Oh The Irony: Mark Steyn

So, in the wake of Donald Sterling being unceremoniously dumped from any association with the NBA, we have Mark Steyn running to his defence.

Even so, it is disturbing to see (as Bill Quick put it) “the use of a man’s property be taken from him because of the way he expressed himself.” And not just any property but a billion-dollar property the man has owned for a third of a century. Solely over views expressed in the course of a two-minute rant at his mistress about the other guys she pals around with.

Oh, right.  So we're supposed to turn a blind eye to it because "it was in private"?  Wrong, Mr. Steyn. Mr. Sterling is free to be as much of an asshole as he wishes - in public or private.  What he overlooked is the consequences of his words being made public.

The NBA administration and the team's players clearly were less than impressed with Mr. Sterling's utterances, private or otherwise.  It's one thing to be a bigot, quite another for it to become so clearly public.  Apparently, there are consequences to that.

If he feels that the NBA's actions are too harsh, Mr. Sterling does have the right to resort to the courts.

The NBA, in this case, is similarly free to express their distaste for Mr. Sterling's beliefs.  Ironically, because an NBA team is a franchise and the NBA is a corporation (a nameless, faceless entity that US law grants people-like rights to in matters such as "freedom of speech"), the NBA is in fact quite within its rights to revoke Mr. Sterling's ownership of the franchise.  (I have no doubt that the franchise agreement has words in it to the effect of "not impugning the good name of the NBA" or something of a sort intended to remind franchisees that their public utterances may well have an impact on their investments.

I’m not so sure being an asshole is still legal in America. Mr. Silver has also fined Sterling $2.5 million – for something he said in his own home recorded without his knowledge. Kareem Abdul Jabar: 

“Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way..? The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime.”

Perhaps the grand irony is that Mr. Steyn doesn't seem to be ready to acknowledge that perhaps what has happened to Mr. Sterling is really not so different from what used to happen to Black people in the segregation era, or LGBT people in the 1950s.  Buy a house in the wrong part of town, and you'd find yourself run out of the area by the locals.  Heck, sitting on the wrong bus bench could get you arrested.  

What has emerged here is that society has evolved, and now being found to be rather publicly a bigot is no longer acceptable.  Instead, it turns out that there's a price for that.  You see, it's rather interesting the way that works.

As long as there is a degree of decency in how one behaves, freedoms such as Free Speech can go a very long ways to improving things.  When someone like Mr. Sterling goes too far - and I don't really care if it's in public or not - there is a price that society will demand.  Mr. Steyn seems to think that because Sterling's comments were made in "private", that we should give him a pass.

As most politicians have already learned, Mr. Sterling and Mr. Steyn need to learn that in today's world, one needs to exercise discretion at all times, not just when a live microphone is in front of you.  Things have a way of making themselves public.

Is the NBA's response to Mr. Sterling excessive?  Perhaps it is.  On the other hand, the in that same realm of free speech and expression, is the NBA not entitled to take whatever steps are reasonable to protect the image that they wish to project to the world?

As I have said before, "Freedom of Speech" is not the same thing as "Freedom of Speech Without Consequences".  Mr. Steyn continues to overlook the consequences part of the equation.

The Steyn Is Back ... and He Still Doesn't Get It

Mark Steyn has returned to the pages of the National Post, and he is continuing his crusade to never be held accountable for his "free speech".  (No surprise there, Steyn and Levant have been mutual cheerleaders for ages)

Mr. Steyn seems to be confused about the difference between free speech, free speech without consequences.  As always, his argument boils down to being able to say whatever the heck you want, and nobody should be able to hold you accountable for it.

He raises several instances where he claims that "free speech" is being unreasonably abrogated:

In California, Mozilla's chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage. 

At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek 'special clearance' before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.

Let's give these two examples a little closer scrutiny, shall we?

Brendan Eichs resigned as CEO of Mozilla as a result of it becoming public knowledge that he had financially supported the pro-Proposition 8 campaign in California.  Nobody has said that he has no right to do that.  He's perfectly free to do so.  Similarly, the users and developers behind Mozilla have an equal right to say that they don't like the idea of being led by a man who is objectively hostile to many of their peers and colleagues.  

Open source developers are notoriously liberal creatures.  They don't like the idea of bigotry and oppression being fomented by their leaders.  So, what happened when Mr. Eichs stepped in as CEO?  A few enterprising individuals went and did a bit of digging into Mr. Eichs' public record and found that he had acted in a manner they didn't approve of.  This was publicized, and the community around Mozilla began to protest rather vocally.  

Was Mr. Eichs' right to free speech (or action) being "suppressed"?  Not really.  Nobody is telling him to "shut up", and in fact I'm quite sure that Mr. Eichs could make quite a living for himself on the lecture circuit with Mr. Steyn, I'm sure.  What has happened is the community within which Mr. Eichs resides chose to censure him for what they perceived to be an inappropriate action.  (I won't pontificate on the proportionality of the consequences for Mr. Eichs, I don't have enough information about the particulars to make much of an assessment of it)

Regarding Mr. Lawson, although I have found one or two mentions of this report from the UK House of Commons Committee, it isn't exactly widely reported precisely what was said, so I'm even more cautious about the veracity of Steyn's claims.  Of a total of 3 news results on the subject, 2 were opinion pieces - including Mr. Steyn's column), and the third was behind a paywall, so it's a little difficult to assess the details and the veracity of Mr. Steyn's interpretation of things.

Mr. Lawson's position regarding climate change is well documented, and he has been pretty clear about it for some time.  Fine.  There is nothing saying that the BBC or any other news source has to give him an audience from which to spout his beliefs.  You see, the interesting thing about this is that Mr. Lawson is free to believe whatever he wishes.  But, just as in situations where creationism crosses paths with science, he is not entitled to his own 'facts' as he chooses to make them.    Therefore, a science show on BBC talking about climate change does need to be careful when bringing in someone like Mr. Lawson as an "expert".  If the show is about the known facts, then Mr. Lawson probably is not the right person to bring in.  

Mr. Steyn seems to think that this represents a narrowing of the public discourse.  Of course, like the average creationist who argues that "the debate" should be taught in schools, he is conveniently ignoring the fact that the facts have long since narrowed things down to the point that the debate is not one of "if", but rather of "when, and how much".  When so-called "skeptics" continue to repeat the tired line that there is "ambiguity in the science" or a "lack of clarity", they eventually render themselves irrelevant to the actual discussion.  

But free speech is essential to a free society because, when you deny people 'an opportunity to act like normal political parties' there's nothing left for them to do but punch your lights out

Of course, libertarians like Mr. Steyn argue this all the time.  They seem to have forgotten the lessons that we all learned (or should have learned) during the Nazi era in Germany.  There are in fact exercises of "free speech" that need to be censured and held in abeyance, for if they are not, they can and do become the tools of oppression and violence for those who are the targets of them.

Those few who are foolish enough to "sincerely" hold those beliefs that the Nazis used to demonize Jews in 1930s Germany (or whatever other bigotry you wish to look at, such as that in Rwanda in the early 1990s) don't have a legitimate voice, for their exercise of "free speech" has consequences for others besides themselves.

The problem that Mr. Steyn's position ignores is the inherent privilege that Mr. Steyn has as a reasonably wealthy, white American.  He is not a member of a minority population subject to systemic and deliberate suppression, he is not a member of a visible minority and subject to the consequences of America's racial segregation era.  He is, in fact, quite comfortable.  As a result, he fails to recognize that in order for there to be free speech, there must also be boundaries to it.  Some of those boundaries are going to be legal, some are going to be social - matters of courtesy shall we say.

If you cannot express your ideas reasonably without violating those conventions, then perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the positions that you are holding.  Are they unreasonable?  Has the society you live in moved past the assumptions that those positions are rooted in?  An excellent example of this would be the gay marriage debate in Canada:  If you raised this subject with most Canadians today, they would shrug and walk away on the basis that it has been the law of the land for close to a decade, and the world hasn't fallen apart as a result of it - holding to the argument that gay marriage should be illegal in Canada is largely seen as an archaic belief.  Society has moved beyond that issue.

Similarly, we have a fairly clear sense of what constitutes hate speech, and why hate speech is subject to censure.  I doubt that anybody would have a big problem with hauling off a white supremacist who started publicly broadcasting Nazi-era propaganda lies about Jewish people and charging them with hate crimes.  Mr. Steyn may decry what he sees as unreasonable "political correctness", and he is welcome to do so.  What is not open for debate is whether or not there should be consequences for those who not only violate the rights of others with their insistence on unbridled free speech.  There are and there will always be.

Is that an unreasonable limitation on "free speech"?  To a libertarian like Mr. Steyn, yes.  To the people who are the targets of hate speech, the question is a little different.  As I have argued many times in the past, rights and freedoms are not absolutes, rather they are a cat's cradle, where individual rights exist in constant tension with each other and the rights of others as well.  Mr. Steyn's right to free speech has limits, as does my own.  To believe otherwise is to blind oneself to the fact that we live in a social world.

Mark Steyn Lies, and Ezra Laps it up

I'm getting quite sick of hearing the utter bullshit coming out of clowns like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant lately.

The latest claim is that Richard Warman has been involved in every Section 13 (Hate Messages) claim in the last few years. Of course, Ezra just has to parrot Steyn.

I'm pretty sure that there's at least one case that did not involve Mr. Warman - that was the complaint that Rob Wells filed against Craig Chandler for republishing Boissoin's letter on multiple websites. I suspect the real truth is that Warman doesn't respond well to being bullied, and will push an issue through the full process and hearings. Since Mr. Wells' complaint was resolved through the mediation process, it doesn't even turn up on Steyn's radar, so the logical fallacy eludes him.

At one point Steyn complains that a transsexual who complained about access to medical services is now working for the government on a study about transsexual health issues:

"Human rights" plaintiffs are professional activists: since filing her complaint, the transsexual in the labiaplasty case has been given a government job investigating the health status of transsexuals.

Hmmm...lessee - it's a bad thing to ask a transsexual to quantify the problems that transsexuals face accessing health care services how? While I would expect more than just that individual to be involved in the study, I can't imagine someone better qualified to give voice to the issues experienced by a small, and relatively obscure minority population.

Oh yes, and in a similar case in California where a hospital refused services to a transsexual woman because of her past, the hospital has changed its "policy".

Of course, to people like Steyn and Levant, denial of services that would otherwise be available to others isn't discrimination, is it? No, no they don't. They seem to be of the opinion that their beliefs are unassailable and beyond question.