You ever explore a cave? One where the further down you go, the darker and clammier everything gets, and the more you start to feel like a doomed lead from a James Cameron movie? And then at some point you catch a glimpse of one of the cave ceilings only to see swarms of big-eyed, prehistoric-looking arachnids waiting to drop down the back of your neck and lay eggs in your cervical vertebra? No? Just me then.
Not to worry. You can always recreate the experience by spelunking into your local social media comment thread . . . the further down you scroll, the more unhinged the specimens!
Perhaps the only positive thing we could say about comment threads is that they act as a kind of “speech spectrometer,” giving us a bead on the varied ideological gasses circulating through our culture. To that end, I thought it might be worth spending some time on a comment made in response to a recent statement posted by our church in response to Bill C-9. I’m paraphrasing, but it ran something along the lines of, “Why should Christians have the freedom to be hateful?”
Assuming this was an honest question, which one really can’t assume for the majority of online discourse, then yes — if this is all just Christians whining about not being allowed to bully anyone anymore, there’s not much else to say. Peter basically said there’s no point in being patient during a beatdown if it came about in reponse to your own stupidity. If you want to throw rocks at people, you shouldn’t complain when they throw them back at you.
But despite the fact that I, personally, have never been more tempted to throw rocks than I have in the last month, this isn’t what we’re objecting to. What we’re objecting to, and what everyone who doesn’t want to share a toilet with Lt. Maybelline and eat nutraloaf for the next 10-15 years should object to, is allowing the state to dictate what people can and can’t say.
We’ve done this before and it doesn’t end well.
C-9 as a closet moment
One of the “sacrifices” citizens living in a democracy have to make is accepting the likelihood of running into people who don’t agree with them. Most prefer this option to having your family farm set on fire because you offended the local land baron. For some, however, such a sacrifice is too much to bear. So fragile their identity, and so fragile their worldview, that they would rather accept the loss of all things — even freedom itself — to preserve their bungaroosh tower of moral superiority.
These insecure people go on to elect other insecure people in the hopes that the right to remain ignorant will be enshrined into law. At first this is achieved through insinuation, misdirection, and various shadowy enterprise. Mainstream media does their part to establish the heroes (disabled muslim pansexual trans furries) and villains (Christians). Eventually, their intentions become so obvious they don’t even try to hide it anymore. Truman is apt here, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
What the trans furries don’t realize is that eventually they’ll get eaten by the same leviathan they helped release. This story only ends one way: the state, and everyone under its boot. Bill C-9 is, in many ways, a “coming out” for Canadian government. It’s been apparent for some time they had commited to the principle of silencing opposition. Now they’re just doing it in the open. Not only is this step a massive breach of trust for citizens, it’s all the more concerning in light of the fact that the same people in charge of supervising speech also struggle to understand the difference between men and women.
It’s hard to imagine wanting to buy cantaloupes from such people let alone endowing them with totalizing speech powers.
The constraints of true freedom
This might be a good time to circle back to make sure we’re on all the same page as to what freedom actually is.
In one sense, freedom is an all-or-nothing deal; you’re either free or you’re not. In another sense, there’s no such thing as total freedom, if by that you mean total autonomy. The Scriptures are clear that every person has a duty of love towards God and towards his neighbor (Matthew 22: 37-40). We have responsibilities to our families, friends, communities, and nations. Those who ignore or resent their duties may imagine themselves to be free from them, but in reality are just slaves to their own passions.
We also have a duty to “hate what is evil, and hold fast to what is good,” (Romans 12:9). How do we know what is evil and what is good? “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). Christians are to love what God loves, and hate what God hates. So a truly free society is one that is free to do what it ought to do, not just what it wants to do.
For the state to determine as “hateful” what God has declared to be the exercise of love (i.e., telling the truth about marriage and gender) is to go so far outside your jurisdiction as to be cosmically — and comically — negligible.
You can’t pretend to have a free society and also imprison people for subjective speech infractions. And don’t say “they would never” because they’re already doing it in the UK, of which Canada remains the estranged, ugly cousin to. Society can only stay as free as truth is allowed to roam free, in all of its beautiful, dangerous power. Apart from truth, there can be no virtue, and apart from virtue there can be no democracy.
"Apart from truth, there can be no virtue, and apart from virtue there can be no democracy."
Yes!
Hey Ben, good article! I like how you tied truth to virtue and good government at the end there.