Update: Shackling the Press

In my previous post on the Human Rights Commission complaints against Maclean's magazine, I noted that the travesty is not the complaints themselves. Free people should be free to complain. The travesty is that the HRCs have agreed to hear the complaints. Mark Steyn agrees:

What's offensive is not the accusations of Dr Elmasry and his pals, but the willingness of Canada's pseudo-courts to take them seriously. So I couldn't care less about the verdict - except insofar as an acquittal would be more likely to bolster the cause of those who think it's entirely reasonable for the state to serve as editor-in-chief of privately owned magazines. As David Warren put it, the punishment is not the verdict but the process.

Maclean's is now in the unenviable position that anything it does to comply with the HRCs in fact legitimizes them.