I want to dislike Ezra Levant. It’s so, so easy to. If you knew absolutely nothing else about the brightest star at the Sun, this would just about seal the deal. There is no way around it: he can be a swarmy jerk of a man. I do not cite further evidence here, because you could so easily find it anywhere yourself. (Start here.) And yet. I met Ezra Levant in 2008. He was to speak at ideaCity, Canada’s answer to TED before Canada had an actual answer to TED, and I was working at the venue where the event was being held. This is the talk he gave:   I knew, then, that Levant had published those cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed, in the Western Standard. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, even though I had worked for a student newspaper that published a different cartoon around the same time as the Standard did. (I voted against doing so, but defended the decision after we ran it.) I didn’t know much else about Levant before I watched him speak. His basic argument–here’s where you should watch his talk above, if you haven’t–was that censoring or punishing offensive speech was wrong. Remember: “offensive” is a subjective position that is staked as an objective one, meaning that when you say that something is offensive, what you really mean to say is: “I personally take offense to this.” For Levant, what you do with speech you deem offensive isn’t to hide it, but to get it out in the open, so that you can prove it to be ridiculous, or wrong, or stupid. Levant makes an important distinction between offensive speech and criminal speech: I shouldn’t be allowed to libel someone, or to suggest that they be killed. Otherwise, sunlight’s the best disinfectant. Here’s the closing bit of his argument:

I ask you to think back, over the past century, of all the great liberal causes: suffrage for women, equality for Blacks, the gay rights movement itself. Each of these was achieved not through muscle, not through violence, not through money or political power, but through speech alone, for they had nothing else. Take away all my rights except for free speech, and I’ll win them all back. And those speakers for women’s equality, and racial equality, and gay equality, were not just passionate. They were by definition offensive‚ offensive to the orders of the day. It was appalling to say that homosexuality was not a crime, let alone something to be tolerated or celebrated. That was offensive. It was offensive to say that women were persons. It was offensive to say that Blacks were equal to Whites. We need offensive speech. We need it on the spectrum of ideas. And anyone who believes that there should be ideas‚ should be a spectrum of ideas‚ should be appalled when anyone on that spectrum is gagged.

Now, I don’t know that publishing cartoons depicting Muhammed with his turban as a bomb is morally equivalent to getting women the vote, or that “speech alone” is always ever enough. But I do know that the argument that free speech necessarily encompasses offensive speech is a compelling one, and sure sounds a lot like the right one. I don’t like the Toronto Sun very much, and I like their TV news channel that Levant hosts a show on even less. I find some of the things Levant’s done, like that segment I linked to earlier, offensive‚ and I take offense to it. I wouldn’t especially mind if the whole Sun News Network vanished off whatever cable packages go higher than channel 100. But I certainly don’t want Ezra Levant’s mouth stuffed. I don’t need to turn anyone off of Ezra Levant: he can do that all by himself. I don’t need to order the Sun off the air: the market‚ the audience, the advertisers‚ can do that for me, and if I wanted to, I could organize an advertiser boycott to tilt the market in my favour. The worst thing to do to a guy like Ezra Levant is to attempt to sanction his silence. Why? Because, for one thing, he isn’t always wrong. For another, my definition of “wrong” isn’t the same as yours, and I sure wouldn’t want to not be able to say the things I say that you would find “wrong.” I shook Levant’s hand after his talk, and told him that I really appreciated what he said, which might have been confusing for him, because I didn’t look like the kind of person who walks up to Ezra Levant to shake his hand and tell him that I really appreciate what he says. (My hair was too messy and my beard was too haphazard to belong to a young conservative.) I realized when he took the stage a few minutes before that I’d actually met Levant earlier in the conference. Not knowing what he looked like at the time, I just noticed a normal-looking guy who spent a lot of time pushing his newborn baby around in a stroller in the second-floor lobby of the theatre. He seemed very nice. I know, now, that he isn’t. But I know that I’m still glad to have shaken his hand.