A fair bit, actually.
As some of you know, we had an election here and the ruling party mostly ran against itself (marred by a scandal affecting the previous government in '99, and by largely boring the country with the most successful economic performance in its history, and a Prime Minister who grumpily refused to ride jetskis to press conferences). The other party ran against being bored by the ruling party, and um, against successful economic performance. Anyway the other guys won, albeit with a tiny minority government that will keep them, in the words of one Conservative Party adviser,
"from galloping off into some blue-eyed Aryan hinterland." A telling quote from one of their own, because in a very real sense this was an election about whether or not tolerance should continue to be an integral part of the Canadian identity.
It's not the Conservatives that I fear, not the old Joe Clark ones anyway.
There is nothing wrong with old-school Canadian Conservatives: in fact I miss them and wish they'd come back.
Curt has an excellent post on what this is supposed to be about. But a few years ago in order to keep the right vote from splitting they merged with a Reagan-era party that was dedicated to sideburns, the death penalty, tractors, lynching queers, denying the holocaust, and rounding up brown people who talk funny. And in the words of one no-doubt-recently-unemployed copywriter; "I am not making this up." The inclusion of white-supremicist elements and sympathizers is referred to among our new Tory overlords as "big tent politics". So what we're left with is a distinctly un-Canadian-Conservatism – in its place is a political Frankenstein that looks a lot like US Republicanism. Which of course has done just peachy things for America.
The first lamb up for slaughter is whether or not some 2 or so million Canadian citizens can have the same rights as the other 28 or so million. The new government will argue that this is not the case, but fortunately they don't have the votes. So despite the governments desire for intolerance, it looks like we still have a tolerant country.
I don't really want to make this about the election, because I'm not that upset about it. The Tories ran an effective, coherent campaign and were democratically elected. Congratulations. Vox populi, vox Dei. Democracy is mob rule with table manners, and I like it that way.
I'd rather talk about tolerance, about how it's about to become both an increasingly endangered and vilified thing. Those of us who consider tolerance a value – a mechanism on the way to acceptance – have a particular responsibility to be faithful to it, and often we fail in this duty. More of that in a minute.
The right is correct in one ongoing assumption: that the center is
intolerant of intolerance. And I think they are also correct in categorizing this stance as unfair.
We have "hate speech" laws in my country – fairly slippery and unenforceable, but laws nonetheless. I do not have the right to say
publicly that Jews use time-machines to control earthquakes, or that Hindus eat babies, or that gays are pedophiles. Now there are contexts in which this is legally permissable: the privacy of one's home, in church, at a party.
Certain Catholic elements have characterized this as outlawing Christianity: if you can't condemn gays (or Jews or vegetarians or whoever our next contestant may be) in public, then you're not preaching the basic tenets of the religion, and therefore it's an unfair restriction. It's all an elaborate plot to turn us all in multiculturalist hemp-wearing Trudeaubots.
And I think they're right.
Now I understand the rationale for hate speech laws; it's about violence. If a Klan rally posits that immigrants or Jews are the problem, it's meant to incite violence. And it often works. Likewise when a Roman Catholic Bishop writes a letter telling people to use "coercion" – violence or the threat of violence – against gays, things are going to get ugly (although any member of the clergy advocating violence is pretty ugly in my opinion, but that's just me).
We have necessary laws restricting freedom of expression; military intelligence, criminal investigations under way, protecting the identity of minors, issues concerning privacy, slander, as well as things like bomb threats.
But is "hate speech" the same as a bomb-threat? Honestly, I don't think so. I am confident that people can judge for themselves; if my neighbour sends me a letter saying there are too many Asians in my community, I can judge that this person is a racist. From that, I can draw my own conclusions, and I hardly need to call the RCMP. We already have effective laws against issuing threats, and if he crosses that line then that's another matter entirely. I personally adhere to the position that we as a society are proven by how we treat those with whom we disagree.
We don't throw them in jail. We don't tell them what they can or can't think or say or publish. But we don't tell them who they can and can't marry, either. We don't go out of our way to deny them Charter rights. And we're not supposed to campaign on the promise that we're going to make things miserable for some of us.
We small-l liberals hold to a number of values that have been vilified by the right: tolerance being the most spat upon, but others – diversity, environmental responsibility, democracy, social justice, the value of art and education – are equally derided by the current ambient conservatism. In fact these same values are typified as "totalitarianism" because liberals see these as universal ideals. But totalitarianism is of course something entirely other: a desire and practice to enforce uniformity in thought, speech, behaviour. Anything outside this norm is not to be tolerated. Liberalism doesn't hold to this, and in fact there is nothing more antithetical to totalitarianism than liberalism. The logic of the right goes; if diversity and tolerance is the new norm, then this is conformity; therefore
conformity is the new non-conformity, and liberals are hypocrites because we won't conform to the new non-conformists. So you're a totalitarian if you expect others to reject totalitarianism. I remember how this goes; ignorance is strength, right?
So, regarding totalitarianism; if the liberal/conservative continuum has any meaning in this context, I think it results from examining these questions;
Which is more likely to shut down an art gallery?
Which is more likely to stop a book at the border?
Which is more likely to ban a TV commercial?
Which is more likely to push for a boycott of an entire roster of TV advertisers over content of a single episode?
Which is more likely to
vandalize a church door?
So here's the deal: I will hold to my unpopular tolerance. You can open any kind of church next door, read any kind of newspaper, paint any art, write any poem; even if it is about evil time-travelling earthquake-causing Jews or baby-eating vegetarians. You can define your family any damn way you choose, and I won't stop or lobby to have you stopped or vote for those who vow to stop you. Where you've felt in the past that we liberals were trying to stop you from blaming everything on gays, I apologize, and we shouldn't have done that. You go right ahead.
I will also vow to move beyond tolerance to acceptance, to find common ground in our humanity, in our democracy, and in our compassion.
.jpg){kind=link}