A Mark Steyn classic

You've got to read Mark Steyn's tour de force in the latest Maclean's magazine. It's a column about human rights commissions, touching on everything from sex change operations to Richard Warman. Some excerpts:

As Ms. Wente pointed out, you can see what got the "human rights" commissars' juices going: here was an opportunity to lay down a lot of landmark "jurisprudence" on the issue of "transsexuals' access to medical care," and if, in the end, it destroys Dr. Stubbs and his business, hey, that's a price worth paying: the human right to a labiaplasty is too important to a free society. So the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is solemnly deliberating on whether the party of the first part is obliged to take apart the party of the second part's parts.

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That may be why, as even Liberal MPs and PEN Canada understand what's happening, the only defenders of the system are its beneficiaries, like Pearl Eliadis, the former director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, who accused me in the Montreal Gazette of "disturbing tactics" for having the impertinence to resist being ruled a hate-monger by a kangaroo court. She claims that I am trying to "disentitle" acknowledged human-rights experts, by which she means a small and unrepresentative clique that has done huge damage to real human rights like the presumption of innocence. "Human rights" plaintiffs are professional activists: since filing her complaint, the transsexual in the labiaplasty case has been given a government job investigating the health status of transsexuals. Richard Warman, the plaintiff in over half of all federal Section 13 cases, is not even a transsexual or a member of any other approved victim group. You can write a piece about Jews, gays, Muslims, transsexuals that offends not a single Jew, gay, Muslim or transsexual. But if Mr. Warman, a former employee of the CHRC, decides to get offended on their behalf he'll drag you before the kangaroo court. He has been a plaintiff on every single federal Section 13 case in the last six years. No other provision of Canadian law has such a deformed profile that is, in effect, the personal plaything of one very strange man.