Free speech strengthened by defending those we find loathsome

14 Oct 11 | Uncategorized

This story is cross-posted from the Edmonton Journal.

CANADA – Freedom of speech is such a slippery concept.

It’s easy for us to support the free speech rights of people whose views we happen to agree with. It’s much harder to offer that same support to people whose views and words we find loathsome, hateful, and hurtful.

The proof of our commitment to freedom of speech is how passionately we defend the rights of people to say things we believe to be abominable, vicious and utterly wrong.

You couldn’t ask for a better test of our tolerance than Bill Whatcott, who appeared Wednesday before the Supreme Court of Canada to defend his right to speak and to publish.

Whatcott is one of Canada’s best-known cranks, an over-the-top anti-abortion, anti-Muslim, and anti-gay activist. (Whatcott calls himself a Christian advocate. I won’t, because it would be an insult to most of the Christians I know.) Whatcott has also described himself as a recovered homosexual who was “cured” after his Christian conversion.

Edmontonians may remember him best from his 2007 campaign for the mayor’s job. Depending where you live in this city, you may have found one of his disturbing, graphic and inflammatory pamphlets shoved in your mailbox.

Because I live in the federal riding of Edmonton-Centre, and because Whatcott long had a particular grudge against my former Liberal MP, Anne McLellan, I’ve found many Whatcott screeds on my doorstep over the years. They are invariably crude, gross, and offensive, usually cheap black and white photocopies with print so tiny, no one over 40 can read them without a magnifying glass.

I have a simple strategy for dealing with Whatcott’s ravings. I crumple up his hand-outs and I throw them in the trash, under the banana peels and plum pits, where they belong.

Not everyone favours such a technique. In 2001 and 2002, Whatcott handed out some of his grotesque flyers in Regina and Saskatoon. They called for Canada to outlaw homosexual acts, compared pride parades to the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and suggested that gay men were pedophiles and child molesters.

“Our children will pay the price in disease, death, abuse and ultimately eternal judgment if we do not say no to the sodomite desire to socialize your children into accepting something that is clearly wrong,” one pamphlet read.

Four people who received the pamphlet filed complaints with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, alleging the pamphlets “promoted hatred against individuals because of their sexual orientation” and therefore violated the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code. The commission originally found in favour of the complainants and fined Whatcott $17,000. The ruling was later overturned by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal.

The court called Whatcott’s language crude, harsh and offensive, but found that it did not rise (or sink) to the level of hate speech. Whatcott’s rights to freedom of religion and freedom of expression, said the court, had to be weighed in the balance.

The commission appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court.

Frankly, I’d far prefer that everyone had just allowed Whatcott’s tinpot crusade to sink into oblivion. Instead, all this legal, political and media attention has allowed Whatcott to posture for the better part of a decade as a free speech martyr.

Were Whatcott’s words puerile and hurtful? Absolutely. Were they intended to incite hatred against gays and lesbians? Actually, with all deference to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, I think they clearly were.

But should that make the words themselves illegal, and make Whatcott subject to state discipline and a punishingly large fine?

Whatcott is a zealot. But he didn’t advocate violence. He didn’t propose a pogrom. On this particular occasion, he wasn’t harassing anyone. He simply questioned, albeit in the nastiest of terms, whether and how schools should teach children about homosexuality and gay rights. While I deplore his intemperate choice of diction, I think he was well within his legal rights to address that important public policy question. Any state attempt to censor his speech only feeds the paranoia of those who believe in some kind of “gay conspiracy” to seduce our children. It’s better to expose this kind of noxious, nonsensical thinking to the bright light of day than to attempt to suppress it and drive it to fester underground.

Yet I’m glad to see the Supreme Court tackle this case. There’s far too much legal murkiness around what constitutes true criminal hate speech, as defined by the Criminal Code, and what constitutes a lesser violation of a provincial human rights code.

Is it really the job of provincial commissions to protect us all from having our feelings hurt? Or should they better stick to practical issues like defending tenants and employees from discrimination?

The fight for equal legal rights for gay, lesbian, transgendered and bisexual Canadians has been long and hard-fought. Despite those many legal victories, homophobia is still a real and damaging social prejudice, and we need to continue to educate and inoculate people against it. But we can’t do that by censorship and suppression. We do it, instead, with informed debate and civil discourse, by responding to ignorance and fear with understanding and tolerance. We can’t win civil liberties for one marginalized group by taking them from another — or by replacing an old orthodoxy with a new one.

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

Follow Paula Simons on Twitter: @Paulatics

Elected police commanders must guarantee free expression

07 Oct 11 | Uncategorized

Will the arrival of elected police commissioners politicise how officers respond to popular concerns about unpopular issues? If artistic expression sparks controversy how will newly accountable police chiefs manage the already fraught competing demands of keeping the electorate sweet, and meeting the requirements of human rights legislation?.

With the arts — some like them, some don’t.  Some walk away from things they don’t like, others exercise their right to protest. The threat to public order, potential or actual, is a core policing issue.

Thus Birmingham police prevented the screening of Penny Woolcock’s film One Day about local gangs; Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti, dealing with tensions within the Sikh community, was cancelled after protests turned violent and police could not guarantee the safety of theatre staff; police upheld concerns by some members of the Somali community that music is un-Islamic and banned a musical performance in Bristol.

 

These and many other similar cases in recent years illustrate the police’s an unprecedented role as arbiters of freedom of expression in the arts. A proposed “heavyweight” independent review of policing inEnglandandWalesled by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens should address this.

Elected commissioners must manage the tension between the popular expectations that put them in post and the unpopular causes that police are sometimes expected, even required, to defend.

Yet currently there’s no clear practice. When the Belgrade Theatre Coventry premiered Bhatti’s follow-up play Behud – Beyond Belief, an imaginative response to the cancellation of Behzti, the theatre was initially asked to pay £10,000 in policing costs, the local force applying rules designed for commercial sports events, to public art.

This is problematic political, legal and cultural territory. Beyond fulfilling their core duties — to maintain law and order, to prevent and detect crime — the Human Rights Act imposes on the police a qualified obligation not to interfere with the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and protest — and a positive obligation to take appropriate steps to protect those rights.

Case law advises: “In determining whether or not a positive obligation exists, regard must be had to the fair balance that has to be struck between the general interest of the community and the interests of the individual, the search for which balance is inherent throughout the Convention.”

When “taking those appropriate steps” means the police supporting an unpopular, minority interest — enabling a play to go ahead rather than sending officers out detecting crime, protecting property — it is a tough call as things stand.

With elected commissioners in place, especially when resources are limited, supporting an individual artist’s right to freedom of expression could look like a real vote loser.

After the riots in August David Cameron made the case for elected police commissioners as part of the solution “to mend[ing] our broken society…they will provide that direct accountability so you can finally get what you want when it comes to policing.”

Following up later that week in the Sunday Express newspaper, under the headline “Rights in my Sights”, Cameron talked of “scoring a clear line between right and wrong through every neighbourhood and backing it up with the full force of the law”.

By challenging the rights agenda in the name of a moral crusade, Cameron set alarm bells ringing for free expression.  The right to freedom of expression is about the rights of the minority, and artists are always the minority.

Cameron’s claim that “our reforms mean that the police are going to answer directly to the people” runs the risk of setting up misleading expectations and empowering those who can put the power of numbers behind their sense of cultural offence.

It is important that any “contract” between an elected commissioner and his or her electorate includes the understanding that the police will do things that the majority may not like, in the interests of democracy and in the interests of a vibrant and provocative culture.

This means more freedom of expression, not less, reinforced by better information about our rights and responsibilities. We need artists to be free to discuss even the most uncomfortable truths and now more than ever to speak truth to power, to call authority to account.