One More Epicycle

The recent attempt by several members of the Canadian Islamic Congress to silence the inimitable Mark Steyn — not by disproving his thesis that because of demographics Islam is on the way up, of course, but by charging him with blasphemy before the Inquisition — enrages and disturbs on every level.

I don’t mean to be metaphorical. I’m entirely serious in describing this as a blasphemy prosecution, and the misnamed human rights commissions as an Inquisition. Whether he’s convicted or not is less significant than the fact there is an official body empowered to determine whether or not he’s blasphemed.

Canada has an official belief system (half-affectionately, half-derisively called the multicult), and we’re required to make obeisance or risk punishment. Our religion doesn’t have many explicit dogmas, per se, but you can still come to understand it pretty well. In classical negative theology, you come to understand God by saying what he’s not; similarly, in our new faith, you come to understand the boundaries of Accepted Truth by what people are punished for, or threatened with punishment for.

These days, no one’s worried about being fined by the government for sympathizing with the non-Chalcedonian Christology of the Coptic Orthodox. Come to think of it, you can probably count one one hand the number of members of the various Canadian HRCs who know what I’m talking about. Questionable Trinitarian theology just isn’t something they concern themselves with, and if I tried to bring a formal heresy charge against an Egyptian friend then the Commissars would laugh.

“Settle this between yourselves,” they’d say.

They’d throw out the case like Seneca’s older brother, the Roman jurist Gallio, threw out the case against St Paul where the locals claimed that Paul “persuades men to worship God contrary to the law”. (Acts 18).

Gallio interrupted before Paul even began his defence, because he wasn’t interested in handling philosophical disputes between one group of Jews (the local synagogue) and another group of Jews and assorted Gentile hangers-on (Paul and coworkers). He was only concerned with dealing with matters involving “some misdemeanor or serious crime“.

Instead, he explained, “since it involves questions about words and names and your own law—settle the latter yourselves. I will not be a judge of such things.“

And he kicked everyone out of the courtroom.

It’s mildly astonishing that a few words from an irritated Roman proconsul two thousand years dead show more sense than a modern nation’s enlightened political structures, but there you go. Whether you view our innovations as inventing new thoughtcrimes or as broadening the traditional exceptions to free speech beyond all sense, the end result is the same: we’ve criminalized the expression of perfectly reasonable ideas, and the space in which our thought can move and play and explore grows ever smaller.

For Steyn’s argument, right or wrong, the natural battlefield is the page, not a kangaroo court.

It’s been noted — I think by the man himself — that the complainants almost always win in these cases, and so the odds aren’t good. I’m not so sure. It may be that if we cast enough light then Steyn might be found not guilty, for fear of throwing the entire HRC project into disrepute– freedom could win by losing. I’d hope so, anyway, but the many previous attacks on free speech in Canada via the Inquisitions have generally passed unremarked, in typical Canadian style.

It’s time for that to end. All those who support free speech — right, left, centre, other — must oppose the so-called “human rights” end-run around our ancient liberties in the Friendly Dictatorship.

Free Mark Steyn, to free us all.

the offending article