Pretty soon you’re talking about real money
Dang. Has Canada gone stark raving mad?
Or maybe it’s just British Columbia.
The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has ordered former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld to pay $750,000 for violating the Human Rights Code by publishing hate speech and discriminatory content against 2SLGBTQ+ people.
“Mr. Neufeld invoked negative and insidious stereotypes about LGBTQ people, especially trans people, which denied their inherent dignity and, in some cases, reflected the hallmarks of hate against them as a group,” the tribunal said in a decision Wednesday.
I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if they are in fact talking about T people only. We know from a million examples that they love to make it about the L and the G and the B, including when it’s not. It’s dishonest and manipulative, and journalism should avoid it like the plague.
Neufeld was one of the “loudest critics” against the B.C. government’s move in 2017 directing school boards to update codes of conduct to address bullying based on “SOGI,” or sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the tribunal’s decision.
Did the BC government by any chance treat skepticism about swappable gender as “bullying based on SOGI”? In other words did it sneak the SO part in there even though it was absent, to provide cover for the outrageous move to force people to agree that men can be women just by saying so? My guess is that they did, because we’ve seen that very thing so many times.
“For five years, he publicly denigrated LGBTQ people and teachers and associated them with the worst forms of child abuse,” said the tribunal members, adding that the effect was a discriminatory work environment for 2SLGBTQ+ teachers in the district.
Did he? Or was he talking solely about the T? We can’t tell, because mainstream journalism consistently lies about this.
The tribunal found six of his publications were likely to expose trans, gay and lesbian people to hatred or contempt based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.
“These publications demonize and delegitimize trans people (and in one case, lesbian and gay people) and cast them as a powerful menace threatening the security of children and their families.”
Aha! There it is, finally – the admission. Only once was it also the L and the G.
One unnamed teacher, who uses she/they pronouns, testified before the tribunal that Neufeld’s comments made the people in their life ask them “to reconsider going into teaching.”
If the teacher uses she/they pronouns why does the CBC use solely they pronouns in that sentence? Could it be because the their/them is so much more irritating?
They said they chose not to be out as a queer person professionally because they and their family feared for their safety, which they described as a tough and isolating experience.
An even worse sentence! Incoherent! Who is the “they” in “they described” – the teacher or “their” family? We’ll never know.
The teacher said not being out affected their ability “to show up in the classroom as their best self.” The tribunal quoted the teacher: “I think that teachers teach with their heart, and a lot of our personality goes into that, and without being able to be your authentic self, you’re not able to show up wholly.”
But it’s not your authentic self, it’s your fake, silly, fatuous one. Furthermore, teachers need to teach with their brains. They can’t do that while playing let’s pretend about their “gender”.
Even if he did stereotype LGB people, that should not be a crime, whether misdemeanor or felony, nor should it be a civil wrong. The school district does have some control over teacher speech, because it can affect their relationship with pupils, and the reputation of the school in the community, but there are limits to how much.
When articles like this are published, readers should demand to know exactly what was said. “Hate speech” has become too broadly defined a category, and frankly, I think “hate speech” is problematic to begin with. Some speech is obviously hate speech – or is it? Different groups have different definitions. I have been accused of hate speech for being a member of FFRF (which is the least hateful of all the atheist groups, and most of them are blunt, but not hateful, at least not since Madelyn Murray O’Hair died). Some groups will accuse women of hate speech simply for reporting that they were raped, because to them it is evidence of racism and a ‘carceral’ mindset. Organizations are accused of hate speech merely for using the word ‘woman’ when talking about adult human females.
With definitions like these, how can anything not be hate speech? And yet, there is something that is apparently not hate speech – “Kill TERFs”. This is true even when it is accompanied by credible threats of real violence and uses graphic images to depict the end of “TERFs”. By this, they mean kill anyone who knows there are two sexes, and only two, in humans, and that we are not among those animals who can change sex.
That’s why I was always, and remain, against hate speech laws. They are too dependent on what individual or group is given the right to interpret the law. If we have free speech, we have free speech, though I have no beefs at all with penalizing actual threats, whether credible or not, and also criminalizing things like encouraging attacks on the seat of government itself (though no one would do that, right? Of course not!)
That could be me on trial for some of my posts here on the abuse perpetrated by teacher “Kayla” Lemieux, he of the huge, fetishistic, prosthetic tits.
Canada’s pretty out there these days, but BC and Alberta really are more extreme, in both political directions. Seems like they always have been. There’s a palpable sense in Western Canada that it’s very disconnected from the country’s economic, political and cultural engine, and that seems to manifest as political extremeness. I remember going West as a teenager and immediately noticing a massive cultural difference from Toronto, one just as big as the cultural difference in Quebec. It’s unmistakable.
I wonder if there’s the same kind of sense in the Northwest US?
I’ve never pictured Seattle as an extreme kind of place. Portland: definitely far-left. Idaho, Wyoming and Montana: far-right. Seattle: kinda normal? Liberal in a typical coastal city way?
Feels like things are slowly beginning to calm down in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, with anxieties about Trump giving many people pause about moving rightward, and the Liberal party shifting its messaging away from wokery-pokery and towards economics, defence, and international relations.
The CBC’s still out to lunch, though.