- Jonathan Kay on Barbara Hall, and the latest 'human-rights' embarrassment
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Imagine you're a hard-working suburbanite. You've scrimped and saved, and put together enough money for the a down payment on a four-bedroom house. You'll be paying the thing off for years — decades, even — but it's worth it: You've got a safe place for your children to grow up, as well as a rock-solid investment you can fall back on when the mortgage is paid, and it's time to retire.
Now imagine your dream being destroyed: Landlords start buying up adjacent properties, and turning them into cheap dorm rooms for students at a nearby trade school. Instead of your neighbours being families with young children, they're suddenly drunken all-night partygoers who use the streets as a toilet.
And so you fight back in the courts — finally persuading a provincial judge to declare the offending properties illegal. It's a first step toward taking back the neighbourhood from the flop-house industry and the denizen of Psi Chugga Chugga.
But now imagine that a bureaucrat comes wading in to the fray, and litigates against you using your own tax dollars, wailing to the court that your desire to retain the family character of your neighbourhood violates Psi Chugga Chugga's "human rights." How would you feel?
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This is probably going to expose my lamentable failureto appreciate ethnic sensitivities, but here goes:
There is an unusual case going on in the U.S. The University of North Dakota is under pressure to drop the name and logo of their hockey team, the Fighting Sioux.
You can see why: Fighting Sioux. It's named after an Indian tribe. The logo shows a Sioux warrior, complete with feathers. It's not unlike the crest of the Chicago Blackhawks.
The news story says the name has been deemed "hostile and abusive to American Indians." Other U.S. colleges have acceded to warnings from sports officials to change their names to avoid hard feelings. But North Dakota has held out, and has the support of many Sioux. Members of the Spirit Lake Tribe, one of two Sioux groups in the state, have sued to block the name from being changed. But the issue is dividing the campus, Indian tribes and the state. It gets very messy, and university leaders fear it is causing damage to the image and reputation of the institution.
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