Blog Post From the Heaven-Rescued Land

A longtime reader and MSM mole has informed me that Kathy Shaidle is being sued for libel. I don’t know Kathy. She has linked to me a few times.

Kathy lives in Canada. As the mole points out, CANADIANS HAVE NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH. I capitalized that. If you take nothing else away from this post, remember the big letters. Especially if you live in Canada.

A Canadian activist named Richard Warman appears to have created a profitable business, suing Canadian bloggers for libel. When he’s not suing libraries for offering books he doesn’t like. And Kathy just made his list. This business has been going on for quite some time up there. I’m sure you know about the Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant stories. It is evidently extremely easy to prove libel up there. Things that wouldn’t begin to meet the American standard satisfy Canadian judges, and the verdicts are big.

Kathy has a link to a defense fund. You’ll see it if you click the link above. She has pledged to fight this character to the end.

How very precious the Bill of Rights is. Look how crazy other countries are. This story really drives it home. Here in the US, liberals have worked very hard to outlaw conservatism and free speech, creating tyrannical “speech codes” and filing frivolous indictments against prominent conservative politicians. Think what they could do if we didn’t have the first amendment, and our laws were as left-leaning as Canada’s. The game would be over. What a beautiful sanctuary is America.

A reminder to any American who supports Kathy and her colleagues from within the US: sooner or later, this guy’s verdicts may generate a big enough war chest to fund lawsuits within the United States, against Americans. And he will clearly be willing to use it. So think before you mention him on your blog. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say about your next-door neighbor. The facts more than suffice to condemn him. And if you plan on visiting Canada, don’t announce it on your blog.

It’s odd how our enemies are developing more and more power to reach inside the USA and shut us up. First the standard Islamist death threats. Now litigation-happy foreigners might pose a risk. According to Kathy, even if Warman hasn’t sued any Americans yet, he has tried to prevent our websites from being seen in Canada.

Maybe it’s time for Canadians who aren’t completely insane to move to America. I can’t imagine a better addition to our workforce than Mark Steyn. In some small way, he might make up for Keanu Reeves.

And now that I think about it, Canada appears to be a great permanent destination for liberals.

More

Canadian commenter Paul C. says the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of speech. I am getting incredibly forgetful, and I failed to check the emailed assertion that Canadians had no constitutional right to free speech; sorry about that.

But while what I said was somewhat misleading in letter, the spirit appears to have been right on.

Via blogger Larry Borsato, here’s a bit from the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam:

How do you like your free speech — well chilled? Canada has no First Amendment and adheres to primitive British-style libel laws.

Here is a hilarious definition of defamation la Canadienne, from the Media Libel website: ”A defamatory statement exists if the publication tends to lower the plaintiff’s reputation in the estimation of those who are commonly referred to as ‘right thinking’ members of society.” Allow me to reiterate my widely known position: Celine Dion is the greatest singer who ever lived.

Just this year, the Canadian Parliament passed what the religious right has branded a ”Chill Bill,” or ”The Bible as Hate Speech Bill,” effectively preventing churches from using the Bible to preach against homosexuality. ”With the passage of Bill C-250, Canada has now embarked upon a course of criminalization of dissent,” according to a statement released this spring by the Catholic Civil Rights League.

Good Lord. Is it okay to say “good Lord” in Canada? If anything, it appears that I was too kind to Canada’s laws. If Beam is right, it is completely fair to state that freedom of religion does not exist in Canada. The right to criticize sinful behavior isn’t just an expression issue. It impinges on your right to worship as you will, by making it impossible to instruct other believers by teaching doctrine.

This is the direction in which the left wants to take America. If it doesn’t scare you, there is something wrong with you. Or maybe you’re just a right-thinking person.

More

David Bernstein, at the National Review’s site:

In another incident, after Toronto print-shop owner Scott Brockie refused on religious grounds to print letterhead for a gay-activist group, the local human-rights commission ordered him to pay the group $5,000, print the requested material, and apologize to the group’s leaders. Brockie, who always accepted print jobs from individual gay customers, and even did pro-bono work for a local AIDS group, is fighting the decision on religious-freedom grounds.

Any gains the gay-rights movement has received from the crackdown on speech in Canada have been pyrrhic because as part of the Canadian government’s suppression of obscene material, Canadian customs frequently target books with homosexual content. Police raids searching for obscene materials have disproportionately targeted gay organizations and bookstores.

Moreover, left-wing academics are beginning to learn firsthand what it’s like to have their own censorship vehicles used against them. For example, University of British Columbia Prof. Sunera Thobani, a native of Tanzania, faced a hate-crimes investigation after she launched into a vicious diatribe against American foreign policy. Thobani, a Marxist feminist and multiculturalism activist, had remarked that Americans are “bloodthirsty, vengeful and calling for blood.” The Canadian hate-crimes law was created to protect minority groups from hate speech. But in this case, it was invoked to protect Americans.