Dear Editor:
RE: ‘Whitewashing,’ Oct. 23.
Brett Davis’s letter to the editor totally misrepresents Charlie Kirk and the nature of free expression.
Labelling Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric as incendiary because it challenges progressive “wisdom” is not a road we should travel down if we wish to preserve democracy.
Free speech gives people the right to debate controversial topics even though some may find it offensive. Charlie Kirk was a proponent of dialogue and free speech.
It’s foolish to discredit Thadeus Williams’ findings without providing any evidence to the contrary other than your reference to Helen Keller being “able to see and hear this evidence to the contrary.” One could see this as offensive to disabled people; is Davis himself now being incendiary?
You accuse Henry Brunsveld of politicizing faith. I don’t think he ever claimed Christian equals conservative. He identified Kirk as a Christian and a conservative.
There is no fine line between the First Amendment rights and hate speech in the US. Like it or not, hate speech is protected under the First Amendment in the U.S. unless there is incitement.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and the U.S. Constitutional Amendments have some similarities, but are legally and fundamentally different; conflating the two is ill-informed. We should condemn hateful acts and violence, but silencing speech by labelling it “hateful” does little to uphold democracy. The better alternative is to encourage dialogue so bad ideas can be replaced with better ideas, freely spoken.
Jeff Leicher,
Fergus