Why Dissent Matters

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"Frances Kelsey was a quiet Canadian doctor and scientist who stood up to a huge pharmaceutical company wanting to market a new drug--Thalidomide--and prevented an American tragedy. The nature writer Rachel Carson identified an emerging environmental disaster and pulled the fire alarm. Dissenting juries can and do change the law. They did that when they refused to convict Dr. Henry Morgentaler of performing illegal abortions when he had done just that. Judicial dissents sometimes point to a different and more just future. Occasionally dissenting judges save lives, or at least try to: that's what happened when a wrongfully convicted teenage boy named Steven Truscott got the chance to tell his story before Canada's Supreme Court. It is, or should be, all about the evidence. And destroying the evidence is exactly what happened in Canada over the course of a dark decade when the recent Conservative government did everything it could to ensure that voices that might have informed public policy were silenced. Occupy Wall Street was the first truly international protest. Who were the occupiers and what did they want? Another growing international protest movement is BDS: Boycott, Divest, Sanction. It is directed at Israel. In October 1973 Israel came close to defeat when Egyptian and Syrian forces massed on the borders and overconfident Israeli officials did virtually nothing. Forty-five years later Israel's leaders seem woefully blind to another unfolding national security threat. Our world has been saved by dissenters: people who have been attacked, bullied, ostracized, jailed, and sometimes, when all is over, celebrated. Some dissenters have truly important things to say. Listen--and decide--before you shut them out."--

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