By Ezra Christensen
A war of words ha
s ensured over the last few days, beginning with Fairfax columnist Mark Kenny labelling Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm an “angry white man” among a gushing tirade of insults. Clearly Senator Leyonhjelm’s advocacy of free speech has gotten Kenny’s goat!
Senator Leyonhjelm hit back at Kenny’s jibe by lodging a complaint with the Human Rights commission, you know, that organisation which is more interested in policing speech and mitigating hurt feelings than addressing real matters of injustice like honour killings and female genital mutilation.
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if Leyonhjelm gets a serious hearing from the HRC. But considering the ‘progressive’ rule of thumb that assumes that it is impossible to offend or be racist to a white man, I won’t be holding my breath.
Jumping to Leyonhjelm’s defence this week, conservative Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi stated:
‘if you simply changed the word white to black, brown or yellow the SJW would spring into a deafening chorus of complaint. Now, such is their silence, you can only hear the crickets chirping, because in their world, only white people can be racist.”
In response to the recent events and the Abbott Government’s failure to honour an election promise to repeal parts of 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, Senator Bernardi has started a petition to the Federal Government to remove the terms “offend” and “insult” from section 18C(1)(a) of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. A link to the petition can be found here.
What’s more, Senator Bernardi stated that Senator Leyonhjelm’s case with the Human Rights commission would expose “left-wing racist, bigot, hypocrite, social warriors” for what they are. We can only hope.
XYZ