Our View - Friday

CELEBRATE FREEDOM
And learn what it means to be free

   In the light of a modest civil liberties victory last week with the Supreme Court's acknowledgment (barely) of the Second Amendment, it's important to remember this Independence Day that rights are not assigned to us or given to us by government. The Declaration of Independence tells us our rights come from the "Creator," they are ours by birth. For those who don't believe in a creator, rights are part and parcel of being human. To borrow from Descartes, we are born, we have these rights.

   Those "unalienable rights" of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are drilled into the heads of public school students (we hope, anyway), but our modern willingness to allow government agencies to prescribe unneeded limits to these freedoms makes us wonder if we see this important document as more than an abstraction.

   Many people talk about rights, but relatively few seem to really know what our rights really mean. Thomas Jefferson noted, "Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty." He was right; Too many are willing to give up rights and their reciprocal responsibilities so government will take care of them. Some, however, are not that complacent.

   We support both the right of citizens to own guns and the right of consenting adults to use mind-altering substances. Some editorial writers at Freedom Communication newspapers, of which The Gazette is one, who have articulated these opinions are alternately referred to as right-wing cronies by folks on the left and members of the liberal media by folks on the right.

   We are neither. We are, however, consistent in our support of as much freedom for American citizens as humanly possible and a government restricted to protecting these freedoms and providing only what private enterprise cannot provide for us.

   That's a concept that seems almost alien in American politics today. Many people simply cannot grasp the idea of a political philosophy based on indivudual freedom and responsibility, because modern liberals and conservatives are both after the same thing - using the government to create their own dream society and impose its rules on everyone else.

   The outrage in response to the Supreme Court's handgun decision last week is fascinating and a bit disturbing. "Does this lead to everyone having a gun in our society?" Chicago Mayor Richard Daley ranted in a press conference after the decision. "Then why don't we do away with the court system and go back to the Old West ... ?"

   In Daley's mind, acknowledging that people have the right to protect themselves with firearms does not square with his dream of a society where people depend on the government to protect them and solve their problems. So he exaggerates the results of the decision to act as though the decision has put us in danger. It's not true. The handgun ban in D.C. is what put people in danger. Criminals certainly didn't care about gun laws and they never will.

   By the same token, allowing adults to use drugs as they would alcohol doesn't square with conservatives' fantasy of a perfect society of people who behave the way they want them to. So they exaggerate the consequences of allowing potheads the same freedoms as drinkers and try to use democratic voting as a weapon to take away people's rights.

   And so it goes. When an expression of an individual right gets in the way of an Americans' conceptions of utopia, they don't question their dreams - they question the right. This insistence has led us into our intractable culture war, the fight to be the ideologues with the most influence over the government.

   Will we ever turn away from the "Something must be done!" mentality that has caused so many people to create an environment in America that grows more and more authoritarian with each passing day? On this Independence Day we ask Americans to consider the idea that none of us is truly free as long as we persist in believing that rights are doled out by a benevolent government rather than gifts we are born with.

A VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH

   Columnist and author Mark Steyn and the Canadian weekly news magazine Macleans have won a small victory for freedom of the press in Canada. The national Canadian Human Rights Commission in Ottawa on June 27 dismissed a "hate speech" complaint against Steyn and the magazine for publishing an article that some activist Canadian Muslims found offensive, but which most observers would find only mildly politically incorrect.

   Whether this decision will lead to less harassment of free speech and the free press in Canada is yet to be determined. The Human Rights Commission for the province of British Columbia, in a separate action, held its own hearings and has yet to issue its decision.

   We hope the case is resolved quickly in Steyn's favor, so he can get back to writing columns.

   It is important to remember that the United States is almost unique in the world in having a First Amendment that protects freedom of speech and the media almost absolutely. There are no commissions or regulators overseeing the press (except for the Federal Communications Commission for broadcasters); any grievances regarding libel or truthful reporting are weighed in court.

   In Canada and in much of the rest of the world, certain opinions - of people who claim the Holocaust never happened, pastors who say homosexuality is a sin, Brigitte Bardot saying Muslims are undermining French culture, for example - may not be expressed at all. In Canada strictures against "hate speech," which arguably could stir up hate against a particular group, have morphed into an entitlement of activist grievance-mongers who seek to forbid speech and writing that they claim to find offensive. The practical result of this is to muzzle opinions some would rather not hear.

   What got this case going was Macleans magazine's decision to publish an excerpt from Steyn's book "America Alone." Titled "The Future Belongs to Islam," the excerpt argued that because of high birth rates among Muslims and low birth rates among native Europeans (and Canadians) living in welfare states, Muslims were likely to turn Europe into "Eurabia" in a few generations.

   Provocative, yes, but it didn't even have the characteristic irreverent humor and sarcasm Steyn's columns often contain. In fact, it echoed and quoted a Danish imam, shortly after the imbroglio over the cartoons of the prophet, who said: "We're the ones who will change you. ... Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children."

   Steyn's argument may not be watertight. Projecting current trends into the future unchanged is a well-known fallacy, though it's a good bet he's right. Regardless, the argument is far from hateful.

   The case against Macleans (Canada's largest-circulation news magazine) has stirred up unprecedented discussion in Canada about the role of national and provincial human-rights commissions. The national commission has appointed a professor to investigate whether it has started to overreach. A measure has been introduced in Parliament to strip commissions of authority to regulate the media. That would be a welcome end to an idea that was meant to foster civility, but ended up restricting communication.