Saturday, April 6, 2013

The Most Chilling Phrase Around: "Celebrate Diversity"

How so? It's because, as Mark Steyn explains, for those who believe in this popular brand of totalitarianism it's a command, not a suggestion (in other words, "celebrate diversity--or else"):
The Diversity Celebrators have their exquisitely sensitive antennae attuned for anything less than enthusiastic approval. Very quickly, traditional religious teaching on homosexuality will be penned up within church sanctuaries, and "faith-based" ancillary institutions will be crowbarred into submission. What's that? I'm "scaremongering"? Well, it's now routine in Canada, where Catholic schools in Ontario are obligated by law to set up Gay-Straight Alliance groups, where a Knights of Columbus hall in British Columbia was forced to pay compensation for declining a lesbian wedding reception, and where the Rev. Stephen Boisson wrote to his local paper, objecting to various aspects of "the homosexual agenda" and was given a lifetime speech ban by the Alberta "Human Rights" Tribunal ordering him never to utter anything "disparaging" about homosexuals ever again, even in private. Although his conviction was eventually overturned by the Court of Queen's Bench after a mere seven-and-a-half years of costly legal battles, no Canadian newspaper would ever publish such a letter today. The words of Chief Justice Burger would now attract a hate-crime prosecution in Canada, as the Supreme Court in Ottawa confirmed only last month.  
Those who have the good fortune of belonging to certain specified victim groups, however, can say whatever the hell they want, secure in the knowledge that as far as the state is concerned, their racism and hate speech is no such thing: 
Of course, if you belong to certain approved identity groups, none of this will make any difference. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who famously observed that Africans of the ancient world had made more contributions to philosophy and mathematics than all "them Greek homos," need not zip his lips – any more than Dr. Bilal Philips, the Toronto Islamic scholar who argues that homosexuals should be put to death, need fear the attention of Canada's "human rights" commissions. But for the generality of the population this will be one more subject around which one has to tiptoe on ever-thinner eggshells.
That's especially so at Queen's University, where the eggshells have grown so thin that twice this past week a "free speech wall" (what a quaint notion) was torn down by campus diversity enforcers, and there's a well-paid campus snitch who listens in on students' private conversations in public places so she can set them straight should they be so bold as to utter anything, um, un-diverse.

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