While it might seem that such cases as Jonathan (for such is his legal name) “Jessica” Yaniv are making a mockery of human rights laws, is that really the case? Or are “Human Rights Commissions” simply performing exactly as their makers intended – and it’s merely taken such egregious cases to finally strip away the curtain?
You are a low-income, married Muslim* woman who works from your Vancouver home performing waxing services exclusively on women.
One day, a transgendered woman asks you to wax her untransitioned genital area. The request is contrary to your religious beliefs and your sense of modesty – your husband is adamantly against it.
When you refuse, Jessica Yaniv, the customer, files a human rights complaint against you. In fact, Ms Yaniv has filed 29 human rights complaints against individuals and salons who refused her the service. At least one of those salon owners, who also started the business out of her home, shut it down as a result of the stress and expense of the litigation.
*In actual fact, the defendant apparently referred to, Marcia da Silva, is indeed Brazilian; many others were Sikh. Their rights not to be forced to manhandle the hairy balls of a bloke in a dress are just the same as any other woman’s.
One would think that an individual could safely refuse to administer such a service, based on religious beliefs, feminist principles or personal comfort and safety. One might also think that the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has more pressing applications to hear than the 16 applications Ms Yaniv filed this year, and the 13 she filed last year.
Within the B.C. Human Rights Code is a provision that allows the tribunal, at its own discretion and with or without a hearing, to dismiss any application that “was filed for improper motives or made in bad faith.”
But the tribunal refused to categorize Ms Yaniv’s application as improper or frivolous, nor her as a “vexatious litigant,” in a decision released on May 30. The author of the decision said that the complaints addressed real problems and genuine grievances.
This is human rights law in Canada today — a mockery of what was intended when the legislation was passed.
Or is it doing exactly what it was intended to do?
While academia was first to fall to the Long March Through the Institutions, nowhere, perhaps, is more damage being done to the fabric of Western society than through the subversion of quangos like so-called “human rights commissions”. Liberal democracy’s very institutions can make it uniquely susceptible to intolerant dogmas like Marxism. HRCs across the Western world routinely pursue agendas and hand down frankly appalling decisions which too often seem to favour the criminal and the deviant over law-abiding, decent citizens.
Jonathan Yaniv is a creepy predator, formerly with a striking resemblance to Heidi the Hippo from Meet the Feebles, who has now adopted a look something like a cross between Jimmy Savile and “Here Comes Fatty-Doo-Doo” Cartman from South Park. He seems to have made it his life mission to persecute actual women, be it teenage girls on the internet, or migrant women trying to run a small business. “Human rights” laws such as “self-identification” are enabling predators like him everywhere.
Cases like Jonathan Yaniv’s also echo the tsunami of “civil rights” litigation that was used to bludgeon businesses in the United States into submission in the 80s. Enabled by mendacious laws that placed little to no onus on the litigants, race-baiting activists filed complaint after complaint against big businesses. Most were utterly frivolous, but the process being the punishment, businesses almost invariably found it simply easier and cheaper to pay the race hucksters money to go away. As Thomas Sowell wrote, it became known as “how to legally rob a bank”.
Our human rights system has transmogrified into one where an individual who was born male and who possesses biologically male genitalia, can make an apparently valid claim against a female aesthetician for refusing to handle that genitalia.
And the usual defenders of the women who refused to provide Ms Yaniv service have remained silent, cowed at the altar of transgender rights…these tribunals should be abolished and Canadians should turn to the courts for relief if they believe their rights have been trampled. Our activist commissions, through cases such as this, are ultimately weakening the protections minority groups require.
business.financialpost.com/legal-post/jessica-yaniv-case-shows-that-human-rights-tribunals-can-undermine-those-they-should-serve
And so, here we are with a predator weaponising the “progressive” agendas of the left. “Because it’s 2019,” as Justin Trudeau might say.