Human Rights

I found the MacLean’s article; I prefer living with space lizards, by Mark Steyn to be a skilled piece of slanted media. Although I do agree that the Human Rights Commission is an, at best, severely flawed process, I noticed that throughout the article, the issue of why the Human Rights complaints were being brought against MacLean’s, while the politics of the complainants where discussed.
In Norman Fairclough’s Language and Power, he discusses how “language contributes to the domination of some people by others”, it seems to me that Steyn is trying to evoke sympathy in his readers by claiming that the complainants in his Human Rights case have managed to get a strong hold on the Canadian media, and therefore have more sway than even him.
I simply can`t believe this. He got plenty of coverage in the media. There was this segment on the Nation which vehemently backs him up, and for that matter, trashes the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The Canadian Human Right Commission defines the purpose its most sacred document; the Canadian Human Rights Act, as “to ensure equality of opportunity and freedom from discrimination, in areas under federal jurisdiction. The idea behind the Act is that people should not be placed at a disadvantage simply because of their age, sex, race or any other of the 11 prohibited grounds of discrimination covered by the Act.” Those 11 “prohibited grounds” you might ask? And I would oblige; they are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex (including pregnancy and childbirth), sexual orientation, marital status, family status, mental or physical disability (including previous or present drug or alcohol dependence) and pardoned conviction.
Going further into the article, Steyn discusses a case where a restaurant owner asked a person smoking medicinal marijuana to leave the front of his restaurant. I see how someone could pull a Human Rights complaint out of that, but have to ask whether or not the owner could as well? Is it not a basic human right to a clean and healthy environment? Well, then why should the restaurant owner and all of his customers from that date for that matter, not file complaints against the person smoking marijuana? Partly because that is not what the Human Rights Commission deals with, but also because who would the media side with? That one person with some terrible illness requiring medicinal marijuana who just to go out for dinner, or that mod who labelled them a stoner?

Fairclough, Norman. " Language and Power."