Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.
Today pluralism operates as a court religion, while having less and less intellectual credibility. Betraying the plastic terminology in which its directives are framed are the additions to the __uman Rights Code_ passed in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1994. The Code cites __uman dignity_ to justify the criminalization of __onduct or communication [that] promotes the superiority or inferiority of a person or class because of race, class, or sexual orientation._ The law has already been applied to prosecute scholars making hereditarian arguments about social behavior, and its proponents defend this muzzling as necessary for __uman dignity._ But never are we told whence that dignity is derived. It is certainly not the one to which the Bible, a text that unequivocally condemns certain __exual orientations,_ refers. Nor are we speaking here about the dignity of nonengineered academic discourse, an act that the supporters of the Ontario Human Rights Code consider to be criminal if judged insensitive. Yet the pluralist advocates of human rights codes that now operate in Canada, Australia, England, and on the European continent assume there is a human dignity. Indeed this dignity is so widely and passionately accepted, or so it is asserted, that we must criminalize unkind communication. In the name of that supposedly axiomatic dignity, we are called upon to suppress scholarship and even to imprison its authors.
After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
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Today pluralism operates as a court religion, while having less and less intellectual credibility. Betraying the plastic terminology in which its directives are framed are the additions to the __uman Rights Code_ passed in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1994. The Code cites __uman dignity_ to justify the criminalization of __onduct or communication [that] promotes the superiority or inferiority of a person or class because of race, class, or sexual orientation._ The law has already been applied to prosecute scholars making hereditarian arguments about social behavior, and its proponents defend this muzzling as necessary for __uman dignity._ But never are we told whence that dignity is derived. It is certainly not the one to which the Bible, a text that unequivocally condemns certain __exual orientations,_ refers. Nor are we speaking here about the dignity of nonengineered academic discourse, an act that the supporters of the Ontario Human Rights Code consider to be criminal if judged insensitive. Yet the pluralist advocates of human rights codes that now operate in Canada, Australia, England, and on the European continent assume there is a human dignity. Indeed this dignity is so widely and passionately accepted, or so it is asserted, that we must criminalize unkind communication. In the name of that supposedly axiomatic dignity, we are called upon to suppress scholarship and even to imprison its authors.
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