And the Loser Is...Canada!

The Montreal Gazette asks whether there's a contest in the land to see who can bring the "silliest" "human rights" complaint.

Well, maybe not officially. But unofficially one's been in place for some time. And while the Vancouver comedy club/lesbian heckler complaint is certainly up there in the pantheon of silliness, with so many silly contestants to chose from (the over-the hill peeler who wanted to strip past her "best before" date; the pre-op transexual who demanded to let it all hang out in a chicks' locker room; the McDonald's employee who got permission to forego hand-washing at work because the company soap irritated her skin, etc., etc., etc.) it's awfully hard to pick just one.

On a darker note, Rex Murphy excoriates the silliness:

A man standing alone in front of a tank in Tiannamen Square -- there's a human rights moment. The multitudinous horror of ethnic cleansing, raging warfare in the Congo, the nightmare of North Korea, the acid-tossing at schoolgirls by the Taliban -- there are people all over this world trembling at the might of the state, seeing their lives foreshortened or ruined, subject to unspeakable horrors at the hands of warlords and tyrants and revengeful dictatorships -- these are the fields of real human-rights violations.

As Canadians, we should be embarrassed that the "right to undress" with "other" women while waiting for a sex-change operation owns the same vocabulary as these. We should be embarrassed, too, that what was most likely a bad-tempered, ill-handled exchange late at night in a place called Zesty's, mutual heckling, is under review by the state as a violation of human rights.

We should be embarrassed, but having quaffed the Trudeaupian brewski so deeply and for so long, far too many of us--social justice types, searchers on a quixotic quest for the chimerical "fine line" separating free speech from hate speech, Ann Coulter-abominators-- remain completely unabashed.