The Banned Played On

Cancel culture is the opposite of multi-culture. And as the world’s most multi-cultural country, this should worry Canadians more than most.

As Michelle Goldberg noted last week, there’s “an aggressive new censoriousness.” True, she was referring to America where some school boards aren’t satisfied to ban certain books. They insist these books be burned. It seems last week, Virginia’s Spotsylvania County School Board voted unanimously to have books with “sexually explicit” material removed. Two of the board members wanted the books burned as well, “just so we can identify, within our community, that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

The American censors tend to love Jesus; gays, lesbians and Nigerians, not so much. But those of us who tend to be left-wing should not be feeling that smug. It seems that Woke culture is booming in Toronto.

If your relationship to “Wokeness” is a vaguely unformed idea that it’s about being politically correct, let me give you the dictionary definition before I tell you how quickly it’s lost its way and become a rallying point for ‘cancel culture’, which officially means “withdrawing support for public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive.”

Sadly, like “woke”, cancel culture is now an essential food group for people who lean so far left that, given the earth we live on isn’t flat, means it’s inevitable they’ll meet their American colleagues who lean far to the right.

Take what happened last week to Marie Henein, the lawyer who defended Jian Gomeshi, late of the CBC, in court in 2016 against charges of sexual assault. She’s written a memoir, Nothing But the Truth, and had not only offered to speak to A Room of Your Own Book Club, but donated 200 copies of her book to its members, many of whom are teenage girls from low-income families.

Then Tanya Lee, who runs the club which draws many of its members from the Toronto District School Board, was told that TDSB schools wouldn’t take part, though they’ve never not participated in the four years Ms. Lee has been there. According to the Globe and Mail, “Ms. Lee said she was told the school board’s equity department felt the lawyer would send the wrong message.”

Whoops. It was all a misunderstanding, said the board, though they didn’t change their mind about exposing their students to the story of Ms. Henein’s life and work.

This led Marie Henein to note: “There are words for this. Misunderstanding is not one of them.” It also led her law firm to Tweet: “The TDSB decision demonstrates an alarming and fundamental misunderstanding about the legal system and about the role defence lawyers play defending individuals against the state.”

Alarming and fundamental, true. Surely, any one of the 12 lawyers who work in-house at North America’s 4th largest school board would have been able to tell its Equity Department what every budding lawyer learns in first-year law school: that everyone deserves the best defence in court, and that lawyers are not clients, either in their actions or in their identity.

These issues are only slightly more clear-cut with doctors who swear an oath to help save someone’s life, even if that person has just murdered a dozen people and is chained to his gurney in the ER as the doctors work frantically to save his life.

We were in Israel a few years ago and had dinner with an ER doctor from a hospital near the Golan Heights and the Syrian border. He told of saving the life of a young Syrian soldier who was wounded in Israel, and when the soldier was discharged from the hospital, he turned to the doctor and said: “The next time you see me, it will be me taking your life.”

So I don’t think the TDSB really worries itself about legal traditions and the niceties of law. As Tanya Lee, who asked Marie Henein to speak, noted: “They told me straight out ‘no’ because [Ms. Henein] defended Jian Ghomeshi and how do you explain that to little girls.”

I have a feeling that little girls would absolutely understand the moral complexities of what a defence lawyer does, just as the students in those schools in Virginia would be comfortable with the ideas behind critical race theory.

It seems little girls are quite able to do that for themselves. As with Virginia, it’s not the students who need protecting; it’s their parents.

Marie Henein noted: “It says a lot that we think education means you cannot have challenging thoughts, you cannot be presented with a view you disagree with, and that you cannot be presented with information that is not the predominant view.”

Maybe it’s time the banned stopped being the damned.

******

To order a copy of my book Love or Die Trying, click here for Canadian orders, click here for US orders, or visit your favourite bookstore.