| From CatholicInsight.com Editorials
The January 2008 article, “Civil rights war in Canada” (pp. 11-16), quoted from REAL Women’s magazine Reality (Mar/April 2007) in saying that “adoptions, social services such as nursing homes, religious-based schools, marriages, employment conduct, etc., carried out by religious organizations will be held to secular standards, not religious ones.” One reason for this development, it was pointed out, is the demand of homosexual activists that everyone conform to their vision of equality rights. So much for the argument that legalizing same-sex “marriage” (SSM) would be of no concern except to homosexual activists. In September 2008, the Department of Education in British Columbia intends to introduce the mandatory teaching of SSM from Kindergarten to Grade 12 in provincial schools. It is a first for a province in Canada to claim the right to determine moral teaching in schools when the vast majority of its citizens reject it as unscientific and contrary to the common good. So we move from Trudeau’s 1967 slogan “there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” – falsely used to destroy traditional morality – to the new slogan that the state will determine people’s moral thinking. Also in September, the Quebec Department of Education intends to replace Christian Ethics in its schools with a secular mish-mash invented by its staff in which Judeo-Christianity is trivialized as only one religion among many. As Douglas Farrow pointed out in March (C.I., “Rebuilding Babel in Quebec City”, pp. 23-25), the suppression is called “normative pluralism.” Under this title the state dismisses parental rights and the formative role of Christian culture, and replaces it with secular sociology. Again, then, the temporal authority, the state, dismisses the spiritual authority and usurps its role. In history this is called “statism,” better known as fascism. In Ontario, fascism reared its head in April as described by Rory Leishman in his column on page 9 (see Leishman’s column for June), when the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) ordered Christian Horizons, a large Christian-evangelical service organization for the disabled (1,400 persons in 180 homes with 2,500 employees) to abandon its religious mission by dropping its Christian moral code and accepting new training for all its employees ‘to bring its employment practices into line with the human rights code’ (i.e., accept state indoctrination that the homosexual lifestyle is normal and to be honoured). The chairman of this government body, Michael Gottheil, simply dismissed Christian Horizons’ “ministry.” No attempt was made to “accommodate” it as required. No mainline press, radio or TV editor protested the ruling. This silence speaks loudly. Three journalists attacked the ruling. Michael Coren in the Sun Media ridiculed it as dangerous and stupid (“Disabling Charity,” “Human Rights Commissions might spell end for Christian aid”). Lorne Gunter of the Edmonton Journal, writing for the National Post (April 28), attacked the OHRC as proving again that it is nothing more than “politically correct thought police,” now also boasting that its ruling “has a significant impact for faith-based organizations that provide services to the general public.” It wants, he said, to stamp out views at variance with those favoured by the Commission. Unfortunately, Gunter also thought that when Christian Horizons “became an agent of state policy, it lost its ability to resist state morality.” Nigel Hannaford of the Calgary Herald (May 3) put it even more strongly. “Church must decide which it serves: the state or God” (May 30). Neither one recognized that the citizen should honour both state and God. By presenting state and God as equal opposites between whom we must choose, Gunter and Hannaford appear to accept the fascist order whereby the state tells the citizen what he may and may not do, think, and write. Judeo-Christian teaching rejects this view absolutely. Man is made by God and for God. The state is the servant of man, a mere instrument, to help him in this world. From the Jewish exodus out of Egypt to the time of Jesus (“Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God”), to Pope Gelasius (“Two there are, oh August Emperor who rule the world, the temporal and the spiritual”, 490 A.D.), the Judeo-Christian culture has denied the divinization of the State. And so should we, as did Blessed Titus Brandsma during World War II (see pages 10-12). For a true examination of how human rights relate to freedom, see Pope Benedict’s address to the United Nations, April 18, (pp. 15-19 especially the section entitled “Right to religious freedom in service to this community,” p.19). Right to religious freedom in service to the community Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian – a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer. The activity of the United Nations in recent years has ensured that public debate gives space to viewpoints inspired by a religious vision in all its dimensions, including ritual, worship, education, dissemination of information and the freedom to profess and choose religion. It is inconceivable, then, that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves—their faith—in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights. The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature. The full guarantee of religious liberty cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order. Indeed, they actually do so, for example, through their influential and generous involvement in a vast network of initiatives which extend from Universities, scientific institutions and schools to health care agencies and charitable organizations in the service of the poorest and most marginalized. Refusal to recognize the contribution to society that is rooted in the religious dimension and in the quest for the Absolute—by its nature, expressing communion between persons—would effectively privilege an individualistic approach, and would fragment the unity of the person.
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