Tag Archives: Nanny State

Christian man shares his story of being banned by Canada’s armed forces for disagreeing with Islam

Four white Canadian police officers arrest black pastor
Canadian police officers arrest black pastor for preaching the gospel

I got an essay from a Christian man who lives in Canada who served with the armed forces, but was banned from re-enlistment for expressing orthodox Christian views online about Islam. On this blog, I have urged Christians not to entrust a secular government with too many responsibilities, because it results in diminished liberty. I hope my readers will learn something from his story.

The remained of this post is written by the Canadian writer.


I was in the Canadian army several years ago, and while during this brief period of my life I was somewhat eager to get out. It just wasn’t a good time and I had chosen a less than ideal trade. I also had a difficult time telling myself I did the right thing. My 3 year engagement was valuable in some ways, I made some of my best friends there, and it made me into somewhat of a disciplined civilian, one might say. After my release from the army, I went to school and studied Christian apologetics and philosophy, which gave me an excellent outlet to share ideas. I had taken a course on Islam through Veritas evangelical seminary, which was very informative. I had learned that Islam shares many core ideas of Christianity, but there was also something about it which undoubtedly drives much of the terrorist activity in the world. I decided I could no longer evaluate Islam through what the media was telling me, or some of the attitudes towards Islam I may have picked up in the army. Given the time in which I was in the army (2005-2008), during the Afghanistan conflict, no doubt there was a great deal of vilification of our enemy in order to dehumanize them. This seems to be how war works, as it makes it easier to kill who you believe to be sub-human.

No doubt, Islam has been heavily politicized since then. It has become the preferred religion of the Liberal party in Canada; the object of tolerance, and the line of demarcation, which if you do not tolerate you are a racist, even if you so much as raise concern with regards to its violent roots, and current activity. Either way, I had to understand it for myself.

Is this a misappropriated religion, used by those who would be violent anyway as a pretext to carry out their actions? Is there room for reform within Islam, can a believer move away from the violent passages in the Quran, and adopt a more peaceful form of Islam without compromising essential beliefs?
Without getting into the details of my piece, I answered these questions in the negative, while leaving open the very real possibility that a genuinely peaceful person might be a Muslim, that we might hold two, or more, conflicting ideas at once. I published my ideas on my former blog.

Since then, I had reapplied with the army, I even did my aptitude test again, bringing up my score, in order to open up a more desirable occupation than before. My chosen occupation was intelligence, and I was almost in. I suppose it was appropriate that the recruiter gathered their intelligence on me, and found my apologetics blog.

During the recruiting process, one form which all candidates must sign is “Operation Honour,” instantiated by General Jonathan Vance, an initiative not in place during my previous engagement. This outlines an understanding that members must not sexually harass, or discriminate against other CF members, and such can be grounds for dismissal, which seems reasonable.

I was called into the recruiting centre, and my reapplication to the military was closed due to this post, this post which expressed views criticizing a set of ideas, Islam, as a private citizen.

I had argued, with the recruiters, how no specific person was accused of violence, and how the piece was only intended to draw out the problems I saw contained within. They would have none of it, and were set on a year long deferral. It became clear to me that our freedoms of speech were under attack, and in order to hold jobs in government one cannot hold views contrary to the current cultural milieu. I have since had the opportunity to reapply, but with such a wax nose initiative in place, where any disagreement one might voice against a particular worldview, I am unsure how one’s career could survive in an atmosphere of whistleblowers, and where people’s feelings are a metric for one’s worthiness in the forces. Literally anything which rubs another the wrong way, any concern or disagreement, can become a nightmare for a member.

Would not the mere presence of me, a Christian, be an affront to Islam, or even a homosexual/LGBTQ member? The simple affirmation of Jesus being the Son of God is blasphemy to Islam, which only affirms Him as a prophet. How is anyone to function in such an environment as both a private citizen and a state employee, one which professes inclusivity, but has their own ideas of exclusivity in mind? In the name of tolerance, it does seem that our government, and its agencies, have become some of the most intolerant and divisive amongst us. They seem more interested in catering to special interest groups, rather than evaluating ideas, which is ironic considering my intended trade—intelligence, which examines sociopolitical influences on a region, ideas that might be useful for command decisions.

If Islam were the peaceful religion our politicians claim it to be, wouldn’t this be a valuable thing for a person in a command position to know? One could use this knowledge to reform violent practitioners away from their erroneous ways. Yet, they have chosen to protect it by brute political force, rather than allowing open discussion.

Sure, I was initially bitter about this, but it was a valuable lesson, and it has shown me how under the brief influence of a very pseudo-liberal government, how our basic freedoms of thought and speech become attacked, freedoms which I thought our military was interested in preserving, at home and abroad. I suppose it was a valuable awakening to no longer see the state as the preservers of morality, let alone our basic freedoms. For this, we need to look elsewhere.


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Report: Pinterest demotes and/or censors pro-life, conservative, and Christian content

Pinterest censors Christians, conservatives, and pro-lifers
Report: Pinterest censors Christians, conservatives, and pro-lifers

Well, Project Veritas has done it again! This time, they made contact with a whistleblower inside Pinterest, who produced documentation showing how Pinterest censors content that is opposed to the Democrat party. It’s not just fringe content: they’re censoring Ben Shapiro, Live Action, Bible verses, and undercover videos of Planned Parenthood organ harvesting operations.

Here’s the press release from Project Veritas:

Project Veritas has received and published documents from an insider at Pinterest. The documents, which include product code, Slack messages, and internal policies, reveal terms and websites that Pinterest apparently censors.

In an interview, the Pinterest insider who leaked the documents explains how the company censors pro-life and Christian content on the website.

Live Action, PJ Media, TeaParty.org all blocked:

“I was pretty surprised,” said the Pinterest insider in an interview, when s/he discovered that pro-life group LiveAction.org was added to a “porn domain block list.” The insider explained that the “block list” was intended to be  a collection of pornographic websites that Pinterest uses in order ensure that pornography cannot be posted. LiveAction.org is not a pornographic website, instead it is the web domain of a prominent pro-life advocacy group.

The insider explained that websites on a “domain block list” cannot be linked in posts made by users. While investigating, Project Veritas tried to post the LiveAction.org link on Pinterest and failed to do so, receiving an error message that read, “Sorry! Your request could not be completed.” Project Veritas reviewed the list of websites from the “porn domain block list” and was able to confirm that along with LiveAction.org, websites like zerohedge.com, pjmedia.com, teaparty.org and other various conservative websites were also listed. The majority of the document lists pornographic websites.

They actually suspended Live Action’s account after the report of bias came out. Project Veritas revealed that the blocking of Live Action was requested by employee Megan McClellan. Her name was on the block request.

Notice that these sites that were blocked are all critical of the Democrat party.

Let’s see some more evidence from the report.

Bible verses, Easter are marked “Brand Unsafe”:

Project Veritas also received a large text file titled “Sensitive Terms List.” The insider said the file contains search terms that Pinterest considers “sensitive,” and that the terms are modified in search results according to different value assignments. According to the insider and supporting documents, terms are assigned an “abusive,” “sensitive,” and “brand unsafe” value.

Some of the actions that can be taken on search terms include: blocking auto-complete results in the search bar, providing an advisory message when a term is searched for, removing the term from recommended or trending feeds, and blocking email or push notifications. Search results are also modified based on the values that are applied to terms.

Project Veritas reviewed the “Sensitive Terms List” and discovered that Christianity-related terms like “christian easter” and “bible verses” were marked as “brand unsafe.” The insider explained to Project Veritas in an interview that such terms are removed from auto-complete search results.

For me, the most interesting part was the censoring of the Planned Parenthood undercover videos. These videos were investigated and found to be undoctored. So there is nothing unreliable about them. But they are harmful to the Democrat party, so maybe Pinterest thought that they could help Democrats by altering their products and services to censor anti-Democrat content.

The censoring of Harvard-Law graduate Ben Shapiro was also interesting, as you can see him on all sorts of television shows on any given night, from far-left CNN to centrist Fox News, and everything in between. Why would Pinterest classify a well-educated, popular and respected conservative pundit as worthy of censorship? One of the documents released by Project Veritas cited a 26-year-old Pinterest employee calling this famous Orthodox Jew a “white supremacist”, despite the fact that he was the number one target of white supremacist threats in a prior year.

Newsbusters notes:

Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro has been labelled by Pinterest Public Policy/Social Impact employee Ifeoma Ozuma as a “white supremacist.” According to the anonymous whistleblower, this took place during an internal war room discussion where “policymakers were making decisions about content.” Any mention of Shapiro discussing Islam was added to the sensitive terms watchlist.

I looked up this employee on LinkedIn, and she didn’t seem to be very well informed about anything. Maybe Pinterest just hires unqualified people, solely based on their political allegiance to the Democrat party?

But this employee is just one example of a company-wide bias against Christians and conservatives. I was trying to guess why they have this bias. Maybe it’s because they are allied with the Democrat party, so they just censor content that makes Democrats look bad?

They certainly have no bias against content that supports the Democrat party on their platform.

Newsbusters noted:

When researchers tried to pin images from pro-abortion giant Planned Parenthood, they faced no such censorship. Similarly, while they faced no problem searching for “Muslim” or “Jewish” content, the search bar included no references to “Christian” imagery. In fact users had to use codes to work around the system so they could try to share Christian content.

[…]Curiously, where people had to workaround the programming of the autocomplete bar to find Christian content, searching “atheist” immediately led to jokes and memes at the expense of religious believers, especially Christians. This writer immediately came across an image of a crucifix made entirely out of the word “lies” and one featuring an image of Mary holding the infant Christ captioned “If there has been DNA testing 2000 years ago, we wouldn’t have this fairytale today.”

But Pinterest isn’t the only one accused of censorship.

This blog has suffered from all sorts of censorship since Trump won the 2016 election. Our Google traffic referrals are down over 90%, reducing our daily page visits by about 66%. Our Twitter followers has increased by 100 in the past year, but in previous years, it went up about 2000 per year. Are big tech companies that intent on punishing Christian conservatives? If they are hell-bent on censoring Christians and conservatives, then maybe we should have a federal investigation into their business to see if they’ve broken any laws.

Fascist Canadian Justice Francesca Marzari overrules father’s freedoms of thought and speech

The Honourable Madam Justice Francesca V. Marzari
The Honourable Madam Justice Francesca V. Marzari

This story of a transgender child in the left-leaning province of British Columbia shows what the political left would do in America if they were in power. In a previous post, I reported on how the public schools, the government-run health care system, and the government-run courts all conspired to give the child testosterone injections, over the father’s objections.

Here is the latest from The Federalist:

Last week, Justice Francesca Marzari of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, declared a father guilty of “family violence” against his 14-year-old daughter on the sole basis that he had engaged in “expressions of rejection of [her] gender identity.” These “expressions” revolved entirely around his polite refusal to refer to his daughter as a boy in private, and his steady choice to affirm that she is a girl in public.

[…]Her father, Clark*, strongly objects to this treatment and immediately sought to reverse the decision in the BC Court of Appeal. Hoping to raise awareness of his case, Clark gave a number of interviews to media outlets, including The Federalist. In these interviews, he repeatedly referred to his daughter as a girl, stating to The Federalist that “she is a girl.  Her DNA will not change through all these experiments that they do.”

While many might take this to be an honest statement of biological fact, Marzari quoted it as a prime example of Clark’s “family violence of a public denial of [Maxine’s] gender identity.” Marzari convicted Clark of this violence, and issued a “protection order” preventing him from speaking to journalists or the public about his case.

[…]What Marzari found particularly egregious, however, was not Clark’s private interactions with his daughter but his “continued willingness to provide interviews to the media … in which he identifies [Maxine] as female, uses a female name for [Maxine] … and expresses his opposition to the therapies [Maxine] has chosen.” According to the court, this willingness placed Maxine at “a significant risk of harm.”

[…]Marzari argued that the “people and organizations” to whom Clark granted interviews had shown themselves “fundamentally opposed” to transgender ideology, yet Clark “continued to support the media organizations posting his commentary with additional interviews.” This kind of attitude was, in Marzari’s view, justification for enjoining Clark from sharing any information with journalists—or with practically anyone outside his legal team—about his daughter’s “sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental or physical health, medical status or therapies.”

The court also emphasized that Clark must not allow relevant documents (petitions, affidavits, letters, court orders, etc.) to come into the hands of third parties not “authorized by order of this court,” or with “written consent” from his daughter.

If father refers to his daughter as female again, then he will be arrested!

Excerpt:

At about the same time that story was published, the Supreme Court issued an additional, more heavy-handed “protection order” from the same ruling. The three-page document declares that the father, Clark*, will henceforth be subject to arrest, immediately and “without warrant” if any police officer has “reasonable” grounds to believe that he has in any way referred to his daughter as a girl in public or in private.

The new order further stipulated not only that Clark must not discuss his daughter’s sex or gender identity in public, but also that he cannot share court documents describing his own gag order. On the one hand, this demand may seem ironic, since it covers a publicly available court ruling. On the other hand, the injunction is so broad that it naturally includes the very document upon which it is written and that document–with its threats of immediate arrest without warrant–has not, as of yet, been made available on the court’s website.

So you have an anti-science judge, who is paid by the tax dollars of this father, overruling him as the biological father, and imposing her own far-left opinions as law. Why would any moral Christian man marry and start a family in Canada, when immoral far-left atheist leftists can take his money for their salary, and then overrule his basic human rights and parental authority? No free man would live in a country that treats him like a slave. Unfortunately, men are treated like slaves in Canada. The only solution is to get out.

It’s not surprising that the courts would censor him from speaking to the news media. In Canada, the government is run by radical secular leftists, who see any speech critical of the secular left agenda as potential violence. So, for decades in Canada, the government and the courts have issued gag orders on pro-life activists, and they even imprison those who speak out against abortion and same-sex marriage. Nurses and doctors who expose abortion extremism and infanticide are regularly censored b the government and the courts, for example. There is nothing like the first amendment in Canada. On the contrary. The progressives in government have made “offensive speech” a criminal offense.

More:

While the main thrust of Marzari’s ruling focused on Clark’s public statements, Marzari also ordered that Clark be enjoined from “exposing” Maxine to any materials that might “question whether [her] gender identity is real or the treatments [she] seeks are in [her] best interests.”

Well, enough of that. Let’s talk about the legal system in Canada.

Although the university system is funded in part by pro-life and pro-marriage taxpayers through mandatory taxes, the law schools are effectively closed to Christians or conservatives. If any manage to get through law school, then they are barred from practicing law. And of course it’s impossible for anyone right of center to be appointed to a government position on the courts, because of discrimination and bias.

There is no free speech or freedom of thought in Canada

This article about religious liberty in Canada is from Vancouver Sun.

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 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 leftist government, the more likely they are to trample all over the basic human rights of anyone who disagrees with their ideology.

This sort of thing happens all the time in Canada. Remember the case where another female judge overruled a biological father who grounded his daughter for sending nude pictures of herself using her father’s computer? This is normal in Canada, where biological fathers are competent enough to pay taxes, but not competent enough to parent their own children.

If any of this sounds unappealing to you, remember this at election time. The only way to stop the fascism of the secular left is to elect small-government conservatives who respect the basic human rights in our Constitution, such as the right to free speech and religious liberty. If you want to keep these rights, you will have to vote appropriately, and encourage others to vote appropriately.