Those were the words of one of my great heroes, John Quincy Adams, when the Congress of the United States prohibited him from introducing petitions sent to him by abolitionists. Such petitions deeply offended slaveowners; often they accused slaveowners of heinous deeds like kidnapping and rape, and called slavery a sin and slaveowners sinners. Such petitions exposed slaveowners to ridicule, contempt, and hatred. So they were banned from Congress. That prohibition, Adams rightly believed, violated the First Amendment, and he spent almost a decade of his later life fighting against the injustice of that ban, in the process showing how slavery meant the deprivation of freedom ultimately for everyone in the nation, and how whenever someone is not free we are all, to some extent, unfree ourselves.
Pity, then, the people of Canada, deprived of the freedom of speech that was their legacy by virtue of the English common law.
A Christian pastor has been given a lifetime ban against uttering anything "disparaging" about gays. Not against anything "hateful", let alone something legally defined as "hate speech". Just anything negative.
So a pastor cannot give a sermon.
But he must give a false sermon; he is positively ordered to renounce his deeply held religious beliefs, and apologize to his tormentor for having those views.
And then that pastor is ordered to declare to his entire city that he has renounced his religious views, even though he has not.
That's Alberta's human rights commission.
But don't worry, cause it can't happen here...
