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By Lloyd Mackey
 A NINE-year-old defamation case, decided with some finality last week by the Supreme Court of Canada, appears to have taken second spot in media consciousness to another, more contemporary, hate speech dust-up.
The reason for that second spot positioning might be that the case is, indeed, nine years old. It might also be that it was rooted in a gay rights vs. social conservatism battle.
By contrast, the contemporary conflict involves hate speech allegations and their apparent impact on Canadian Muslims. Just hours after the Supreme Court brought down its decision, the Canadian Human Rights Commission rejected the complaint of the Canadian Muslim Congress, that columnist Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine had engaged in hate mongering against Muslims.
The case has been carefully watched, along with similar actions lodged with Ontario and British Columbia human rights tribunals, because of the widely-held view that such tribunals were not legitimate arbiters of free speech issues.
* * *
The nine-year-old case in question was entitled: 'WIC Radio Ltd. and Rafe Mair vs. Kari Simpson.' The Supreme Court found in favour of Mair and WIC, clearing the two of defamation against Simpson. Briefly put, Mair, a then-controversial British Columbia talk show host, had accused socon activist Simpson of reminding him of Hitler, the KKK and skinheads.
It was his perception of her methods and tactics in opposing gay rights that caused Mair's October 25, 1999 commentary on the WIC radio network. And that commentary led to Simpson's suing him for libel. She lost the suit in the BC Supreme Court. Later the BC Appeal Court reversed that finding. And now, the SCOC has, by a 9-0 margin, reversed the appeal court ruling and returned to the BCSC verdict. In the process, the high court justices have made it a little easier for defendants of libel actions to win their cases.
* * *
So far, no journalists have been successful in getting any comments from either Mair or Simpson about the outcome of the case. I will, myself, try to make some contact with the lawyers for both later this week.
Meanwhile, it is worth noting that part of the tension between Mair and Simpson arose because, after their being allies on parenting issues, Simpson fell out of favour with Mair because of what he saw to be her public intolerance toward gay rights that bordered on bigotry.
In the commentary that was at the core of the action, Mair noted: "Before Kari was on my colleague Bill Good's show last Friday, I listened to the tape of the parents' meeting the night before, where Kari harangued the crowd. It took me back to my childhood when, with my parents, we would listen to bigots who, with increasing shrillness, would harangue the crowds. For Kari's 'homosexual,' one could easily substitute 'Jew'."
The commentary continues, offering a couple of American south examples of bigotry against blacks.
He concludes with the nuanced but straight-forward suggestion that "The trouble is, people who don't want violence often unwittingly provoke it and Kari Simpson is, thank God, permitted in our society to say exactly what she wishes, but the other side of the free speech coin is a public decent enough to know a mean-spirited, power-mad, rabble-rousing and, yes, dangerous bigot when they see one."
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In defence of Simpson, I would suggest that she was no more rabble-rousing than many of the highly-emotional preachers that I would sometimes listen to, as part of my covering of the various shades of the Christian community. To me, there was a definite dividing line between various kinds of preaching. On one side of the line was the kind of preaching that attempted to persuade through warmth, logic and careful gospel exposition. On the other side was the highly emotive and repetitive presentation that seemed, often, to spill over into a "screech" that was dubiously attributed to spiritual anointing.
I have to admit to a bland preference for the more cerebral and less emotive kind of preaching. So, in a sense, I would tend to suggest that the "anointing" be checked out in the cold hard light of day, after the euphoria is passed.
* * *
Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and author of Stephen Harper: the Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006). He can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.
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