Mark Steyn on the Guy Earle Persecution and the Death of Comedy in Canuckistan

Wraps it up in a tidy little package, he does. The punchline:

The great strength of Common Law is its antipathy to "collective rights" - because the ultimate minority is the individual. If you elevate group rights over individual liberty, you're mainly empowering not "minorities" but the state, which becomes the sole legitimate arbiter of relations between various groups. And empowering the state means empowering the likes of Commissar Geiger-Adams to preside over four-year investigations into the precise degree of smooching between two patrons of a late-night comedy club. That's why group rights are "the key Nanny State concept". What we are witnessing, from the comedy clubs of Vancouver to the groves of academe in Connecticut, is not just the collapse of liberty but the death of the human spirit. There is something deeply sick about the willingness of freeborn citizens to submit to statist enforcers like Geiger-Adams.

And to think the ball got rolling because some people thought cracking down on free speech, er, sorry, hate speech was the best way to prevent the Nazis from returning. Decades later the Nazis (the German ones) are nowhere in sight, and we're stuck in this "human rights" Hell. And the biggest joke of all--we don't think it's Hell, we think it's Utopia. And we're even paying big bucks to erect an obscenely big shrine where we can worship the "human rights" monster we've created.

As the old actor once said: Dying is easy; comedy is hard. How right he was!

Update: About the Guy Earle case and Murray Geiger Adamses of the land Jonathan Kay wrote (in '08):

Human Rights mandarins posture as champions of “diversity.” But as this case illustrates, what they seek is actually complete conformity. Their dream is a whole society that, in every nook and cranny, adheres self-consciously to the same rigid, humourless orthodoxies that hold sway in their own circle of professional human-rights paper-pushers.

Exactamundo. Anyone who still thinks "human rights" is about protecting the vulnerable and not about the empowerment of those bossyboots/officious types who crave power hasn't been paying attention.