Jay Currie

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Warren Kinsella has taken to snapping pictures of graffiti in washrooms to illustrate the need for s. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. I suspect Warren and I might agree the little shit who scrawled this deserves a spanking or, if he is a bit older, a few well aimed punches from his more enlightened team mates not to mention an hour or two scrubbing out every stall in the bathroom to remove every bit of graffiti which is what a coach of mine demanded when I simply drew a mildly naughty picture on a wall.

However, that is not the effect of the Human Rights regime either federally or provincially. Stupid, hateful people “posting” in the anonymity of a bathroom stall are not going to be caught. (Unless Lucy Warman is hanging around enticing them to write nasty things.) Instead, on the logic of the HRC, the arena might well be subject to a complaint for “publishing” this vile little screed. Or, at least, for not getting in there with the SOS pad and eliminating it. (Something Warren could have done himself or asked the janitor to do.)

What the HRC effectively does is give citizens – Warren, myself, you – the easy out when we see or hear offensive expression: we call the government.

Now, when I am riding the bus and some lamer kids are chatting about “how fucking gay” PE is, I am quite willing, and often do, tell them to cut the language out. It’s what adults do. I don’t ask the bus driver to intervene. I don’t demand that the state act on my complaint – I just get the job done.

So when it comes to BS like the pic Warren posted or like the sexist racist diatribe some guy posting as “90’sareover” posts at Stormfront I begin my analysis with – what can I do? And, from there, what can “we” do? In the case of the washroom graffiti, wash it off, in the case of Stormfront, shun the site (not a big loss in my surfing habits).

Will this purely private initiative end offensive speech? Not immediately, nor should it as the idea of “offensive speech” is a shifting target. But ask yourself, how often do you hear the word “nigger” these days? (Outside rap and hip hop culture which is a whole other story.) How often do you hear native Canadians refered to as “jigs” or native Canadian women called “squaws”, and when was the last time you heard a Jew referred to as a “kike” or “heb”? Do you often hear women referred to as a “slit” or a “gash” – broad, chick and gal have made something of a post-feminist come back but as often as not from women themselves. All these words have fallen into disuse not because they are illegal but rather because we allow ourselves to be genuinely offended by them. Our personal intake of breath when someone calls a person of colour a “nigger” is sufficient, in the vast majority of cases, to correct the intolerance that usage implies.

If we outsource our capacity to be offended and to correct to the State we have, in effect, neutered ourselves.

Now, I note that Warren’s picture and my examples are rather simple minded – they obviously do not deal with things like cartoons which may offend or quoting Imams as to the breeding rates of Muslims in Europe. Nor should they. Because here the potentially offending speech is in support of a legitimate objective: debate within a democratic nation. Painting a swastika on a gravestone in a Jewish cemetery or calling someone a “nigger” forwards no debate but is simply an expression of overweaning stupidity. However, these sorts of expressions are so primitive that they cannot be taken as incitement either. One is vandalism and should be treated as such, the other is rude and to be shunned as the rude always should be.

Hanging s. 13 on a bit of nasty graffiti shows just how intellectually bankrupt its defenders are. They want to justify its existence as a prophylactic against the one sort of speech it almost certainly cannot control. To give up free expression to better suppress graffiti is a bargain most of us will not make and we should not make it because, as Mike Brock pointed out, free speech is what gives us real democracy.

*Update: with traffic coming from SDA (thanks Kate) and FFF (thanks Kathy) it was a bit unfair to burn Kinsella’s bandwidth with a hotlink. But I was damned if I was going to post a crappy image twice the size it needed to be. So this image has had automatic colour and contrast adjustment and has been scaled to a 450px width.

If you have a minute find out more about Kinsella here.

Update #2: Jonathan Kay in the National Post:

As well as reproducing the earnest, lachrymose plea for censorship sent by his Jewish friend, Kinsella offers, by way of proof, a photo he took of a tiny piece of childish graffiti that says “White Power” — alongside two crudely drawn swastikas.

Good on Warren for having his cell-phone camera at the ready. But my reaction is: So what? When I was in junior high school, it was a common practice for kids to carve this sort of stuff into their desk (and far worse) because we were desperate for attention, and this was the easiest way to shock people. This is hardly indicative that the “web of hate” is reconstituting itself. (Even a generation ago, in fact, that “web” probably never did amount to much — it turns out that a surprising number of alleged hatemongers were actually police informants.) full comment

Kinsella – to whom I have linked more than enough – put up a preemptive piece but, when it comes down to it, Kay’s point is that we have moved on and Warren hasn’t. I wonder how the oldest living punk band is making out speaking of past it.