Angry in the Great White North

The YouTube situation is very disturbing, and especially for Canadians. It all started with insulting videos:

A Turkish court has ordered access to YouTube's Web site blocked because of videos allegedly insulting the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Paul Doany, head of Turk Telekom, Turkey's largest telecommunications provider, said his company had immediately begun enforcing the ban.

"We are not in the position of saying that what YouTube did was an insult, that it was right or wrong," Doany said Wednesday in remarks to the state-run Anatolia news agency. "A court decision was proposed to us, and we are doing what that court decision says."

Insulting Kemal Ataturk is a crime punishable by imprisonment in Turkey. The videos in question were not made in Turkey, or made by Turkish nationals, but they were visible in Turkey.

After two days, the Turks reversed the decision without explanation, but it might have been in part because of criticism related to Turkey's shakey humans rights record.

And that made me wonder -- what about a country that takes human rights extremely seriously, or at least thinks it does? Canada, for example. It could never happen here, right?

[Reverend Stephen] Boissoin is being hauled before the Human Rights Commission to answer to a complaint filed by Darren Lund, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. Lund made his complaint after Boissoin published a letter to the editor in the Red Deer Advocate, in which he denounced homosexuality as immoral and dangerous, and called into question new gay-rights curriculums permeating the province’s educational system.

In that letter to the editor, Boisson lamented that “Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.”

If a priest can face punishment for writing a letter and voicing an opinion, and getting that opinion published in some form, then what of a video on YouTube that makes comments the homosexual community would find insulting? In an effort to suppress those attitudes, will gay rights advocates take the approach the Turks used, and use the courts to shut down access to YouTube? Who doesn't think any of Canada's provincial Human Rights Commissions would hesitate to issue such an order? Would YouTube or any other internet presence tolerate the potential disruption, or would they just yank the offending content and avoid the whole mess?

And if the content was created by a Canadian, then what? If the content was hosted outside of Canada, what authority does a Human Rights Commission have over the content, or for that matter, over the author? I'm not sure myself, but should the situation arise, I would be willing to bet that the Commissions would be willing to try to establish that authority.

Let's not be too quick to berate Turkey for trying to control YouTube. I think this could happen here too. And perhaps far more easily.