NO FREE SPEECH AGAINST HOMOSEXUALITY

From "Opinion Journal"

"Those of us with libertarian impulses agree that government shouldn't prohibit gay sex between consenting adults. We may even be sympathetic to the call for marriagelike benefits for same-sex couples. But we also believe in free speech and thus are quite troubled by stories like this one, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.:

A high school teacher in British Columbia, punished for writing publicly against homosexuality, is not protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the province's Supreme Court has ruled. . . .

In 2002, the British Columbia College of Teachers suspended [Chris] Kempling for one month for "professional misconduct or conduct unbecoming a BCCT member."

It had been investigating a complaint received after Kempling wrote a series of letters to his local newspaper between 1997 and 2000 saying homosexuality was wrong.

Reuters quotes Justice Ronald Holmes, who wrote the decision: "Discriminatory speech is incompatible with the search for truth." Even if we accept for the sake of argument the proposition that Kempling's speech was "discriminatory" and false, it is still arrant nonsense to call it "incompatible with the search for truth." The search for truth inevitably entails exposure to many false ideas, some of them obnoxious. The "liberal" agenda Holms advocates is actually a profoundly illiberal one: the imposition by bureaucrats and judges of a preapproved "truth.""