justifies their existence if it is the principle they are functioning under that is being questioned.

I'm increasingly coming around to the Jon Kay/Ezra Levant/Mark Steyn point-of-view of free speech absolutism, not because I am in favour of unfettered free speech (and incidentally, I am not in league with neo-nazis, notwithstanding what someone like Warren Kinsella might contend), but because I believe our society is already on a slippery slope when the state starts going completely in the opposite direction, "sanctioning" and approving public debate. This type of state control is something I think will end up being far worse than "too much freedom" in the long run.

Rebecca Schecter has a funny viewpoint: she is in favour of censoring hate speech, but not "smut", because she has a vested interest in preserving that particular freedom (the freedom to promote filth, or whatever you want to call it). In other words, she is holding two contradictory viewpoints, and attempting to rationalize her positions with some dubious logic. At least, I wasn't convinced... you can watch the video and judge for yourself.

Ms. Schecter is far from the only person to display this kind of paradoxical logic. A couple of days ago, Jon Kay wrote an article about Kelly Holloway, a detestable functionary in the student government at York with a bright future as a censorship commissar:

I've been writing a lot lately about free speech. My view on the subject is pretty basic: You have to tolerate the speech you hate in order to guarantee protection for the speech you love. Once you go down the road of ideologically motivated censorship, it never stops: Government hate-speech laws that are designed to shut up neo-Nazis eventually get used to harass legitimate commentators like Mark Steyn.

Of course, censorious activists and lawmakers never actually concede they are engaged in "censorship." Invariably, they try to argue that the speech they are targeting is so offensive as to not even constitute legitimate expression. Consider, for instance, what has been going on at York University, in Toronto. Here's a snippet from a March 5 news item in The Excalibur, a York University newspaper:

"A planned debate on abortion rights at York University’s Student Centre was canceled less than three hours before it was scheduled to begin. At an emergency meeting on Feb. 28,members of the Student Centre Board of Directors ... voted unanimously to cancel the debate that was to be held later that day ... Student Centre vice-chair Kelly Holloway said the debate was cancelled because it was an equal rights issue. 'The reason is that it’s an equity concern for the Student Centre. Having a debate over whether or not women should be able to choose what to do with their own bodies is tantamount to having a debate about whether or not a man should be able to beat his wife,' Holloway said. 'The issue is violence against women, and women in this country have a right to choose what they do with their bodies. They have a right to have an abortion, and we don’t want to validate a debate that wants to threaten that right.'"

According to Holloway, in other words, the millions of pro-life Canadians who would presume to voice their objection to abortion do not have "valid" viewpoints. They deserve to be shut up because all they're doing is expressing de-facto threats against women, akin to urging spousal violence.

What's interesting is that, on another issue dear to her left-wing heart, Halloway is quite capable of sounding like a free-speech purist. Just two weeks ago, Holloway signed her name to a Feb. 21, 2008 letter complaining that the university's decision to ban anti-Zionist "Israeli Apartheid" activities on campus is "a blatant violations of democratic freedoms of speech and dissent." The letter also goes on about the "democratic context of the public university" and asserts that "universities are places where discussions and debates about difficult geo-political questions should be promoted, not stifled."

So what is the confused Ms. Holloway — a censor or a free-speech champion? Both and neither. Rather, she is a symbol of the basic human instinct to permit speech we agree with while shutting up one's opponents — and then finding some tortured logical argument to reconcile the two. The only thing unusual about Holloway is her public hypocrisy. She is a perfect example of why vesting the power to censor in politically correct mandarins — be they from Ottawa or a student government — is always a bad idea.

The Schecter and Holloway cases are merely anecdotes, to be certain, but they are important signposts: In essence, what we are seeing is the gradual de-normalization and deligitimization of fairly mainstream Christian viewpoints in the public domain, under various banners. I say: free speech for all.

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Update:

Wow, link from Steynonline.com... I guess I better do a better job proofreading my rantings if I'm going to be getting visitors of that calibre.