According to The Blaze News, a group of 33 individual organizations has banded together to call for an event by Jordan Peterson to be canceled.
These groups signed a letter that calls for the city of Ottawa, Canada, and the hosting arena to cancel a scheduled event by Jordan Peterson as part of his international tour.
The event is scheduled to take place at the Canadian Tire Centre and is meant to take place on January 30, 2023. Petersons talent representatives, Creative Arts Agency (CAA), were also asked to drop Peterson as a client.
The letter focuses heavily on Peterson supporting Canadas Freedom Convoy and Trucker Protest of 2022. The letter says that the protest led to hundreds of calls to law enforcement and an inability for disabled people to move about the city where they needed to go. They are upset about the disruption to life caused by the protest, and now they are upset that Peterson is a supporter of the vision and mission of the protest.
The letter reads:
Despite this egregious situation, Peterson was an avid supporter of the so-called Freedom Convoy that spurred the occupation.
The letter also suggests that Petersons viewpoints are misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and racist.
It continues by saying that Petersons rhetoric is often violent and is certainly off-putting compared to these groups' viewpoints. In short, the groups that wrote this letter certainly disagree with Peterson and believe he should be barred from having the events he wants to have in Canada.
They try to deflect from the idea that their requests are a form of censorship by saying that Petersons rhetoric might not be outright hate speech but that they feel that it veers very close to that arena.
It says:
Peterson and his followers will often argue that protesting or calling for the cancellation of his events is akin to censorship. However, we are not writing this letter simply because we disagree with his ideas but because the ideas espoused by Peterson directly jeopardize the safety and well-being of marginalized communities, especially women and transgender people.
and
In short, there is a difference between free speech and hate speech. The views of Dr. Peterson veer more towards the latter. The tolerance of differing ideas is about mutual respect and dignity. We believe the views expressed by Peterson and his supporters reflect neither of these values.
Many read this as nothing more than left-wing groups trying to censor views they disagree with.
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