Is it a human right to not be offended?

I'm with Simon Black when he writes about the new Canadian law that essentially makes it a human right to never be offended.

There are people out there who are just looking for opportunities to be offended. It's a victim position. Anyone who's busy actually create a happy and productive and successful life for themselves will have other things to do than clinging to feeling offended. It's catering to the lowest in us.

The whole notion that we need to regulate speech and behavior in this way is absurd. It does nothing to address the underlying problem of people being bigots or racists or what have you. Trying to outlaw the behavior just pushes everything underground where it can fester and grow. It doesn't go away. It makes it stronger. It divides societies and makes enemies of people.

Jacob Holdt always said that the KKK were the "little racists". They were the easy ones. Spend a couple hours in a car with them, and they'd crack open and start crying like babies, spilling their guts about the abuse they suffered as a kid. That's the only reason someone would ever start to harm other human beings in that way.

The big racists are the rest of us. The mom who pulls her kid a little bit closer to her on the bus when a black man walks in. Or her breathing gets a bit more tense. Kids pick up on this stuff and internalize it. Black men are dangerous. Got it.

Even worse is if we're in denial about it. It's one thing to say openly "I notice that my body got scared when that black man walked on the bus, even though I rationally know that he's most likely a perfectly good and law-abiding man. I have a little person inside of me that gets scared when I see a black man walk on the bus, because it probably reminds me of something that happened when I was a kid. It has nothing to do with this particular man."

But most people don't. They will either justify it ("black men are more likely to be bad guys") or deny it ("I didn't do anything, I acted perfectly normal, I'm not a racist, you're seeing things that aren't there"), both of which make matters worse.