No free speech in Canada

Here is some news from Canada:

WINNIPEG - A case of two youngsters seized from a couple suspected of being racist has raised the question of how far parents can go in teaching their children what they think is right.

"I think it's really a tough issue," Harvey Frankel, a professor of social work at the University of Manitoba, said Monday.

"I'm not aware of the courts giving a whole lot of guidance here in (this) area of child welfare." ...

Manitoba guidelines allow child welfare workers to investigate any situation where there is concern for the safety or well-being of a child, including cases involving "religious or political practices ... if those practices could be harmful to the child," said Nadine Delisle, communications co-ordinator for Family Services and Housing.

Whether a judge would permanently remove kids from parents with racist beliefs could be a different matter, according to Frankel.

Unfortunately, there is no free speech in Canada. A professor was recently ordered:

That Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc. shall cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals. Further, they shall not and are prohibited from making disparaging remarks in the future about Dr. Lund or Dr. Lund’s witnesses relating to their involvement in this complaint. Further, all disparaging remarks versus homosexuals are directed to be removed from current web sites and publications of Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc.

The above custody case is not a tough call at all. If you believe in free speech, then no parent should ever lose his kids because of political views. The next time you hear a Canadian support same-sex marriage or something like that, just remember that he might just be saying that because he does not want the government to take his kids away.

An article in tomorrow's NY Times explains:

“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”

“But in the United States,” Professor Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”

This article is supposedly hate speech in Canada. It is actually a quite sensible article about Islam.