Sure Flanagan has the right to say stupid, offensive things –

- And people have the right to fire him, shut him out, and criticize him for saying stupid, offensive things.

A few people are coming out in defense of Flanagan (while always carefully stating that they, themselves, do not support his views on child pornography) acting as though he has been treated unjustly for simply stating his opinion and trying to engage debate.

Flanagan is not being charged with hate speech or anything else, so his defenders can quit trying to go on about how he is being denied the right to free speech.

However, if you say really stupid, offensive, disgusting things, then your employers probably won’t want you spouting your bile under their banner.  And that is the employers’ right.

Let’s look at some of the feeble, misguided defenses Flanagan’s few supporters are offering:

Jonathan Kay:

At the very least, Mr. Flanagan’s many years as a respected public intellectual have earned him the right to be given the benefit of the doubt about the meaning of his remarks. But no one seems willing to give him that benefit.

Nonsense.  He has no more right than anyone else to be given extra portions of benefit of doubt.  Respect for what a person says, respect for the quality of their opinions needs to be maintained.  No one gets a free pass on stupidity and being offensive, or even wrong.  It is up to them to continue showing that their points are valid.  Flanagan failed miserably and continues to fail.  No one is stopping him from clarifying the meaning of his comments concerning child porn.  In fact, the comments resurfaced because he was asked for clarification and said the same thing.

In such situations, people express themselves in all sorts of clumsy, and sometimes bizarre ways.

Sure, and their bosses, realizing this, often end up firing them because they don’t want to pay public figures who will say bizarre, clumsy things.

Is this what Flanagan was getting at with his clumsy remarks? I don’t know. But I do know that it is one very possible interpretation of what he intended to say. And just as we insist on a presumed-innocent standard in criminal trials, a similar presumption of innocence should exist before we kill someone’s career and reputation.

Wrong.  The public and Flanagan’s former employers did not kill his career.  He did it himself through arrogantly believing he could say whatever vile, incorrect thing came to mind.  He is wrong.

That’s the very least that every single one of us would ask for in similar circumstances, as we watched our whole life’s work hang in the balance.

We should first ask ourselves if we caused our own downfall.  No one owes Flanagan protection from career crash and burn.

Mark Mercer:

In Canada,people who are convicted of viewing child pornography often go to jail. It is entirely in the public interest, then, to ask whether they should go to jail.

That has been asked and answered.  They go to jail because they encourage, through their demand, the production of child porn, the exploitation of children, the treatment of children as sexual objects.  They also violate a child’s rights over their own body as they view images of children who cannot and have not given consent.

Now, instead of defending Flanagan’s prerogative to raise questions and offer opinions, as it should, the U of C is giving Flanagan the cold shoulder. Even worse, it is, through its president, expressing an opinion on the matter Flanagan raised. That’s bad, because the university is not expressing that opinion as a move in a debate. Quite the contrary. It is expressing an opinion in order to close debate.

What debate?  The one Flanagan seems to think exists, that viewing and owning child porn harms no one?  There is no debate on this, nor should anyone be invited to open one.  A child’s rights are seriously violated through the viewing of child porn.  That is a fact, and to attempt to open a debate on such a thing is to disavow the rights of children by implying that those rights are up for debate.

We should be invite debate into laws where environments change, demanding we examine laws, but the fundamental rights of children must never change, so any debate that would risk those rights should not take place.

Heather Mallick puts it very well:

Flanagan wasdumped from the CBC, condemned by Harper and rightly so. But that obscures a more important point, which is that Flanagan is sincere.  For he is an ideologue, and ideologues are always sincere. It’s what makes them dangerous. Concepts like untrammelled liberty are clear spring water to them, and real life, as it is lived by small soft-limbed splayed children weeping with pain and terror on camera, is irrelevant.

...Flanagan is saying that watching child porn is a passive crime. Police worldwide say with all the passion they can muster that it’s not. Online porn exists because there is a market for it…Those who make it are bestial. Those who watch it are feeding the beast.

...In 1998, when the FBI began tracking online child porn, Bazelon reported, they found one particular case, photos of a little girl with emails like this: “do me a favor . . . take a pic of her in nothing but stockings pulled down below her (genitals.) The photographer obliged.

...If Flanagan thinks child porn is victimless, he should know that Amy (a victim of child porn) will spend the rest of her life knowing that men worldwide are looking at ghostly images of her as a child, naked, trussed up, penetrated, bleeding. It will continue after she dies.

Flanagan likes personal liberty. There will be none for Amy.

Any debate that risks the fundamental rights of children should not occur.  Obviously, people like Flanagan, Kay, and Mercer do not agree.