Human rights commissions vs. gay rights

The thing about human rights commissions, the thing that worries me so much about them, is that when you create a government organism that can violate real rights -- like property rights, and the sanctity of contract, and freedom of association -- everyone is at risk. We see that with free speech: neo-Nazis are the official reason why Canada has thought crime laws, such as section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. But once you accept the fact that some thoughts are illegal, well then everyone's at risk. That's the folly of the Canadian Jewish Congress: they think they'll always be riding the back of the tiger, not being mauled by it.

Pete Vere sends me this interesting case study of the wild animal biting madly. A Montreal gay bar, Bar Le Stud, told a woman named Audrey Vachon that she wasn't allowed in -- it was a men-only establishment, and had been happily operating that way for eleven years. Then the human rights commissions got involved, and Bar Le Stud has copped a plea bargain. We don't know the details of how much money Vachon got paid or -- and you know this was part of the deal, it usually is -- the kind of "sensitivity training" that Bar Le Stud's staff have to undergo.

A gay bar -- like a straight bar, like a Christian church -- has age-old rights that long pre-date our fads of "human rights". Bar Le Stud has property rights, which include the right to exclude people. They have freedom of association. They have contractual rights. Strangers have no "right not to be offended" by them. They have no "right" to come onto their property, to change the purpose of Bar Le Stud, and to interfere with its peaceful practices. But now they do.

Misguided gay rights activists -- like Darren Lund, and even Richard Warman -- have used the bludgeon of human rights commissions to batter down the real rights of others. But they have laid down precedents that, in this case at least, are being used against gays.

It doesn't happen often, because conservatives, and straights, and Christians, aren't as active as their opponents in the grievance culture that Canada's HRCs foment. And, of course, even if they were, the grievance-activist bias of HRC staff would probably dismiss those complaints.

But that can only last so long. As Mark Steyn pointed out in his last Maclean's column, Adolf Hitler didn't invent Germany's censorship laws, nor did he write the emergency powers provisions that the Nazis abused. They were all written by the liberal Weimar Republic.

Leftist and ethnic-identity activists have loved the HRCs because they have usually picked on those groups' enemies. But the dangerous precedents have been set, and everyone's rights are at risk, as Bar Le Stud has found out.

ADDENDA: I know what real "gay rights" are. They're the same as real "Jewish rights". The right to private property. The right to self-defence. The right to free speech, sanctity of contract. The right to be free of violence, etc. Those were the rights that were stripped away from Jews by the Nazis; those were the reasons the Jews were killed -- not because of words, but because of deeds. Gay rights means property rights of a gay bar. But human rights commissions don't care about such real gay rights, any more than they would for anyone else. They're about feelings, and because Bar Le Stud hurt someone's feelings, real gay rights were trumped. 

Question: if Bar Let Stud can't keep out Audrey Vachon because she's a woman, can they keep out an anti-gay protester? Can they keep out a skinhead?