Ezra Levant on Cross Country Checkup

Ezra Levant will be on Cross Country Checkup this afternoon for a program on censorship. Is Mark Steyn going to be on too? Checkup bills the program as follows:

Two separate events are raising cries of government censorship. One, is a proposed law (C-10) that will deny government funding to films considered in poor taste. The other involves complaints made to Human Rights Commissions against certain journalists and their publications (Ezra Levant, Western Standard; and Mark Steyn, Maclean's).

Perhaps less known are two other cases where censorship is either being requested or decried. A new video game called Bully: Scholarship Edition (it's made by the same people who make Grand Theft Auto), has raised the ire of teachers and they want it banned. Also, an attempt by the York Debating Society last week to discuss the pros and cons of abortion at York University was shut down by those who said such debate is not acceptable.

I plan on listening in, maybe emailing or calling, but I know my mind is going to hurt after listening to the program, because it is going to deal not only with the real censorship of human rights commissions, but also the false censorship decried by the arts community concerning the the amendments in Bill C-10 that affect whether film makers will get tax credits if they produce a movie that the government does not like. As for the shutting down of the abortion debate, I think it is shameful on a university campus where academic freedom is supposed to prevail but it is not censorship because the power of the state was not invoked to crush the debate.

I hate the conflation of Bill C-10 with censorship. Andrew Coyne has a great column in this week's Maclean's that, unfortunately, I cannot find online. He gets the difference. And it is this: censorship criminalizes speech; withdrawing a subsidy does not.

Yet in the TVO debate on Steve Paikin's The Agenda, the conflation and confusion that drives me crazy is precisely what happened. Charles McVety did a pretty good job of defending my point of view. The guy from the Canadian Jewish Congress and the woman from Little Mosque on the Prairie almost gave me a migraine.

And why, oh why, oh why is freedom of speech always associated with smut? The Left seems to have no problem with the shutting down of political speech they don't like, or Christian speech they find moralistic and offensive, but don't touch their freedom to make porn.

John Pacheco at Socon-or-bust has a good post this morning on the difference between freedom and license.

The exercise of authentic freedom, as opposed to the legal, civil construct we are accustomed to arguing for, recognizes the boundaries that the truth has made around it. So, we must always remember that just because we can say something and we have the civil right to do it, it doesn’t mean it is moral to do so.

Stepping outside those moral and conscientious boundaries changes the very nature of an act from genuine freedom to license. The difference between the two is the truth. Lose the truth and you are not arguing for the exercise of freedom any longer but rather being a pimp for sin.

snip

The corollary to rejecting the truth and upholding freedom as a god unto itself is to descend into a meaningless and arbitrary existence at the service of rank egoism and an ultimate loss of identity and purpose.

True freedom is the servant of the truth which, in turn, sets us free to understand the meaning in life, to live for something more than putting in our bleak days on this earth.