Why George Jonas is the master

George Jonas was on to the fraud of Canada's "human rights commissions" before I was even born, and he's still the master at debunking them as the abusive, corrupt entities that they are. His piece in yesterday's National Post was one of the best I've read on the subject in a year.

The title itself is great -- he calls them "medieval rights commissions", because they want to destroy our liberal justice system, and replace them with a half-sharia, half Star Chamber perversion that is more suited to the Dark Ages than to our own enlightened times.

Some excerpts:

HRCs [are] seeking intervener status before Justice Frank Marocco of Ontario's Superior Court, who is asked to determine whether a Muslim woman should remove her veil while testifying as a witness at a hearing in a sexual assault case.

Apparently the original presiding judge said yes, please, take it off. He didn't add, as I might have: "Remove it, dear lady, because you're now in Canada, and here it isn't our custom to try people on the evidence of masked witnesses."

No, Justice Norris Weisman didn't say what I'd have said, which is probably why he's a judge, and I'm a scribbler. All the judge allowed himself to note was that the lady's religious modesty might not be overwhelming, considering she did consent to be photographed for her driver's licence without a veil. (Would the judge have let a Muslim believer he found more genuinely devout testify in a veil? We don't know.)

Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Barbara Hall's troops are pawing the ground to be heard in the matter. Predictably, their view is that a believer's right to exercise her religious practices trumps the right of an accused to a fair trial. The way the law has evolved in Canada, they say, it's the courts' duty to accommodate outlandish customs. How could it be otherwise, when the vital right of a Muslim woman to be ritually veiled is balanced against a mere bagatelle, such as a man's rightoid to give full answer and defence to the criminal charges against him?

...Here's an institution, ostensibly established to safeguard human rights, including, among others, a right Canada's Charter of Right and Freedoms calls fundamental, the right to a fair trial. Crossexamination-- "the engine of truth" as a legal cliche has it --is integral to a fair trial, and seeing a witness' face while testing his or her veracity is integral to cross-examination. Given this, what is there to say about "human rights" officials offering themselves as "experts" to testify that the right to a fair trial in 21st-century Canada takes second place to a medieval Muslim notion of feminine modesty?

...Hall's commissars aren't demanding access to Judge Marocco's court as advocates for shariah. No, they're calling themselves experts on Canada's evolving law. They're not urging the courts to accommodate veiled Muslim witnesses, they're stating as their expert opinion that, as a matter of law, accommodating such witnesses is the duty of Canadian courts.

...consider the "human rights" persecution of a St. Catharines, Ont., exercise entrepreneur for his decision not to immediately allow an incomplete sex-change candidate use of the ladies' changing room in his establishment. ...some libertarian commentators think that, well, really, people should be able to decide for themselves whether they're men or women.

I'd wholeheartedly agree, if they added "in their own minds."

People should certainly be able to decide what they are in their own minds. By all means, please, be my guest, be whatever you like -- men, women, bullfrogs, butter knives. It is (or used to be) a free country. My problem is with people who want to decide what they are in my mind. The way liberty works, they can decide what they are for themselves, and I'll decide what they are for me.