Tag Archives: Bigotry

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Darren Lund loses second attempt to punish Canadian pastor for exercising free speech

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Dr. Darren Lund, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary
Dr. Darren Lund, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary

From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

Pastor Stephen Boissoin, who was found guilty in 2007 by a provincial human rights tribunal of “hate speech” for writing a letter to the editor expressing his views on homosexuality, has been strongly vindicated after the Alberta Appeals Court dismissed an appeal of a lower court decision in Boissoin’s favor.

The court also ordered Boissoin’s accuser, homosexual activist Dr. Darren Lund, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, to pay Boissoin’s attorney fees.

Appeals Court Justice Clifton O’Brien concurred with the lower court that Boissoin’s letter “was not likely to expose homosexuals to hatred or contempt within the meaning of the Alberta statute.”

In 2009, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Earl C. Wilson overturned the 2007 ruling by the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC), which ordered Boissoin to desist from expressing his views on homosexuality in any sort of public forum, ordered him to pay damages equivalent to $7,000 to Lund and called for Boissoin to personally apologize to Lund via a public statement in the local newspaper.

[…]“Matters of morality, including the perceived morality of certain types of sexual behavior, are topics for discussion in the public forum,” concluded Justice O’Brien. “Freedom of speech does not just protect polite speech.”

Boissoin’s lawyer, Gerald Chipeur, Q.C., who is an allied attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), pointed out that not only did Justice O’Brien throw out the AHRC’s decision, but ruled that a human rights panel had no constitutional authority to preside in such circumstances.

“This was a watershed case,” Chipeur said. “Very important, in terms of freedom of expression and religious liberty. Going forward, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for religious or political debate to be found in breach of Alberta’s current human rights laws.”

“Christians and other people of faith should not be fined or jailed for expressing their political or religious beliefs. There is no place for thought control in a free and democratic society,” Chipeur remarked. “The tools of censorship should not be available to prohibit freedom of religious expression in Canada. The court rightly found that this type of religious speech is not ‘hate’ speech.”

Gay activists can sometimes go too far and end up suppressing basic human rights like free speech and freedom of association.

Consider the case of the gay activist Floyd Lee Corkins II and the recent shooting at the Family Research Council that he was involved with. We need to be careful in the United States about encouraging gay activists like Floyd Lee Corkins II, who are hostile to basic human rights like free speech and freedom of association. The fascistic tendencies of the secular left have resulted in much violence in the past century, and you can even see it today in places like North Korea, where free speech and freedom of religion are not allowed. I’m sure that Stalin thought that what he was doing to the millions of people who disagreed with his agenda was “social justice”, too.

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Fascism: Ontario education minister wants to stop Catholic schools from teaching pro-life view

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Political map of Canada
Political map of Canada

From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

In what pro-life leaders are calling a stunning and unprecedented attack on religious freedom, Ontario’s Education Minister has apparently declared that Catholic schools can no longer teach that abortion is wrong.

Laurel Broten, who serves under Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, said Wednesday that Catholic schools are barred from teaching this core moral belief because Bill 13, the government’s controversial “anti-bullying” law, prohibits “misogyny.”

“Taking away a woman’s right to choose could arguably be considered one of the most misogynistic actions that one could take,” she told the Canadian Press. “I don’t think there is a conflict between choosing Catholic education for your children and supporting a woman’s right to choose.”

Bill 13 had already been slammed by Ontario’s bishops as an attack on religious freedom because it forces Catholic schools to allow “gay-straight alliance” clubs.

And confirmation:

 An official transcript sent to LifeSiteNews by the Ontario government confirms that Dalton McGuinty’s Education Minister told media on Wednesday that Catholic schools should not be teaching that abortion is wrong because it is a violation of the government’s newly-enacted anti-bullying bill.

[…]In her press conference, Minister Broten went beyond saying that Catholic schools cannot teach their pro-life beliefs, insinuating that they must actually adopt a “pro-choice” position. “We must ensure that women, young girls in our schools, especially highlighted during the week of the first ever Day of the Girl tomorrow, that young girls can make the choices that they make. This is not about being pro-abortion, it is about being pro-choice,” she stated.

A reporter pointed out that in the debates around Bill 13 there was no mention of abortion, and so asked why she had brought up the controversial bill.

“Bill 13 has in it a clear indication of ensuring that our schools are safe, accepting places for all our students,” she explained. “That includes of LGBTQ students. That includes young girls in our school. Bill 13 is about tackling misogyny, taking away a woman’s right to choose could arguably be one of the most misogynistic actions that one could take.”

“There are many, many families that send their children to Catholic school and choose that education for their children that also support a woman’s right to choose,” she continued. “And as I said, I don’t think that there is a contrast or a conflict between choosing a Catholic education for your children and supporting a woman’s right to choose.”

And reactions from pro-lifers:

Since LifeSiteNews first published the shocking comments Wednesday, they have ignited a firestorm of criticism from pro-life and faith leaders in both Canada and the U.S. and across denominational lines.

Dr. Margaret Somerville, the founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, called it an “appalling” violation of religious freedom. “If Bill 13 were interpreted in the way the Minister suggests, in my opinion, it would be unconstitutional as offending freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and free speech, as well as contrary to parents’ obligations and rights with respect to their children, and so on,” she told LifeSiteNews.

[…]Steve Phelan, communications director for the Virginia-based Human Life International, called it “a case of radical, secular leftists trying to take away the most basic rights of those with whom they disagree.”

William Saunders, Senior Vice-President of Legal Affairs for Americans United for Life, said the comments show the “totalitarian instincts” of pro-abortion politicians, but also stressed that “it can’t be misogynistic to oppose something that is so harmful to women, as many recent studies show.”

“That’s the dirty secret about abortion – how harmful it is to women; and so to suggest it’s misogynist is to completely miss the point,” he explained.

[…]Somerville said the Minister’s comments are a sign of abortion advocates’ desperation, which she sees as hopeful.

“The fact that they can’t discuss abortion shows how frightened they are that they cannot support their case in an open public square and get others to support it,” she said. “And now, if we take the Minister’s comments as an indicator, that fear seems to have increased: They don’t want to let anyone even disagree with them, indeed, they want to go further and have everyone ‘preach what they preach’ about abortion. So much for their stance of adopting so-called “progressive” values which is supposed to include their ideology of tolerance for diversity and manifest this in practice.”

Now, I am not a Roman Catholic. I am an evangelical Protestant Christian, and proud of it. But I do defend religious liberty for all. There is nothing that I hold to more strongly than religious liberty, the first and most precious of our American liberties. I think it is important for us here to look around the world and to see which groups are opposed to religious liberty and freedom of conscience. It’s not the conservatives. It’s the progressives. And that’s why we must never vote for them, for any reason. We have to defend that right, as a matter of the first importance – not just for us, but for everyone else, too.

It’s important for social conservatives to understand never to make common cause with those who support big government and the restriction of basic liberties. We need to embrace small government and fiscal conservatism so that government never gets powerful enough to take away our freedoms. For a start, government should not be in control of education at the federal level. As social conservatives, we should be promoting state and local control of education, right to work laws and school vouchers. There is a connection between fiscal policy and social policy that both sides need to understand.

Must-see videos on education policy

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October surprise: video from 2007 shows Obama engaging in racism

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Click here to watch the video from the Daily Caller. (H/T ECM)

Here’s an excerpt from the accompanying article:

In a video obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama tells an audience of black ministers, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism.

[…]The racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s carefully-crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.

[…]Obama begins his address with “a special shout out” to Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago pastor who nearly derailed Obama’s campaign months later when his sermons attacking Israel and America and accusing the U.S. government of “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color” became public. To the audience at Hampton, Obama describes Wright as, “my pastor, the guy who puts up with me, counsels me, listens to my wife complain about me. He’s a friend and a great leader. Not just in Chicago, but all across the country.”

[…]As the speech continues, Obama makes repeated and all-but-explicit appeals to racial solidarity, referring to “our” people and “our neighborhoods,” as distinct from the white majority. At one point, he suggests that black people were excluded from rebuilding contracts after the storm: “We should have had our young people trained to rebuild the homes down in the Gulf. We don’t need Halliburton doing it. We can have the people who were displaced doing that work. Our God is big enough to do that.”

This theme — that black Americans suffer while others profit — is a national problem, Obama continues: “We need additional federal public transportation dollars flowing to the highest need communities. We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs,” where, the implication is, the rich white people live. Instead, Obama says, federal money should flow to “our neighborhoods”: “We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods, so people don’t have to travel from miles away.”

[…]In the prepared version distributed to reporters, Obama’s speech ends this way:

“America is going to survive. We won’t forget where we came from. We won’t forget what happened 19 months ago, 15 years ago, thousands of years ago.”

That’s not what he actually said. Before the audience at Hampton, Obama ends his speech this way:

“America will survive. Just like black folks will survive. We won’t forget where we came from. We won’t forget what happened 19 months ago, or 15 years ago, or 300 years ago.”

Three hundred years ago. It’s a reference the audience understood.

I’m a person of color myself. I actually have darker skin than Obama. On the way home from work today, before I knew about this video, I found myself reflecting on what advice I would give to people like me who want to advance in the world – to be successful. My advice would be this – don’t make anything out of your skin color. Don’t define yourself by it. Don’t associate with people just because they have the same skin color as you. Don’t blame people of a different skin color for your problems. Don’t let the past hold you back from making the right choices today.

Obama isn’t doing people like me any favors by encouraging us to hate people of a different skin color and blame people of a different skin color. That just holds us back. I personally find it shocking that people of color would vote for someone who attacks their employers, who forces them into failing public schools, who gives money to abortion providers who perform abortions against people of color more than on whites, who forces them into dependence on government handouts, and so on. It’s wrong.