The headline is a bit broad, but give me a minute, and I’ll explain what the judges decided. For one thing, it’s only in Ontario and British Columbia where the ban is in effect. Also, the basis of the ban is that Christians cannot be lawyers if they believe that sex before marriage or outside of marriage is morally wrong. Let’s take a look at an article from the less leftist of Canada’s National newspapers, the National Post.
Excerpt:
Trinity Western University suffered a stinging loss in the Supreme Court of Canada on Friday, which found that law societies in B.C. and Ontario were justified in not accrediting the university’s prospective law school because of its policy on premarital sex. But no one should harbour any illusions that the pain will be limited to the small Christian school in B.C.’s Fraser Valley.
The impact of the court’s decision against TWU will seriously afflict the engagement of religious communities with public life across this country, regardless of whether it’s the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army or Muslim and Jewish charitable organizations.
The Supreme Court was asked to decide whether TWU’s Christian “community covenant,” in which students and staff agree to the understanding that sexual relations must be limited to heterosexual marriage — which, by definition, excludes homosexual relations — was a legitimate prerogative for an accredited law school. In layman’s terms, the court had to discern the balance between Charter-protected religious freedoms and emerging rights of sexual minorities to live their identities freely and fully.
The court ruled that the refusal of the two law societies to accredit TWU’s law school was a “reasonable” balancing of rights. Its logic was that LGBTQ students would be unlikely to apply to TWU given the community-covenant requirement, so they effectively would have 60 fewer spaces available to them. Other students have access to the 16 current law schools, plus TWU’s 60 spots, and that therefore constitutes an inequality. By compiling that perceived inequality with the fact that students at TWU commit to reserving sexual intimacy for within traditional Christian marriage, the court concluded that the TWU covenant created a “public interest” harm to the reputation of and public confidence in the legal profession. These outweighed, in the court’s assessment, the “minor” consequences of denying religious freedom to the TWU community.
The effect of this ruling is that Bible-believing Christians who study law at the only Bible-believing law school in Canada cannot practice law in two of the most populated provinces. But Ontario is the province that contains the large city of Toronto, as well as the capital city of Ottawa. This basically means that Trinity Evangelical Law School graduates would be unable to be lawyers or judges at the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court is fine with LGBT people practicing law in Ontario and British Columbia, including at the Supreme Court, just not Christians who believe in the Bible. But those Bible-believing Christians should definitely have to pay taxes, including the taxes that go to pay for the salaries of their overlords on the Supreme Court. Basically, if you’re an evangelical Christian in Canada, then you’re good enough to be a slave, but not much else. You can work to pay for your secular slave masters, but you can’t have the same rights as people who don’t believe the Bible.
I think it goes without saying that the Supreme Court judges weren’t able to get this ruling from the text of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They just made it up from their own secular leftist values. This is actually normal for judges in Canada. There are no judges on the Canadian Supreme Court who accept that the Charter overrules the will of the judges.
Here’s a reaction to the ruling that I thought was interesting:
“Perhaps most disappointing from our perspective, the majority failed to account for or even address the equality rights of prospective TWU students or TWU’s freedom of association. These were issues we raised in our oral and written arguments to the court,” says Schutten. “The majority says it need not address those rights claims, because it is sufficient to ask whether the violation of freedom of religion is justified.” ARPA Canada believes that these other rights should play an important part in the “proportionality” analysis of the law societies’ decisions.
There is no freedom of religion in Canada. And there is no freedom of association in Canada. From previous rulings by Canadian Human Rights Commissions, we know that there is no freedom of speech in Canada. There is no right to self-defense from criminals in Canada. And there are no parental rights to educate your own children according to your Christian worldview in Canada. In Ontario, the man who wrote the education curriculum is now behind bars for child pornography, and the Supreme Court had nothing to say about whether that was morally wrong. For a long time, there has been covert discrimination against Bible-believing Christians in Canada, and now the Supreme Court has just shown what has been going on for decades and decades in universities and in government, in order to keep serious Christians out of positions of influence. From classroom teachers, to business owners to Supreme Court judges, Christians have been banned from the public square. Just like what happened to Jews in 1930s Germany.
Any Bible-believing Christian born in Canada has one mission: to get educated in a STEM skill that America needs, and then get out of that godless country. Kudos to those wise Christians who saw what was coming and got out early. It’s not the place for Christians to have a full and meaningful Christian life.
