Simon Owens notes that Philip Pullman's comments re "killing God" have been significantly juiced to make his "Golden Compass" seem even more anti-Christian than it is. As well, Catholic Magesterium attempts to suppress sales of the book by arguing that it is darkly subversive have gone swimmingly, and the reviews of the movie I've seen are decidedly mixed.
As an aside, I've read all three books in the series. "The Golden Compass" I thought was very good. "The Subtle Knife" was good, but by the end of it I was already beginning to feel that Pullman's imaginary world was becoming over-stuffed. "The Amber Spyglass" is an unholy mess (gay angels?) and I skimmed more than read the last 100 pages.
Meanwhile, as several of my commenters noted, Andrew Coyne, known far and wide as "the Conservative writer that can add", did seems to have done very litte research for his column on Maclean's troubles with the CHRC. If he had done some, he probably would not have written:
Not content with tossing around incendiary charges of religious bias, the CIC has enlisted the force of the law to press its case. It has done so, what is more, not through any of the traditional legal means by which freedom of speech may be limited, nor with any of the legal system’s usual requirements of due process, but through a new and seemingly open-ended mechanism: the human rights commission .
As JS writes:
Human Rights Commissions are only "new" mechanisms in the way that any other 46 year-old mechanism can be considered to be new.
Looks like Steyn's effect on other writers is to drag them all down to his level.
3 comments:
It's revealing (though hardly surprising) that over at Just Society, the blogger has to entertain a series of challenges from someone who obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.
This kind of thing among Conservatives starts right at the top, with writers like Steyn, Wente, Marcus Gee, everyone at Sun Newspapers, and too many Conservative politicians to count.
...and, often enough, Andrew Coyne.
I think it's fundamental to how the minds of a lot of people work. They believe what they believe without regard to how they've come to develop those beliefs and confuse that with knowing something. And then, they're shockingly arrogant enough to join a debate thinking that these beliefs alone have explanatory value for other people.
It's like getting an explanation of how the World works from a three year-old. Except not nearly as endearing.
Thanks for the shout out.
And nice line at the end there ti-guy.
Coyne is a libertarian, not a conservative - the two are very different. Sadly, political terms have become so muddled that it's difficult to have a sensible conversation about them.
The CHRC was established in 1977, which is 30 years ago. I imagine most provincial HRC's began after that.
Given that the Canadian justice system has a history that goes back many centuries (including the British and French systems from which it was derived), "new" isn't a terrible description.
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