I’m was wrong…..you’ll hear that twice tonight so make sure you stay tuned.
I know the critics out there are saying, “Lilley, be more specific….you are wrong on everything.”
Fair enough. Keep sending those letters.
Anyway, yesterday I had Ezra Levant on to talk about human rights commissions and their crazy decisions. In my view the whacky rulings were slowing down but…….seems I was wrong.
In fact as Ezra and I were talking about a guy in Montreal getting fined 150 thousand dollars for insulting his Chinese employees for peeing on the floor, the BC Human Rights Commission was issuing a ruling against a comedian.
That’s right. Not just speech police, we have joke police in Canada.
To paraphrase Henny Youngman, Take my rights please.
It all goes back to 2007 when Guy Earle, a struggling stand up comic was at an open mic comedy night at a local Vancouver bar.
He got heckled.
He heckled back.
The women heckling him were lesbians. Earle mentioned this in his profanity laced response to their profanity laced heckling.
Now he and the owners of the now closed Zesty’s restaurant owe Lorna Pardy 22 thousand dollars on the order of the BC Human Rights Tribunal.
Pardy says she felt discriminated against, threatened and humiliated.
I’m not buying it.
I don’t believe there is a right not to feel humiliated and discriminated against when you decide to mix it up with a stand-up comedian.
This, as in so many other cases, is a made up right that sees the government jumping into determining what jokes are funny, which insults go too far.
You should see what I’ve had said about me since it was announced that I was going to be part Sun News Network.
Despite their cries of homophobia for any perceived slight against gays and lesbians my critics on the hard left regularly jump to emailing me or posting comments online that insinuate I’m involved in some sort of homo-erotic situations with my employers.
Should I file a human right complaint? Could be fun…..turn the tables a little….
Mostly I ignore them and their sick, twisted comments.
That’s what Lorna Pardy should have done.
She could have left the bar.
She could have decided never to go see a comedy show by Guy Earle again.
Instead she asked a government body to rule that an insult from a comedian was a violation of her rights.
We’ve had human rights bodies tell bar owners they have to let medical marijuana users smoke-up in their bars even though doing that would make them lose their license because it is against the law……
another decision ruled that a woman with a skin condition had to be rehired by McDonald’s and that the restaurant chain could not force her to wash her hands….it irritated her skin……..while she handled other people’s food.
And of course the most famous cases were involving Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant both taken to different human rights bodies over their journalistic work.
Government censors for magazines, for jokes, for insults.
These aren’t real rights.
We have charters of rights to protect us from government not so that government can run our lives.
It’s time to wake up Canada.
Time to demand change in these overzealous bodies.