How can hatred be socially acceptable?

Will there come a time in Canada when it will be socially unacceptable for anyone — male or female — to cheer on the abuse and humiliation of women?

Canadians are different from Americans. We do try to restrict public tormenting of groups of people for their race, place of origin, sexual orientation and other differences.

But there are two groups who are still treated viciously without payback: Indigenous people and women.

In Canada, media and public abuse and mistreatment of Indigenous people is incessant, always has been.

And in this #MeToo moment, we see public abuse of women — individual women and the social corral we inhabit — coming in waves. It’s in the media. It’s online. It never stops. Women join in. Co-workers remain bystanders when they see women harassed in the workplace.

How can these social attitudes be changed?

The grossest abuse is the attempt to control women’s bodies. I write this as a new Ontario law creates a bubble zone around abortion clinics to protect patients and staffers from harassment, threats and physical attack by antichoice obsessives. Why should a woman be spat on? This law will be wonderful, if enforced.

Just like religious groups complaining that they can no longer obtain federal summer jobs grants to fight women’s rights under the Charter, ‘prolifers’ seek to eat away like acid at women’s autonomy. Never forget this.

Study the relentless withering of U.S. abortion rights in each state. Republican Gov. John Kasich of Ohio has signed into law a bill forcing women carrying a fetus with Down syndrome to remain pregnant. Doctors who provide abortions for them will lose their licence.

A smart Ohio woman would go out of state to have an ultrasound or a blood test, just in case her body becomes the property of the state of Ohio. And implicitly, the law only applies to poor women who can’t afford to travel.

Worse, some mothers of beautiful happy Down syndrome children — complain that there are so few being born. In other words, they resent pregnant women for having choice and then not making the right one.

This is just one example of some women fighting the feminism that gave them the right to be heard at all.

The entertainment, media and political landscape is full of dinosaurs mocking and humiliating women who risk all to come forward and say they were sexually harassed in the workplace. Somehow, it’s still a shock to hear women-bashing from female dinosaurs too.

It evokes a bygone world where bosses chased secretaries around the desk and there was a housing boom for soldiers returning from the Second World War.

What is this alternate world they live in?

The commentator Michael Coren has written that many on the right yearn for “The Canada I Grew Up In.” He calls it revisionist “false nostalgia” and he’s right.

I can’t tell if women-haters are employed as proxies for their retro bosses or if they genuinely believe that because they turned tough, younger women should suffer in the same way and be toughened. I say that young women should fight back, as they didn’t, along with good men and change the system.

I cheer for Pascale Brisson, a young woman who in 2013 accused the notorious Sen. Colin Kenny of sexual harassment. He has faced many questions about his sexual and financial behaviour over the 34 years he spent in the Senate. I mean, who gets complaints about sexual harassment from the staff of both NATO and their tanning salon business?

After the Senate gently investigated itself and found him innocent, Brisson left her job, “ruining my life at the time,” as she said. When Brisson asked that the investigation be reopened, Kenny, 74, suddenly resigned.

I watched Brisson, now a teacher, tell her story on CBC’s The National and was thrilled to see her so happy. She was brave. She persisted. As times changed, with #MeToo and a feminist prime minister, she once again thought she might have a shot at justice.

An unfamiliar feeling invades me. It is happiness. It is a light heart.