Harley Price has an excellent post on human rights, human rights commissions, and hate speech. It defies excerption, but there are a few takeaway points that extremely important. We live in an age when the normal is viewed as abhorrent as the “universal is everywhere and always subordinated to the particular.” That leads to certain opinions being marginalized as hateful or offensive and necessary to tamp down, by government force if necessary. Hence the human rights commission industry and hate speech codes. Price notes that the philosophical underpinnings have been turned upside down and thus, too, traditional defaults of settling disputes when the rights of one group of people conflict with the rights of another. (It is peculiar feature of our age that we pretend that rights are never in conflict while constantly, even incessantly, re-writing the rules by which rights disputes are settled.) Price concludes by noting that even in human rights cases in which social conservatives are victorious, the powers that be often admonish those who hold politically incorrect views (on homosexuality, for example) while ostensibly exonerating them or upholding their free speech rights. Pointing to the case of an Alberta judge overturning the provinces human rights tribunal’s punitive treatment of Steven Boissoin, Price notes that the judge used language that, if the tables had been turned, would violate hate speech and human rights commission standards of offensiveness.
