Defund the Orange County Human Relations Commission

I received this e-mail today:

The most important thing that we may do this year is urge the Orange County Board of Supervisors to pull funding for the unconstitutional Human Relations Commission.

Also, please urge every OC taxpayer to write the Board of Supervisors to ask them to defund the Orange County Human Relations Commission. The simple message is that no government sponsored group should criticize or condemn any exercise of free speech. This group is not accountable to voters, has no legal or political power and has no business passing judgment on exercise of constitutional rights. This is crucial since free speech is the key to all of our other freedoms and the only tool we have to challenge groups that want to veto our speech rights. The very fact that this group dares to censor speech based upon their view of what "creates an environment of hate" is shocking. They have become a law unto themselves and their subjective judgments must stop.

Please write the supervisors below and tell them that free speech means exactly that: FREE speech. Our First Amendment does not say that speech is free unless a county commission thinks that it is offensive!!

bill.campbell@ocgov.com
john.moorlach@ocgov.com
shawn.nelson@ocgov.com
patricia.bates@ocgov.com
janet.nguyen@ocgov.com

A sample of the commission's anti-speech campaign: "OC Human Relations Commission Calls for a Return to Civility in Reaction to Muslim Charity Speakers and Protests."

The background, of course, is the manufactured outrage of political correctness that followed the protests by some breakaway activists in Yorba Linda in February, at an Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) fundraiser. The event was ruthlessly exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood's Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its neo-communist allies at George Soros' Center for American Progress. Gary Fouse has the background: "What Happens When Political Correctness Runs Wild."

RELATED: If folks have been reading Blazing Cat Fur, then what's happening in Orange County might sound familiar. Frankly, the O.C. commission sounds like a clone of the Canuckistan version, or vice versa: The Canadian Human Rights Commission. Or, some might remember the case of Mark Steyn: "The Kafkaesque Show Trial of Mark Steyn." (And some of Steyn's offending material, "The future belongs to Islam.")

Complaints were also filed against Ezra Levant for publishing the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. Blazing Cat Fur has more on that today, "You only have to give "average" head to get a job at the CHRT...":