Just Shut Up

Rick Green, a Hartford Courant columnist and blogger, reports on his blog CTConfidential that “Rowdy students prevented New Canaan's Ann Coulter from speaking in Ottawa” Canada, and he added “That will stop her” in apparent approval.

Closer to home, UConn students successfully blocked Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton  from speaking on campus.

Coulter said later that the Canadian university that scheduled her to speak was a second rate institution, and Boughton, who is running for governor on the Republican ticket this year, politely protested his exclusion from a law school panel before which he had been invited to speak. Boughten did not characterize UConn as a second rate college.

Canada, more or less patterned after European models, has no First Amendment rights. Mark Steyn, a Canadian writer much published here in the land of Jefferson and Madison, has had a tougher time of it in Canada, where a quasi governmental agency – the amusingly miss-named Canadian Human Rights Commission -- a couple of years ago subjected Steyn to a lengthy and costly investigation following a complaint received by the commission from the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC). The CIC objected to a magazine in Canada that printed excerpts from Steyn’s book “America Alone.”

In Connecticut, whenever assaults are made on First Amendments rights, the air is usually thick with recriminations: commentary articles in newspapers, marches and assemblies, editorial protests and other healthy effusions. But let a Connecticut native be hooted down in Canada or a candidate for governor in the state be pressured out of a speaking engagement by law school students at a tax supported university and you get – a silence so think you can mould it into a brick and throw it at the head of any target disserving of liberal displeasure.

Neither the Canadian brown shirts nor the UConn group was associated with Tea Party Patriots.