Bishop Henry on human rights commissions
This is a man who knows that of which he speaks, having faced the star chamber kangaroo court Alberta Human Rights Commission himself.
“Human rights laws, designed as a shield, are now being used as a sword,” [Bishop Fred Henry] wrote in a December 31 email from Calgary, in what he described as an increasingly “bizarre” series of events.
The recent filing of human rights complaints against Maclean’s magazine for an excerpt of Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone, and against Catholic Insight magazine for articles outlining Catholic teaching on homosexuality, are only the latest in a series of cases that have highlighted freedom of speech and religious freedom.
The Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL) described the Steyn and Catholic Insight cases as part of an “ongoing pattern in the use of human rights commissions to penalize the expression of unpopular opinions,” in a December 31 alert to members entitled, ‘Stop the use of human rights commissions in free speech cases.’
“The League is concerned about this disturbing trend, since it often involves opinions based on religious beliefs,” said CCRL executive director Joanne McGarry.
Henry agrees, stating: “The issue is rarely true Discrimination but rather censorship and enshrinement of a particular ideology through threats, sanctions and punitive measures.”
In 2005, Henry faced two separate complaints to the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for allegedly discriminatory comments in a pastoral letter on marriage. “I challenged one by one the standard arguments used to support same sex unions as the equivalent of traditional marriage,” Henry stated.
Though the complaints were eventually dropped, Henry described the process as “fundamentally flawed,” and closely resembling “kangaroo courts.” Among those flaws, he maintained, were the “presumption of guilt until you can prove your innocence; the open ended time lines for dealing with a complaint; and unjust incurring of financial expenditures for the defendant in the simple event of a complaint being lodged.”
The AHRC covers the complainants’ costs.
Human rights commissions (HRCs) were set up to protect people against discrimination when it came to housing, employment or services. Henry contended that existing human rights legislation needed to be interpreted very broadly to allow the complaints against him.
“It was surprising that the Commission accepted the complaints on the basis of ‘goods/services refused and terms of goods/services,’ as there was no explanation as to what constituted goods or services refused, or their terms,” Henry said. “Nor did the complainants set out the manner of discrimination in other areas.”
He added: “I believe these complaints were an attempt to intimidate and silence me.”
As is becoming increasingly clear, the various advocates for the establishment of Canada’s human rights commissions — at a national and provincial level — must have either been absolutely daft to not realize that such bodies would become instruments for censorship and the regulation/elimination of freedom of expression in Canada, or must have had that censorship and jackbooting of freedom as their goal. Out of charity, one desires to assume they were merely daft, but in the end the outcome is the same either way.
(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)
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