Outside a committee room at Queen’s Park on Feb. 9, an anarcho-capitalist whose name I didn’t catch said that if you were to take away all his rights except one, he’d like to be left with the right to free speech. Then he could use that to try to convince you to give him the rest of his rights back. Cheers to that.

He was part of a cheering section that attended a hearing on the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal to witness the testimony of conservative columnist Mark Steyn, a man who has been called before bureaucratic commissions to answer for his opinions in the past year.

His point, and the point of Steyn’s testimony to the hearing — echoing the sentiments of great thinkers throughout history including Voltaire, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky and Thomas Jefferson, just for a start — is so simple, and yet so in need of repeating in Canada, in Ontario, in Toronto today. The right to free expression is the most fundamental of all rights in a democracy — it is in fact the one right that allows the very existence of democracy.

Another frequently repeated truth is that if you don’t believe in free speech for the most offensive, hateful, moronic people you can imagine, you simply do not believe in free speech at all. It’s so self-evidently true that one would think it wouldn’t even bear saying. And yet it is a point constantly missed by a shocking number of people wielding influence in Canada today.

Take Gilary Massa, a student politician at York University, who last spring rationalized her student government’s ban on anti-abortion (or “pro-life,” or “anti-choice,” depending on the flavour of your ideology) groups meeting in student-owned building on campus by telling newspapers it was not a free speech issue.* “No, this is an issue of women’s rights,” she says. “You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body. We think that these … groups, they’re sexist in nature.”

I, of course, believe in Massa’s right to express her opinion on the subject. It is, however, so phenomenally stupid that it makes me embarrassed to share her opinion on legal abortion rights — the entire pro-choice position risks being tainted by association with this totalitarian B.S.

But since apparently Massa speaks for the student body of York University, and since her opinion (according to the Globe and Mail) is shared by administrators and students at Carleton, Guelph, Capilano College, Lakehead and other schools where the belief that destroying a fetus is morally problematic has been banished from discussion, perhaps it merits a response.

Ms Massa: It does not matter one whit whether a person is a sexist or a racist or a capitalist or an anti-zionist or whatever other -ist you happen to find most unreasonable. Their right to speak their opinion is still a matter of free speech. Even if you do not believe in free speech, you must acknowledge that it is the subject under discussion. Is someone free to speak that opinion or not? That is the question. (Also, incidentally, their speaking their opinion does nothing at all to infringe on a woman’s right to choose.)

I would go further — with virtually every great thinker in history and the entire tradition of democratic society on my side — and argue that, recognizing that free speech is what is at stake, we should be in favour of free speech. Even when — maybe especially when — the speech in question is something we find horrifying and dangerous.

Why? If I can repeat a point I’ve made here before: if some windbag moron articulates a lunatic, hateful, stupid idea, we have a whole range of options. We can make rational arguments that dispel the idiocy. Maybe change some minds. We can also condemn the lunacy for what it is. We can mock the numbskull who speaks the offensive words. We can socially marginalize them. Or we can ignore them.

But if we ban their opinion, we have no way of responding to it. Forcing them to shut up will, of course, do nothing to change their minds, and if anything it will just give the idea the credence of being too dangerous to be spoken — why would an idea hold that sort of power if it wasn’t true?

This is all pretty elementary stuff, and yet it is not just the young, naive university students who are failing to get it. It is also human rights commissioners and politicians and labour leaders in Ontario.

At the Queen’s Park hearing, it was quite a spectacle to witness Cheri DiNovo of the NDP and David Zimmer of the governing Liberals attempt to argue with Steyn that limits on free speech are appropriate based on ethnic and gender sensitivity (and in DiNovo’s case, equating actual employment discrimination with speech).

It was most interesting because Steyn, whose opening remarks were so on point and so reasonable, responded with an amusing lesson in legal and theatrical history and then with digressions about honour killings and explanations of how and why only right wingers are persecuted by the politically correct police. Controversial stuff, some of which I disagree with.

Of course, the beauty is that if our right to speak is guaranteed, we can debate the rest of it. If only the powerful people who disagreed with him — and with pro-lifers and whoever else — spent less time trying to shut him up and more time trying to argue with him, maybe we’d get somewhere.

*This sentence has been edited to correct innacuracies. It originally read: "Take Gilary Massa, a student politician at York University, who last week rationalized her school’s ban on anti-abortion (or 'pro-life,' or 'anti-choice,' depending on the flavour of your ideology) groups meeting on their campus by telling newspapers it was not a free speech issue." I regret the errors. — EK