According to Mr. Coren, the uproar over schools banning Pullman's book is equivalent to the series of human rights rulings that have gone rather against Craig Chandler and allies:
By golly, it's funny when liberal-minded people become terribly self-righteous and bemoan the lack of free speech in Canada. Funny because liberal-minded people tend to be the most aggressive and intolerant of censors. In Canada we regularly have human rights commissions closing down websites and condemning and fining writers, and the CRTC telling broadcasters what they are allowed to say.
Mostly from one side of course. Almost without exception leftist opinions are permitted or even encouraged while conservatives are scrutinized or even gagged. Which leads to the positively hilarious scene of those same alleged liberals condemning a Roman Catholic school board that last week chose to remove Philip Pullman's book The Golden Compass from its library shelves.
Somehow, I think there's rather a significant difference between a book written by an author that appears to be critical of the RC Church and letters written by Stephen Boissoin that called for people to "fight back" against GLBT people or likened them to drug dealers and pedophiles. Or perhaps he thinks that there is an equivalence between Pullman's book and Chandler "merely" threatening to retaliate against someone for complaining about what he said on a radio show?
Pullman's book is a work of fiction. It may be structured in a way that is as hostile to religion as CS Lewis' works were blatantly pro-Christian. You don't see atheists complaining about CS Lewis. It's mostly wingnuts who are all bent out of shape by Pullman's work. (I suspect it's like getting bent out of shape by the Harry Potter books - rooted in a perverse combination of paranoia and silliness)
Is there really an equivalence between a book - a children's book of fiction that is only "critical" by indirection or inference and someone who in a very real world sense draws analogies between an already marginalized population and Nazis?
2 comments:
My take on Boissoin's letter never made me think anything beyond the ideological and political. He was not calling people to violence but awareness and offence. He was a minister and a leader in a political lobby group...take wahtever steps to me meant, whatever political or other steps that made me aware of the issues and made me care more about how they might be effecting my children.
To insinuate more seem rather ridiculous.
Roger,
I'd suggest you spend some time reading the AHRC analysis of both the letter and the testimony.
Were it merely "a call of concern" that would be one thing, but it stated as "fact" a great many mistruths about GLBT people, and used militaristic language repeatedly.
My thoughts on the ruling, and links to the ruling itself are here.
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