Christian Bonk on the Guy Earle case:
It is apparently now a legal matter in Canada to determine if jokes are amusing or not. And if that sounds to students of Eastern European history like something out of Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, or Kundera, it pretty much is. (…)
Earle is hardly anybody’s idea of a redneck, homophobic bigot. If anything, he’s a self-described liberal who seems genuinely bewildered at the way those on his “side” have been so eager to throw him under the bus as punishment for what appears to be nothing more than drunken insult-slinging between a comic and an unruly audience.
Granted, Earle’s putdowns were not at Don Rickles’s level of heckler-flattening sharpness. Many observers and even fellow comics were eager to dismiss Earle as not being worth the effort to defend because they didn’t find him funny. They argued that better comics would know how to handle obnoxious audience members without resorting to crude dick jokes.
Perhaps they were thinking of subtler, gentler putdowns along the lines of George “Would somebody just put a dick in that guy’s mouth, please?” Carlin or Richard “I’ll slap you in the mouth with my dick” Pryor.
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Bonk (being a Canadian) believes that the HRCs original mandate was noble and “basically sane.”
Despite being Canadian, too, I disagree and have for some time.
Property owners have a right (in fact, they have a fiduciary duty) to discriminate on the matter of who gets to use/set foot on/otherwise benefit from their property, even if their reasons seem arbitrary and offensive and “racist.”
After all, I find this “reasoning” arbitrary and offensive and “racist”, but it is the Establishment Elite’s arbitrary, offensive “racism”, so it’s OK.
(Not only OK — it’s the law.)
Increasingly, it seems I’m not alone.
You’re welcome!
