Activist's remarks about Islam, sex probed

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SAULT STE. MARIE, Ontario — Organizers of a conservative online forum in Canada say their free-speech rights are under attack after they received a letter saying a complaint has been filed with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The complaint, filed by a private citizen and accepted for further investigation by the commission, protested a critical posting on the forum's Web site regarding Islam and homosexuality.

The remarks were posted on FreeDominion.ca, a sister site to the conservative U.S. forum FreeRepublic, by FreeDominion member Bill Whatcott, a former homosexual prostitute turned outspoken Christian activist.

I can't figure out why the homosexuals I ran into are on the side of the Muslims, Mr. Whatcott wrote on the Web site. After all, Muslims who practice Sharia law tend to advocate beheading homosexuals.

He also attributed the worldwide Muslim fury at the Danish Muhammad cartoons to violence and discrimination inherent in Islamic theology.

The complaint, which has not been made public, reportedly said the posting has a discriminatory content against Muslims, and Free Dominion contributes to disseminating hate literature by allowing it to be on its Web site.

A spokeswoman with the Canadian Human Rights Commission in Ottawa said the commission tries to conciliate between a complainant and the accused and only if that fails is a tribunal set up to hear the case.

As a matter of policy, the commission does not discuss details of individual cases before they reach the tribunal stage, which has not happened in the complaint against Free Dominion, said the spokeswoman, Carmen Gregoire.

If the case does reach adjudication, she said, the tribunal would be empowered under the Canadian Human Rights Act to order the Web site to cease and desist the publication of hate speech or to impose a monetary fine.

Canadian hate speech laws are more stringent than in the United States and outlaw some remarks that would be protected in the United States by the First Amendment. Miss Gregoire said she was unsure whether a tribunal could order the shutdown of a Web site.

Conservative bloggers across Canada have rallied to the defense of the Free Dominion organizers, who suspect they are being victimized for their conservative leanings.

I cannot help but think that this is a politically motivated attack on our members' free speech; the commission is behaving like Voldemort's Death Eaters in the new Harry Potter book, said forum co-founder Connie Wilkins.

Whatever your political persuasion, you can't possibly condone this attack on free expression by an unaccountable, unelected bureaucracy, wrote Kathy Shaidle of Toronto, who denounced the complaint as a secular fatwa on her widely read Relapsed Catholic blog.

Mrs. Wilkins said she first learned of the matter on July 18 when she received a letter from the commission asking for a response to the complaint that same day. The letter was dated July 16.

She subsequently was told that a letter with details of the complaint had been sent earlier and apparently had gone missing. Only when Mrs. Wilkins' lawyer got involved did the commission agree to fax the details of the complaint, she said.

Mr. Whatcott, for his part, has clashed with Canada's human rights tribunal system before. A tribunal in the western province of Saskatchewan fined him $17,500 in 2005 for distributing leaflets describing homosexual marriage as sodomite marriage and using graphic language to describe homosexual acts, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Mrs. Wilkins said Mr. Whatcott is an active participant at Free Dominion but that she and other members of the discussion board often rebut his views.