While the Simon Weisenthal Centre stupidly celebrates (and I’m not even sure why, or why they have the nerve to participate in something called “Freedom Day” at the same time), Patrick Hayes speaks very slowly to the last remaining idiots — and even he makes a sensible point poorly:
One of the most depressing aspects of this all-out attack on freedom of speech and political expression is that a former far-right councillor has now been granted access to the moral high ground.
The censured Coleman is posing as the defender of democratic values, pointing out that:
‘Posting an article on a personal blog could never be construed as harassment, not in a free country. This is political correctness in law form… My forefathers fought in two world wars to protect the freedom we have today. I will be damned if these hard-won freedoms will be taken away in the twenty-first century.’
He has a point. It’s just worrying that it has been left to him – a far-right activist not very interested in liberty – to make it.
Such has been the left’s abandonment of the ideal of freedom of speech that it can now be co-opted by elements on the hard right.
***
“Ironic,” yes, but “worrying”? “Depressing”?
Surely not, it you really believe, as you claim to that freedom of speech is a universal right.
One cannot “co-opt” something that was always yours to begin with.
And how is it that the “far-right activist” is the one “not very interested in liberty” when it sounds like he is far more “interested” in it than his smug, petulant prosecutors on the Left.
I DO wish folks could defend freedom of speech without butt-covering, partisan moral preening.
I’m reminded of the leftists outside abortion clinics, who were livid when (scumbag) (whoops, now I’m doing it!) Randall Terry’s protesters adopted provocative yet non-violent resistance methods.
“That’s our thing!!!” they’d wail like stuck pigs.
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