Canadian do-gooders PUBLICIZE "hate speech"

Rather good of them:

"The paradox is this: Groups across Canada are bent on silencing people whose views or feelings they don’t like, but their tactics ensure that lots and lots of Canadians become aware of those views or feelings.

Most recently, we saw this in Waterloo, where three protesters occupied the stage on which Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford was to appear, causing the university to cancel Blatchford’s talk. Yet the book Blatchford meant to promote is available in bookstores everywhere. Soon it will be in libraries. Much of it is already available free on the web.

The Waterloo disruption succeeded in its limited aim of shutting the event down. But likely enough it will also result in increased sales of Blatchford’s book. It certainly earned Blatchford media coverage across the country.

This is not the only instance in which activists wanting to shut someone up have won a battle only thereby to lose the war. A couple more examples are Ann Coulter’s talk at the University of Ottawa and Jose Ruba’s presentation at Saint Mary’s, in Halifax. In both cases, the event was disrupted and, yet, because of the disruption (not in spite of it), the speaker’s views gained wide circulation.

The clearest examples of this paradox involve the various human rights commissions and tribunals in this country. Though Stephen Boissoin himself was forbidden (for a time) to speak his views on homosexuality, his offending letter to the Red Deer Advocate was all over the Internet. It was even reprinted in a few respectable newspapers. Some bloggers posted Boissoin’s letter and begged the Alberta Human Rights Commission to come get them, too. They were told that since they were using the letter to discuss freedom of expression, they were not speaking hate, and were welcome to continue posting it.

Pearl Eliadis, a former director at the Ontario Human Rights Commission, appended to a defence of censorship she published in the magazine Maisonneuve, in 2008, a page of vile racist rants, the sort of thing that she argued in her article should be banned. If you check the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s report “Freedom of Expression and Freedom from Hate in the Internet Age,” you’ll find even more choice passages, helpfully introduced by “Warning: The language used in these examples will disturb and upset some readers.”

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Their hatred of non-conforming ideas blinds them to the effect of what they are doing