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BBC bans “husband” and “wife”; Canada’s hate-crime law
Just as was predicted in these pages months ago, the acceptance of homosexual “marriage” is leading instantly to the prohibition of the words “husband” and “wife.” According to Robert Bork writing in the current issue of First Things, the BBC has banned use of “husband” and “wife” because those terms privilege heterosexual couples over homosexual couples. So there you have it: the most basic natural and social concepts and realities—concepts and realities fundamental to all human societies from the beginning of time—are now seen as discriminatory and are forbidden. Bork also mention that a man was prosecuted under Canada’s hate-crime law for quoting Biblical passages condemning homosexual acts. Canada’s hate-crime law was amended last April to include groups defined by sexual orientation among the protected groups, as can be seen from the full text of the law, Canada’s Criminal Code, Sections 318-320, which is not long and is well worth worth reading.
The Canadian law assigns both a narrower meaning and a wider meaning to the term hate crime. The narrower meaning limits hate crimes to speech likely to make people engage in violent acts. Section 319 (1) says: “Every one who, by communicating statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace,” is guilty of an indictable offense can be imprisoned for not more than two years. Ok, you can’t actually stir up violence against people. That doesn’t seem too bad. But then there is the wider definition, stated in Section 319 (2) of the law: “Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group,” can also be imprisoned for up to two years. Now several qualifications are placed around the definition of hate crime. Truth is a defense, as is a good faith argument from a religious text. (However, wouldn’t this latter qualification mean that Moslems calling for the murder of Jews and Christians, based on a sincere belief in numerous passages in the Koran and other sacred Moslem texts commanding such murder, would be protected from prosecution?) Still, the bottom line is that any statement regarded as “promoting hatred” toward an identifiable ethnic or sexual-orientation group (and “promoting hatred” is not defined) can be arrested and jailed. The truth defense is no bulwark, since the burden is now on the defendant to prove that what he said was true. If a person simply said, “Moslems are completely incompatible with us, the more of them that are here, the more they will try to take over and destroy our form of government,” and then was accused of a hate-crime for saying that, could he prove to the satisfaction of a court that his statement was true? The undeniable drift of this law is toward the criminalization of any strong warnings or critical speech about any protected group. I suppose that for my recent article, “How to Defeat Jihad in America,” or even for a lot less than that, I could be jailed in Canada. Email entry |