Canada Election 2015: Socialists in red, Communists in Orange, Conservatives in blue
This article about religious liberty in Canada is from Vancouver Sun. (H/T Glenn)
Excerpt:
Ontario’s top court has dismissed an appeal from a private Christian university that forbids sexual intimacy outside heterosexual marriage, denying its proposed law school accreditation in the province.
The ruling from the Ontario Court of Appeal on Wednesday dealt a significant blow to Trinity Western University in a legal battle which pitted freedom of religion against equality rights.
A panel of three appeal court judges found that while the university’s religious freedom had been infringed upon, the institution discriminated against the LGBTQ community.
Trinity Western — which is fighting similar cases at appeal courts in Nova Scotia and British Columbia — expressed disappointment at the ruling, saying it would be taking its fight to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Ontario case saw the Evangelical Christian institution based in Langley go up against the Law Society of Upper Canada after the regulatory body voted not to accredit the university’s planned law facility.
At the heart of the dispute was Trinity Western’s “community covenant” or code of conduct, which all students are required to agree to.
The key point about the code of conduct is that it doesn’t discriminate against any particular group, e.g. – LGBT. It also forbids excessive drinking and premarital sex by heterosexuals:
It includes requiring students to abstain from gossip, obscene language, prejudice, harassment, lying, cheating, stealing, pornography, drunkenness and sexual intimacy “that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.”
Now read this next part carefully. Although there was no legal support for denying a Christian university religious liberty and freedom of association, there was the hurt feelings of the LGBTQ community:
“The part of TWU’s Community Covenant in issue in this appeal is deeply discriminatory to the LGBTQ community, and it hurts,” the appeal court ruling said. “The LSUC’s decision not to accredit TWU was indeed a reasonable conclusion.”
In Canada “it hurts” means the end of human rights like religious liberty and freedom of association. Why? Because the Christian community in Canada has – for decades – voted to increase the size of government at the expense of liberty, in order to get free stuff. It doesn’t matter if the Christians who wanted a Christian university are hurt. Or that the Christian students at TWU are hurt. Only the hurt of the LGBT community matters, and their hurt changes laws, criminalizes dissent and annihilates natural rights. There are no such things as freedom of religion and freedom of conscience in Canada. There never was free speech, either. Anything that might hurt the feelings of left-wing groups has to be made criminal.
I’ll put this as plainly as anyone can: Canadian “Christians” have been voting to transfer wealth and power to a big secular government for years. They wanted government to cover health care, and now the government thinks that health care is providing free sex changes, free IVF and free abortions. Canadian “Christians” wanted their 30 pieces of silver more than they wanted the freedom to act as if the Bible was true in public. It turns out that the more wealth and power that you transfer to a secular government, the more likely they are to abuse that wealth and power in trampling out any ideology that interferes with their buying votes from their favored special interest groups.
Free speech and religious liberty hero David French wrote about the Stormans family case on Tuesday, in National Review.
Just as a preliminary comment, I really like how upset David French is sounding lately. I have written posts in the pasts where I was upset, and said things that I wanted to take back. And I have a whole herd of editors who regularly tell me if the drafts that I send them are “too mean”. But this article by Mr. French has some comments that were I think a little over the edge, but that’s just fine with me. I liked it a lot. It’s time to be direct and say what is really motivating the secular left.
He says:
Today the Supreme Court declined to hear one of the most extraordinary and plainly vicious anti-Christian cases I’ve ever seen. My friends and colleagues at the Alliance Defending Freedom represent the Stormans family, owner’s of an Olympia, Washington, pharmacy called Ralph’s Thriftway. The Stormans — like many Christians pharmacists — decline to fill prescriptions for abortifacients (drugs that can kill a fertilized egg, often by preventing implantation). When customers request abortifacients, the Stormans decline to fill the prescription and then refer them to one of “more than 30 other pharmacies within five miles of Ralph’s.”
This process is entirely conventional and normal. Indeed, it was so mundane that the state of Washington stipulated that “facilitated referrals do not pose a threat to timely access to lawfully prescribed medications.” In other words, the fact that the Stormans refuse to sell abortifacients didn’t cause a single person to lose access to the drug of their choice. But to anti-Christian bigots, it is intolerable that Christian professionals exist unless they bow the knee to the Baal of the sexual revolution, so Washington’s governor took action — demanding that the Washington State Board of Pharmacy issue regulations that required pharmacists to issue abortifacients regardless of religious or moral objections. In his dissent from the Court’s denial of certiorari, Justice Alito described the state’s anti-religious motivations:
The District Court found that the regulations were adopted with “the predominant purpose” to “stamp out the right to refuse” to dispense emergency contraceptives for religious reasons. Among other things, the District Court noted the following. When the Board began to consider new regulations, the Governor of the State “sent a letter to the Board opposing referral for personal or conscientious reasons.” The State Human Rights Commission followed with “a letter threatening Board members with personal liability if they passed a regulation permitting referral” for religious or moral reasons. And after the Board initially voted to adopt rules allowing referrals for reasons of conscience, the Governor not only sent another letter opposing the draft rules but “publicly explained that she could remove the Board members” if need be.
Ah, yes. The “Human Rights Commissions” that exist in so many countries, whose primary purpose is to stamp out the basic human rights of Bible-believing Christians using the power of the state.
The governor in question, by the way, is Christine Gregoire, who narrowly defeated a wonderful conservative a while back named Dino Rossi in 2004, and then defeated him again by a larger margin in 2008. I wonder how many “Christians” voted for Gregoire in Washington state in those elections. Rossi favors an exception for the Christian pharmacists.
More:
Christian pharmacists could either comply with state demands or close their pharmacies — an action that could actually “reduce patient access to medication by forcing some pharmacies—particularly small, independent ones that often survive by providing specialty services not provided elsewhere—to close.”
Predictably, the Ninth Circuit sided with the state. Just as predictably, our pitiful Supreme Court let the ruling stand. So Washington gets away with its pure anti-Christian animus, and it establishes a state religion to the god of sex. While Washington is an outlier (for now), it is showing Blue America the path forward — and any red state governor who refuses to defend religious liberty is completely without excuse. They can’t rely on federal courts to cover for their own lack of courage and conviction. As for the church? If it keeps gutlessly delegating defense of its liberties entirely to lawyers and politicians, then it will richly deserve its legal fate. It’s time to take a stand.
So, in the state of Washington, one of the most liberal and secular states in the union, you can’t be a Christian and be a pharmacist.
I think what French is trying to say there is that groups like the ADF and the ACLJ have been a thin line of resistance to judicial tyranny for many years, but Christians are not helping things by voting for Democrats – usually because they are looking for a handout from the government at their neighbor’s expense. Remember, Obama got Supreme Court picks when he was elected and then re-elected. People who voted for Obama voted for a more liberal Supreme Court – and the persecution of real Christians, like the Stormans.
Now, keep in mind that this is the same state that is going after a Christian florist who referred her a gay customer to another florist for their wedding. She had served him faithfully for years, but when she turned him away for their wedding, then the state decided to go after her for her life savings and business. Never live in this immoral state.
While many assume that family rejection is the leading cause of depression among LBGTI individuals, a new study has found that in fact the problem appears to stem predominantly from the higher incidence of relationship problems among homosexuals.
Dr. Delaney Skerrett led a team of researchers from the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention (AISRAP) in studying suicides in Queensland. He found that a leading cause of suicide among “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex” (LGBTI) people is stress from their romantic partners.
“We tend to assume that the psychological distress LGBTI people are often going through is due to family rejection. But it seems that’s not so much the case. The conflict seems to be largely related to relationship problems, with partners,” Dr. Skerrett said.
In fact, he said, “The numbers are telling us there’s a general acceptance at the family level,” something he said is “great” and “really heartening!”
Instead, the study, which was published on April 2 in Asia Pacific Psychiatry, found that “LGBT individuals experienced relationship problems more often” than heterosexuals, “with relationship conflict also being more frequent than in non‐LGBT cases.”
That confirms previous studies finding that homosexuals also face higher rates of intimate partner violence than heterosexuals. A 2007 study in the Journal of Urban Health, which is published by the New York Academy of Medicine, found that 32 percent of homosexuals have been abused by at least one partner during their lifetime.
The researchers with AISRAP also found that a higher percentage of homosexuals took their lives [out] of despondency, rather than other psychological illnesses. While one-eighth of all Queensland suicide victims had been diagnosed with a psychosis that impaired their judgment, Skerrett reports “there were no such diagnoses among LGBT individuals.” The conclusion adds to the consensus that depression disproportionately besets active homosexuals.
But there’s more to say – let’s look at an individual case now, which will put some meat on the bones of the studies.
Here’s an article from the liberal New York Times.
Here’s the set up:
BOB BERGERON was so relentlessly cheery that people sometimes found it off-putting. If you ran into him at the David Barton Gym on West 23rd Street, where he worked out nearly ever morning at 7, and you complained about the rain, he would smile and say you’d be better off focusing on a problem you could fix.
That’s how Mr. Bergeron was as a therapist as well, always upbeat, somewhat less focused on getting to the root of his clients’ feelings than altering behavior patterns that were detrimental to them: therapy from the outside-in.
Over the last decade, he built a thriving private practice, treating well-to-do gay men for everything from anxiety to coping with H.I.V. Mr. Bergeron had also begun work as a motivational speaker, giving talks at gay and lesbian centers in Los Angeles and Chicago. In February, Magnus Books, a publisher specializing in gay literature, was scheduled to print a self-help guide he had written, “The Right Side of Forty: The Complete Guide to Happiness for Gay Men at Midlife and Beyond.”
It was a topic he knew something about. Having come out as gay in the mid-1980s, Mr. Bergeron, 49, had witnessed the worst years of the AIDS epidemic and emerged on the other side. He had also seen how few public examples there were of gay men growing older gracefully.
He resolved to rewrite the script, and provide a toolbox for better living.
“I’ve got a concise picture of what being over 40 is about and it’s a great perspective filled with happiness, feeling sexy, possessing comfort relating to other men and taking good care of ourselves,” Mr. Bergeron said on his Web site. “This picture will get you results that flourish long-term.”
But right around New Year’s Eve, something went horribly wrong. On Jan. 5, Mr. Bergeron was found dead in his apartment, the result of a suicide that has left his family, his friends and his clients shocked and heartbroken as they attempt to figure out how he could have been so helpful to others and so unable to find help himself.
Look:
To his friends, Mr. Bergeron maintained a positive tone. He went on vacation, dated some, visited museums.
Still, he privately expressed misgivings about what the future held. Olivier Van Doorne, a patient of Mr. Bergeron and the creative director of SelectNY, a fashion advertising firm, recalled Mr. Bergeron telling him that every gay man peaks at one point in his life.
“He said a number of times: ‘I peaked when I was 30 or 35. I was super-successful, everyone looked at me, and I felt extremely cool in my sexuality.’ ”
Mr. Siegel, the therapist who supervised Mr. Bergeron in the early days of his career, said: “Bob was a very beautiful younger man, and we talked a lot about how that shapes and creates a life. The thesis of his book is based very much on his own personal experience with that. And the book also emphasized what to do when you’re not attractive or you no longer have the appeal you once had. The idea was to transcend that and expand your sexual possibilities.”
And:
With the book about to be printed, Mr. Bergeron became convinced that he’d written too much about the shame and isolation involved with hooking up online; that people weren’t even really doing that anymore, now that phone apps like Grindr and Scruff had come along.
His book, he felt, had become antiquated before it even came out.
[…]Though some of his friends, Mr. Rappaport among them, wondered whether drugs were involved, leading to a crash Mr. Bergeron did not anticipate, the suicide seemed to have been carried out with methodical precision. On an island in the kitchen, Mr. Bergeron had meticulously laid out his papers. There was a pile of folders with detailed instructions on top about whom to call regarding his finances and his mortgage. Across from that he placed the title page of his book, on which he also wrote his suicide note. In it he told Mr. Sackheim and Mr. Rappaport that he loved them and his family, but that he was “done.”
As his father remembered it, Mr. Bergeron also wrote, “It’s a lie based on bad information.”
An arrow pointed up to the name of the book.
The inference was clear. As Mr. Bergeron saw it at the end of his life, the only right side of 40 was the side that came before it.
I think that the problem is that in the gay lifestyle, you have a typically male emphasis on physical appearance, sex and pleasure. There is none of the moderating influence of women, which tends to push men into commitments, responsibility and stability. Stuff that provides fulfillment and meaning and purpose after you lose your youth and appearance.
If you really love a person, then you don’t tell them that the dangerous thing they want to do is not dangerous. That’s not love. It’s easier for you to approve of them and be liked by everyone, but it’s not love.
