A Dime a Dozen Blog

[old story, I know...]

I had thought atheism was the ‘in’ thing with the ‘progressive’ left. Apparently not. Take a look at the linked Varsity editorial. Trottier describes it correctly when he paraphrases them as saying: “so what, that doesn’t qualify as a hate crime, you should get used to getting punched or something”.

As for the human rights people? The banners of books and the harassers of librarians – not as much of a surprise. They’re hypocrites, but they’ve always been hypocrites. If the victim in this case had been Muslim, I have absolutely no doubt that they would have been the first to press for charges. Last time I checked, in Canada at least, being a Muslim is as much a choice as being an atheist.

Justin Trottier, president of the Freethought Association of Canada, was assaulted March 28, at approximately 1am, and is claiming that his assault should be considered a hate crime.

…Approximately 20 minutes later the assailant and his friend came back, said Trottier, and the friend asked, “’What did you say to my friend before?’ and I told him just what I said about recycling the poster and he’s like, ‘I don’t think that’s what you said. I think you said that you can believe what you want and I can believe what I want.’”

“I insisted that’s not what I said and he insisted that was what I said and that went on for about two minutes.”

After calling the appropriate authorities, Trottier said he was asked to apologise to the man within two minutes because they were not going to wait for the authorities to come. “Basically I held my ground and the guy who had originally thrown the poster down comes up…he slaps me a couple of times in the face and says, ‘Watch your smart mouth,’ so I grabbed his hand and told him to stop it and that’s when he did the headbutting with his hat and then he left and that was basically it.”

Regarding his injuries, Trottier said, “It wasn’t too serious, I’ve been recovering pretty well.” The headbutting resulted in a cut on Trottier’s nose.

According to Trottier, the Freethought Association of Canada is treating this as a serious incident that should be regarded as a hate crime, and are disgusted at some of the media attention that his incident has received from other papers.

“They joked about our belief system. They had 20 minutes to premeditate the attack, [but] the police were saying it was just an escalation from a verbal dispute but that wasn’t it at all. There was no verbal dispute. They waited 20 minutes and then they decided that they wanted to come,” he said. “They were very smart about it.”

Regarding the Varsity’s editorial, “Trottier makes a poor martyr”—which disputed Trottier’s claims and suggested that his claims are a result of hurt pride—Trottier said, “I couldn’t even make sense of their editorial.” The feeling he got out of it was that they acknowledged that the incident might have stemmed from him being an atheist “but so what, that doesn’t qualify as a hate crime, you should get used to getting punched or something…that was the feeling I got out of that.”

Harry Abrams of the Canadian Anti-Racism Education and Research Society said that this incident does not qualify as a hate crime.

“A hate crime happens when someone is on the receiving end of abuse for the things about themselves that they cannot change,” he said. “[Trottier] really should expect that some lumps should come his way sooner or later over not just taking this position but for promoting that point of view rightly or wrongly.

“I don’t think [atheism] is caught by the Canadian Constitution in terms of being a protected minority.”

He added that perhaps if Trottier had apologised, the assault could potentially have been avoided. “He possibly had a way out of this thing and chose to be confrontational rather than apologetic or something consolatory.”

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