Does this decision grant more license to bash Christians?
Though Ezra Levant seems quite sanguine about the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision involving a defamation case against Kari Simpson, I'm not so sure it's a good sign. I have not read the decision yet, but based on the news coverage, I fear it may be just another example about how it is open season on Christians. Anything said about conservative evangelicals or Catholics is "fair comment" no matter how defamatory, libelous, or egregious. Shoot, Dan Brown's "hate screed" The DaVinci Code was a mega bestselling book.
But say similar things--even if true-- about any other group and, well, all of a sudden, fair comment morphs into hate speech. I wonder what the decision would have been had Kari Simpson been sued by, say, a gay activist. We'll see what happens when Stephen Boissoin's case gets appealed. Some groups are more equal than others before the law.
Now maybe the principles in this case will be uniformly applied, and the bloggers being sued by Richard Warman will find this decision helpful. I hope Ezra is right to be optimistic that the highest court is upholding a broader notion of freedom of speech. But if that broader notion of free speech is only one-sided, giving the wholesale right to lie about Christians, demean us, dehumanize us, while making it increasingly illegal for us to defend our faith and moral principles in the public square, this decision could further hurt us.
See, anti-Christian bigotry is fashionable. It's even been useful in political campaigns to bash those scary Christian conservatives, paint them as theocrats, to portray them as morally equivalent to terrorist jihadists, to call them "anti-Charter" and "anti-Canadian" as Liberals have done in recent federal campaigns. There is a spate of books touting this thesis selling well in the United States and bloggers like Andrew Sullivan refer to Christian leaders as "Christianists" and warn they want to take over and impose a theocracy as dismal as that of the Taliban. These are pernicious misrepresentations at best, outright lies at worst. While there may be the odd kook who wants the return of Old Testament Law, or the ridiculous, tiny but ubiquitous Fred Phelps gang with their hateful messages, these people represent less than a fraction of one one-hundredths of a per cent of Christian believers.
The problem is that Christians ARE in danger because of these lies.
The biggest under-reported story in Canada may be the abuses of human rights commissions says Rex Murphy, but the biggest under-reported story in the world is the wholesale, bloody persecution of Christians around the world. Christians are being literally martyred in numbers that dwarf those from earlier periods of history. But does the mainstream media give a hoot?
Christians are in real danger of imprisonment, persecution, beatings, house-burnings, and death, from Africa to India to Indonesia. In Canada, while we remain free of physical harassment, our rights to worship as we please, to publicly express our views, to ensure our beliefs are passed on to our children, are being rapidly eroded. The state is intruding on our families, parents' rights to educate their children and trampling on the consciences of people who object to the new secularist orthodoxies.
But I suppose this is a yawn for the intelligentsia who work for the news media because many themselves have a knee-jerk prejudice against Christians. They think we bring it on ourselves.
They call us haters when they are in fact the ones who hate us.
But say similar things--even if true-- about any other group and, well, all of a sudden, fair comment morphs into hate speech. I wonder what the decision would have been had Kari Simpson been sued by, say, a gay activist. We'll see what happens when Stephen Boissoin's case gets appealed. Some groups are more equal than others before the law.
Now maybe the principles in this case will be uniformly applied, and the bloggers being sued by Richard Warman will find this decision helpful. I hope Ezra is right to be optimistic that the highest court is upholding a broader notion of freedom of speech. But if that broader notion of free speech is only one-sided, giving the wholesale right to lie about Christians, demean us, dehumanize us, while making it increasingly illegal for us to defend our faith and moral principles in the public square, this decision could further hurt us.
See, anti-Christian bigotry is fashionable. It's even been useful in political campaigns to bash those scary Christian conservatives, paint them as theocrats, to portray them as morally equivalent to terrorist jihadists, to call them "anti-Charter" and "anti-Canadian" as Liberals have done in recent federal campaigns. There is a spate of books touting this thesis selling well in the United States and bloggers like Andrew Sullivan refer to Christian leaders as "Christianists" and warn they want to take over and impose a theocracy as dismal as that of the Taliban. These are pernicious misrepresentations at best, outright lies at worst. While there may be the odd kook who wants the return of Old Testament Law, or the ridiculous, tiny but ubiquitous Fred Phelps gang with their hateful messages, these people represent less than a fraction of one one-hundredths of a per cent of Christian believers.
The problem is that Christians ARE in danger because of these lies.
The biggest under-reported story in Canada may be the abuses of human rights commissions says Rex Murphy, but the biggest under-reported story in the world is the wholesale, bloody persecution of Christians around the world. Christians are being literally martyred in numbers that dwarf those from earlier periods of history. But does the mainstream media give a hoot?
Christians are in real danger of imprisonment, persecution, beatings, house-burnings, and death, from Africa to India to Indonesia. In Canada, while we remain free of physical harassment, our rights to worship as we please, to publicly express our views, to ensure our beliefs are passed on to our children, are being rapidly eroded. The state is intruding on our families, parents' rights to educate their children and trampling on the consciences of people who object to the new secularist orthodoxies.
But I suppose this is a yawn for the intelligentsia who work for the news media because many themselves have a knee-jerk prejudice against Christians. They think we bring it on ourselves.
They call us haters when they are in fact the ones who hate us.
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