State legislators have responded to the national outcry over the mom in Texas seeking a gender “transition” for her seven-year-old, promising to introduce legislation to ban puberty blockers for minors. Legislators in Georgia, Kentucky, and Texas have proposed legislation that would prevent medical gender “transitions” for minors. Georgia State Rep. Ginny Ehrhart (R-36) is drafting a bill that would make it a [...]
Controversy is about more than pronouns Professor Jordan Peterson attached over refusal to use politically correct pronouns. University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson regularly releases YouTube videos without causing a stir, but those days are a thing of the past. In early October he released two videos that challenged politically correct orthodoxy and Canada’s human rights regime, calling them [...]
When the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ruled on July 18th that Mount Sinai Hospital was not discriminating when it refused to abort one of a patient’s two healthy preborn twins, the patient decided to appeal the ruling. The patient, a 45-year-old woman who is referred to in the case as C.V, had filed a human rights complaint to the OHRT on May [...]
Fr. Raymond Gravel A legal torpedo was launched against online news service LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) on Dec. 21, 2010, following a long period of ongoing friction between Fr. Raymond Gravel (a Catholic priest and one-time Bloc Québecois MP) and LSN. The priest sued LSN, five of its journalists and managers, plus Campagne Québec-Vie (CQV) and its former director, Luc Gagnon. [...]
The homosexual activist who pursued Alberta pastor Stephen Boissoin on a complaint of discrimination since 2002 has re-launched his campaign, after a December court defeat, by taking his case to the Alberta Court of Appeal. Dr. Darren Lund is appealing the Dec. 4, 2009 Court of Queen’s Bench decision by Justice Earl C. Wilson, who overturned a 2008 ruling against Boissoin [...]
Early in the previous century, G.K. Chesterton observed that it is the mark of the modern that “the normative is everywhere and always being subordinated to the non-normative.” In our own age of proliferating “rights,” it is a further mark of the modern that the universal is everywhere and always subordinated to the particular. Until relatively recently, the natural rights upon which [...]
Stephen Boissoin brought some of the tenacity that goes along with his being a boxer when he travelled to Ontario to speak about his human rights case recently. Ending a self-imposed media and public speaking boycott of some length in time, Boissoin spoke in Grimbsy, Ont., just outside Hamilton, on Oct. 16 at a meeting of the Niagara chapter of [...]
The bizarre saga of Canada’s censorious human rights commissions took another freakish turn in September, when one of its own suddenly declared the very system that employed him “unconstitutional.” Even longtime HRC critic (and victim-turned-victor) Ezra Levant was taken aback. As Levant put it at his blog when the news broke: “Two years ago, Athanasios Hadjis was a human rights hack, sitting [...]
The Roman Catholic bishop of Peterborough, Nicola De Angelis, has written a pastoral letter addressing a recent complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, brought against the bishop and 12 local parishioners. In the letter, distributed on Sept. 13, he strongly redressed the OHRT’s encroachment, asserted his authority as bishop of his diocese and the autonomy of the church from state control over [...]
In a classic 20th-century treatise entitled The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek observed that the hallmark of a free country is the subordination of ruling authority to the fundamental principles of the rule of law. He explained: “Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government, in all its actions, is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand -- rules which [...]
In a time of unprecedented political upheaval, it seems that there is only one thing about which all Canadians can agree: that Section 13 of the Human Rights Act should be repealed. In a stunning display of intellectual honesty, voices from all across the ideological spectrum have emerged to denounce the outrageous behaviour of Canada's self-appointed censors. The human rights commissions' campaign [...]
The Interim talks to its first Person of the Year about human rights commissions Editor's Note: Interim editor Paul Tuns interviewed Ezra Levant by e-mail on Dec. 12 about his own case with the Alberta Human Rights Commission and his ongoing battle against the human rights commission industry. The Interim: In your reply to the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, famously posted [...]
Kathy Shaidle takes a look at Ezra Levant, a man who has valiantly fought for a proper understanding of human rights over the last year.
Complainant appeals CHRC’s dismissal of case against magazine Canada’s human rights industry has resumed its persecution of Catholic Insight, a magazine edited by former Interim editor Fr. Alphonse de Valk. On July 31, Rob Wells requested a formal judicial review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s dismissal of his complaint against the magazine. The commission had spent 16 months investigating de Valk and Catholic [...]
The controversy over human rights legislation and its attendant federal and provincial commissions – as well as the conduct of their employees and associates – continues to simmer despite the usual slowdown in political activity during the summer season. Two significant recent developments that have kept the pot boiling were the dismissals of human rights complaints against Catholic Insight and Maclean’s magazines. In the [...]