Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are dying the death of a thousand cuts in Canada. Under attack by multiculturalists, radical Muslims, atheists and homosexuals, the days of speaking honestly or expounding biblical standards are ending. And the Canadian government is doing all it can to keep the blood flowing.

Today, all an activist needs to do is claim to have hurt feelings. Canada’s human rights commissions (provincial and national) are all too willing to exceed their intended judicial authority and force self-interest viewpoints down the throats of the majority—and use taxpayer dollars to cover activists’ legal expenses along the way.

The latest case in point: the Canadian Islamic Congress versus Maclean’s magazine and author Mark Steyn. The judge, jury and punisher are the pro-minority Canadian Human Rights Commission (chrc).

But what gives the chrc the authority to arbitrarily decide what can and cannot be published?

The human rights commissions are not even courts—they are government-appointed commissions, often composed of activists or former activists that have now usurped the power to decide which social and racial groups they want to support and protect, who they won’t protect, and where the line lies between free speech and “responsible” free speech as they choose to define it.

Affording activists and other officials who have limited (and in some cases no) legal training such power is irresponsible and unjust.

Worse, the human rights commissions weren’t even originally designed to make rulings on anything even remotely associated with free speech. Their original purpose was to prevent discrimination in pay and housing.

At first, the human rights commissions more or less kept themselves to their intended purpose: regulating landlords and employers. However, they have gradually been extending their enforcement tentacles into many other aspects of life—areas they have no business regulating, including free speech and the freedom to practice one’s religion.

Worse again: Because the chrc is not an official court, according to the human rights act “the panel is not bound by the rules of law respecting evidence in judicial proceedings.”

Self-interest groups are taking full advantage.

According to the Canadian Islamic Congress, author Mark Steyn’s award-winning book America Alone (an excerpt of which was published in Maclean’s) “subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and Islamophobia.”

You would think Mark Steyn must have said some pretty horrible things in the article titled “The Future Belongs to Islam.” According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Islamic action group was angry that Steyn said that Muslims have high birth rates, that Islamic people could become the majority population in Europe, and that some Muslims are violent radicals.

Forget the truth—forget the 9/11 attacks and national security—forget the recent assassination of Pakistani presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto—skip due process. Let’s use the pro-minority human rights commissions to punish viewpoints that are not supportive of specific minority groups, in this case Islam.

That is exactly the kind of twisted reasoning behind the abuse of the justice system by the Canadian Islamic Congress (cic) and many other self-interest lobbyists. And because the chrc “is not bound by the rules of law,” they can get away with it.

In the case of the cic, it seems to have specifically lodged a complaint against Maclean’s with the Human Rights Commission in order to avoid Canada’s normal legal avenues. Canada’s justice system probably would have tossed the case out.

According to the Canadian Family Action Coalition, a group calling for an overhaul of the human rights commissions, the reason the cic lodged a complaint with the pro-minority chrc was that if the Islamic group had “sought remedy under Canada’s hate speech law, as over-broad as it is, they would at least have had to persuade a prosecutor to take their case, and to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. But as it is they can tie up the magazine and its lawyers before one commission or another for months.” The National Postagrees.

The Canadian Islamic Congress isn’t the only self-interest group to avoid the justice system and exploit the Human Rights Commission to force its agenda on the rest of Canadians.

“We today have a major national magazine, a federal political party leader and a registered political party, a major Catholic newspaper and an internationally renowned journalist all of whom are being investigated by appointed ‘hate speech therapists’ from the commissions,” says the Canada Family Action Coalition.

The Human Rights Council is also investigating the Alberta-based Christian Heritage Party of Canada and its leader Ron Gray, after a homosexual activist claimed material on the website was offensive to homosexuals. The main article in question was reprinted from WorldNetDaily, which quoted research from the Council for National Policy in Washington, d.c., that found that pedophilia was much more common among homosexuals.

The homosexual activist also took issue with communiqués condemning actions of “militant secularists and homosexuals” who shouted down a religious speaker; for calling “homosexuality a treatable disorder”; and for criticisms against the government’s politically correct “cone of silence” pertaining to all discussions related to homosexuality.

Then, in an unrelated case, the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission ruled in November that a minister from Red Deer was guilty. His crime: writing a letter to the editor of the local paper that criticized homosexuality. The commission chairwoman noted that a homosexual teenager was beaten two weeks later, and found “a circumstantial connection” between the letter and the incident even though the attacker was never identified or charged.

If you live in America, don’t presume you are safe.

In fact, there is evidence that in the face of Canadian Human Rights Commission rulings and similar ones in Britain, some U.S. authors are having trouble finding publishers for books critical of radical Islam, Saudi Arabia’s support for terrorists, or the Muslim Brotherhood. By publishing books on these topics, companies that have operations in Canada and Britain open themselves up to fines, legal costs and punishment from the commissions. So publishers in America are, in a sense, forced to comply with British and Canadian law.

America also has its own minority rights activist groups. In September, the state of New Jersey revoked the tax-exempt status of a Methodist church for refusing to allow two lesbian women to marry on church property.

According to judicial analyst Bruce Hausknecht, there are many efforts in play to remove tax-exempt status from all religious groups. “[I]t will not take long for tax exemptions for churches and religious entities to be revoked if they will not bow down to the god of homosexuality,” he says. “Churches especially should heed the clear warning of this … situation. If you are going to stand for … biblical sexuality, you may have to pay the price.”

Perhaps one of the most hypocritical things about many of the self-interest groups is that they are publicly promoting their agenda under the auspices of free speech and freedom of religion—but in words and deeds, they are actually doing everything in their power, including circumventing the justice system, to prohibit any speech that does not fully endorse their own lifestyle.

President Ronald Reagan once summed it up this way: “The frustrating thing is that those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance. Question: Isn’t the real truth that they are intolerant of religion?”

That is exactly what is happening in Canada and America today. The majority are being oppressed by a skillful, vocal minority.

From America’s and Canada’s beginnings, these two countries were special in that they did not for the most part seek to force specific religions upon people. Despite warnings from God about how a house divided against itself cannot stand, Canada and the U.S. took that concept much further and have set out on a policy of multiculturalism as opposed to integration. We have a policy that promotes differences as opposed to similarities; when it gets right down to it, we have a policy that promotes actions that are in direct conflict with the morals, principles and laws of the Bible.

Today, we are paying the price. That tolerance has now come full circle. Minority self-interest groups, which were given freedom to practice their own beliefs, are now forcing their ideals and morals on those who allowed the existence of minority ideals in the first place—the majority. How ironic, and how sad.

God talks about a time when justice would leave the land, a time when the nation would proudly declare and mainstream its sins, and minority groups and self-interests would rule. You can read about it in Isaiah 3 and Deuteronomy 28:43-45.

When you are done reading those verses, read the first half of Deuteronomy 28 and see the blessings God says would result if we would only turn to and follow Him.