Note: Not all opinions expressed in articles posted on this website are necessarily identical with positions taken by British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life.

Religion in the public square

Freedom of religion doesn't mean freedom from religion—we should hear all voices on issues that shape society's values

By Margaret Somerville, the Ottawa Citizen, May 15, 2010

If you've paid any attention to the media over the last week -- for instance, regarding whether the G8 "maternal and infant health initiative" should include abortion, or The Current's and The National's programs on CBC that focused on Marci McDonald's new book, The Armageddon Factor, that raises alarm about the rise in political power and influence of the "Canadian religious right" -- you'll find this secularist truism espoused both front, centre and behind the scenes: Religion and religious voices and views have no valid role to play in the public square. Indeed, many secularists are openly hostile to any such participation. But are they correct?

To respond, we need to examine the arguments for and against their participation.

First, the nature of the issues being debated is relevant. Recently they have included euthanasia, abortion, new reproductive technologies, sex education of children, access to health care, being soft/hard on crime and drugs, medical marijuana, safe injection sites, business ethics, corruption, environmental ethics, aid to developing countries, and so on.

These issues involve some of our most important individual and collective social-ethical-legal values. Many of them are connected with respect for life, and with birth or death, the two events around which we have always formed our most important values. These values, together with our principles, attitudes, beliefs, myths and so on, make up the societal-cultural paradigm on which our society is based -- that is, the "shared story" that we tell each other and buy into in order to form the glue that binds us as a society.

So, in a "secular society" such as Canada, does religion have any valid role to play in determining what these values should be?

That depends on what we mean by a secular society.

Secularists argue it means that religion has no valid role to play in forming our shared values and has no place in the public square. I believe they're wrong, but it's true religion cannot function in the public square in the same way as in the past.

We form society through a journey of the collective human imagination. In the past, societies used a shared religion to find their collective imagination and bind themselves together. That's no longer possible, but can a purely secular approach replace this function of religion?

Religious studies scholars Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young have examined what they call "secular religions." For instance, humanism and atheism function as secular religions binding their adherents through common belief and ideology. Science also functions as a secular religion when it becomes scientism. . . .

None of these "isms" is harmful in itself, but they are harmful to finding shared values and ethics when they are promoted -- as, for instance, scientist Richard Dawkins does with scientism -- to deny any space for spirituality and traditional religion in the public square and replace those with secularism, the most encompassing secular religion that functions as a basket holding all the others.

In other words, I'm arguing that it's a mistake to accept that secularism is neutral, as its advocates claim. Rather, it too is a belief system used to bind people together. And if, despite being a belief system, secularism is not excluded from the public square, then religious voices should not be excluded on that basis. The mistake is in taking a disjunctive (either secularism or religion) approach to a situation that requires a conjunctive (both secularism and religion) approach.

We need all voices to be heard in the democratic public square and they have a right to be heard.

The basic principles on which democracy is founded are liberty and equality. To privilege secularism, as its advocates argue should be done, is to contravene the liberty and equality principles of democracy and to prevent democracy functioning as it should -- in short, it's profoundly anti-democratic.

A frequent argument used by secularists to justify excluding religious voices from the public square is that secular democratic societies require a separation of church and state. That's correct, but the question is: What does respecting that separation require?

First, it means the state, and its laws and public and social policy, are not based directly on religious beliefs and laws as, for example, in Islamic societies such as Iran. There is no "religious litmus test" that must be passed for a law or social policy to be valid.

The doctrine is meant to protect the state from being controlled or wrongfully interfered with by a religion or religions, and to protect religions, within their valid sphere of operation, from state interference or control. For instance, the Chinese government's interference in the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops in that country contravenes the doctrine of separation of church and state. The doctrine has division of powers or demarcation of jurisdictions functions.

Those using "separation of church and state" to justify excluding religion from the public square have created confusion among: Freedom of religion; freedom for religion; and freedom from religion.

Freedom of religion: The state does not impose a religion on its citizens and there is no state religion. Freedom for religion: The state does not restrict the free practice of religion by its citizens. Freedom from religion: The state excludes religion and religious voices from the public square, in particular, in relation to law and public policy making. The first two freedoms are valid expressions of the doctrine. The third is not.

This mistaken interpretation of the doctrine of "separation of church and state" has been used by secularists in order to win a victory for their values in the culture wars by eliminating consideration of the values of their opponents on the basis they're religiously based. But for many people, their moral reasoning is connected with their religious beliefs. To exclude them and their moral views from the public square, because of the source of their beliefs, would be to disenfranchise them. . . . .

Religion brings to bear important considerations that secularism doesn't, and vice versa. We need to hear both sides and give proper weight to each, if we are to make wise decisions about the values that should take priority, when values are in conflict.

I suggest that the most important task of the religious voices in the public square is to help to place and keep social-ethical-values issues in a moral context. Religion should be seen as an important holder of our "collective moral memory," a memory we lose or ignore at our peril. We need to revalue religion, even if we are not people of faith, to see it as a store of traditional knowledge and wisdom.

We need also to extend the scope of our analyses of contemporary social-ethical-values issues beyond an intense present to consider the needs and rights of future generations. And we must "hold on trust" for them, not just our physical ecosystem, but also our metaphysical one -- the values, principles, beliefs, stories and so on that create and represent the "human spirit," that which makes us human. Religious voices can help us to do that.

Values conflicts cannot be solved by excluding religious voices from the public square. On the contrary, doing so is likely to exacerbate those conflicts.

Margaret Somerville is director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, and author of The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit.

[Read the whole article in the Ottawa Citizen online.]

On Religion and Political Discourse:
A written version of
a Talk Given at Pearson College on February 20, 2008

(In the talk there was some ex tempore matter and probably some other, slight deviation from the written version given here.)

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. I spent many years speaking to people of approximately your age; and since leaving that phase of my life I have missed having a lot of chances to interact with them.

I understand that you as a student body are today discussing how religion affects interactions between people. I have undertaken to discuss the role of religion in political action--the part religion can take in the interactions between people regarding public questions.

This topic is a very large one, so I am narrowing it down somewhat. If someone takes a particular public stand because of his religious beliefs, should his fellow-citizens, because he is religious, say “We won’t listen to you,” or should they grant him or her an equal right to participate in public matters and listen to his or her position on a given matter? . I would like to discuss the question “Do people motivated by their religious beliefs have a right to participate in public discourse about public matters, and should others who are not religious consider their contributions to be of possible value?” I am going to argue that in an open society religious people should have a right to enter public discourse, and should be listened to—listened to and neither accepted automatically nor rejected automatically because they are religious.

I know that you come from a wide variety of countries and religions. I was born in Canada , and am influenced by the political traditions of this country, and also by my Christian beliefs.

In our political tradition, which is basically part of the British political tradition, people of faith have frequently been prominent in political affairs. In the nineteenth century, for example, many people like William Wilberforce worked to abolish slavery. Christians were not the only ones in the antislavery movement, but they were very prominent in it. They were prominent also in the antislavery movement in the United States .

Similarly, faith-motivated people such as Lord Shaftsbury spearheaded reforms to improve the lot of working people and their children.

William Booth founded the Salvation Army, which particularly reached out, and still reaches out, to the poor and the down-and-out. He wrote a book entitled In Darkest England in which he outlined a multitude of projects to help those who were in unfortunate circumstances, whether or not they had come into those conditions through their own mistakes or through the actions of others.

In Canada in the twentieth century, I can think of two who started out as ministers of religious congregations and then went on to found political reform movements. J. S. Woodsworth started the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (which was the forerunner of the New Democratic Party) and William Aberhart started the very different Social Credit movement.

In spite of this background, many people in Canada dismiss the ideas of people precisely because they are the ideas of religious persons.

No-one should trust someone’s ideas simply because the person is religious. In this connection I have a story:

Once upon a time in a land far off and a time long ago the monarch of a large kingdom died without leaving any son or daughter or relative to succeed him. The great men of the kingdom gathered together to consider what they could do to choose a successor. It so happened that there was in the kingdom one man renowned for his devotion to God and for his kindliness. This was the holy hermit who lived in the Great Wood. The great men of the kingdom decided to go to him and seek his advice as to who should be the next ruler. After travelling a long way through the Great Wood they came to the holy hermit. To him they explained their dilemma. “Oh holy man,” they said, “will you reveal to us who should be the next king of our realm?”

The holy hermit sat for a long time in silence. Finally he said, “I have lived by myself for many years and have not had an opportunity to know the ways of men. I cannot think of anyone who would be fit to rule you.”

“But you are a man of God,” the great men said. “Do you not have a message from God to tell us whom we should choose?”

The lone hermit sat for a long time in silence. Finally he said, “I do have a message from God. And that message is …. [The wise men waited with bated breath] That message is: Never trust a holy hermit to choose your king for you.”

That story points out a moral. We should not look to someone to make our political decisions for us simply because of his religious standing. (Even if he is a worthy person, we should not leave practical decisions about politics to be decided by someone on the basis of religious insight alone divorced from practical knowledge.)

On the other hand, there is the narrative of Saul in the Christian and Jewish scriptures. Saul was strong and handsome and dynamic, and appealed to the people. They chose him to rule over them rather than to be judged by the old prophet of God. Saul turned out to be a disaster, and was replaced by a man who was a shepherd, a man of God, and a poet and psalmist, who--we are given to understand--ruled justly till his position of power went to his head, and he too failed, until he repented. One moral of the story of Saul could be that the people may choose someone with outwardly appealing characteristics, but if they fail to consider the inner or spiritual qualities of their leader, they may choose very wrongly.

Let us get back to the present from the instructive past. In Canada today, as I was saying, there is a tendency to dismiss ideas merely because they are seen to be religious in origin. There are, it is true, plenty of examples in the world of those who have misused religion as an excuse to bring in oppressive and unjust laws. But, in view of the part people of faith have played in comparatively recent political history in our country and in countries with similar traditions, this aversion to ideas from religious sources should be somewhat surprising. I think it stems from mistaken thinking and in some cases from a fundamental error in philosophy.

In Canada today we often hear in response to a proposal for a law: “You’re trying to impose your morality.” Usually the person saying this seems to imply that law should impose no morality at all, and apparently believes that if a religious injunction forbids something, then the law of the land should not take a stand and forbid what a religion forbids, on the supposed principle of the separation of church and state. But isn’t the main job of law to impose justice, which is moral behavior towards others? Among the Ten Commandments is the injunction “You shall not murder.” Yet no-one would suggest that murder should be allowed because it is forbidden in a religious text. In fact there are many things forbidden by most religions which practically everyone would agree should be forbidden by law also.

Do you think that everyone’s ideas about right and wrong are of equal value? It sounds generous to say “Of course!” But a moment’s consideration should rid us of that idea. Think of the greatest public benefactor you know of. Maybe it’s someone who out of generosity of heart gives a lot of money to worthy causes. Maybe it’s a historical figure such as Ghandi or Mother Teresa. Now think of the worst person you can think of: maybe a mass murderer—perhaps a political one such as Adolph Hitler, Paul Pot, or Idi Amin. How could the ideas of great public benefactors and mass murderers be of equal value? Yet many people object to the public participation of people motivated by religion because most religions proclaim that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and many people have carelessly bought into the idea that everyone’s ideas about such matters are of equal worth.

If we believe in the essential unity of the human race, we ought to subscribe to the idea that there is a common standard of right and wrong which applies to the whole of humanity. This standard of right and wrong was not discovered yesterday, but to a great extent is embodied in most of the major religions of the world. Most of these standards are discoverable by logical reasoning, provided we agree on basic assumptions. One of those assumptions is that, first of all, there are such standards to be discovered, and second, that those standards apply equally. I should treat my neighbour as I think I ought to be treated myself if I were in his shoes.

Because there are universal standards of right and wrong, it is not surprising that they are to be found in the major religions of the world. Religions claim to tell more than our unaided reasons can tell us, but Christianity, for one, acknowledges that there is a light in all of us which can tell us whether we are doing right or wrong

Since there s a common body of agreement between the natural reasoning of human beings and what has been given us in many religions, it is not surprising that people of faith hold many of the same truths about right and wrong as do moral philosophers, people who get their ideas of right and wrong by reasoning things out.

When people of faith speak out about justice and injustice, right and wrong, in a society, they should not expect, and in my experience usually do not expect, non-believers to automatically accept what they say. They do feel that their ideas should not automatically be rejected because they come from religious insight or religious tradition. Rather they would hope that their fellow-citizens would subject their ideas as well as those of others to the light of reason and then accept them or reject them on that basis.

For many years I have been working with a group of people seeking to influence public policy. The group I work with has no theological tests. Anyone can join, whether he or she is religious or not. Yet it is true that most of our members are motivated by their faith backgrounds and perspectives. We are quite willing, even eager, to have our proposals subjected to examination in the light of reason. What we do find frustrating is the instant dismissal of our proposals apparently because the critics identify them as associated with religious teachings.

Let me give some examples of issues we in British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life have been involved with.

We began as a group of teachers who were concerned about our teachers’ association using our professional or union dues to promote abortion. We felt that even those who were in favour of abortion should have seen the injustice of using dues obtained by compulsion from teachers who were opposed to it. We saw this as a human rights issue, not a religious one. We found that only those opposed to abortion seemed willing to support us against this injustice.

Next we investigated and found that there was nothing to prevent public schools from promoting abortion by referring teenaged girls to abortion agencies. A fourteen-year-old could come home having had an abortion after a referral from her school, all without her parents’ consent or knowledge. We saw this as intruding on the role of parents, but we were also against it because we saw abortion as wrong. Though it is true that the sacredness of human life is an important principle for many religions, and though the Christian scriptures and some two thousand years of tradition oppose abortion, we also believe that for anyone who places a sufficiently high value on human life, scientific data alone is enough to convince the unbiased that induced abortion is wrong except to save the life of the mother.

As BC Parents and Teachers for Life we have also opposed the use of the schools for the promotion of pro-homosexual propaganda. While conservative religious groups teach that homosexual behaviour is wrong, we also find that the scientific evidence is strong that it is psychologically and physically harmful.

On all these public issues our organization has spoken out not as representing a particular religion, but as supporting values which we see as basic to our society. It is, of course, impossible to go into detail on each of these issues in the short time available to us. If you are interested in getting a comprehensive view of the issues on which we have taken a stand, please go to our website at www.bcptl.org . The point I want to make is that on each issue we have taken up we have sought to base our stand on arguments which stand apart from any religious dogma. The fact that most of our members probably have faith positions which are compatible with these stands on social issues does not mean that they are seeking to impose standards on society which stem only from personally-held religious beliefs.

In Christianity there is a belief that there are two ways in which truth is communicated to human beings. One is by direct revelation from God. Christianity, like other faiths, points to prophets and teachers who are credited with speaking to mankind on behalf of God. But there is another method by which certain truths are accessible to human beings, and that is by the use of reason. Much moral truth can be obtained by the use of the human intellect, and this truth is available to human beings regardless of their religious beliefs or lack of them.

Unfortunately, many times in history religious groups, including those taking a Christian stand, have tried to force society to adopt those beliefs which are peculiar to particular religions and are regarded as coming by direct revelation from God. I believe that any such attempt is harmful not only to society but to the religious group attempting to impose its values.

On the other hand, it is entirely in order and I believe healthy for society if those with faith insights bring them into the market place of ideas, ready to defend them with their God-given intellects. That society which ignores what its citizens have to say simply on the basis of the fact that they speak from a position of faith—that society is the loser. Time and time again we find that in such societies totalitarian dogmas have arisen to replace suppressed religious teachings, and human beings have been subjected to tyrannies as bad as or worse than those which have resulted from the mistaken imposition of religious dogma.

As human beings we should seek truth wherever we may find it, and as citizens we should be ready to listen to the insights of all, no matter what the sources of those insights might be. If we do this with a common desire to seek the welfare of the country in which we find ourselves, then that country will be richer because the ideas of many will be fairly considered. n

Ted Hewlett

An Analysis of Some Aspects of the Provincially-Approved Teachers’ Guide Making Space: Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice throughout the K-12 Curriculum

“First a ripple, then a wave” —to borrow a phrase from an old commercial. The release of the elective Social Justice 12 Draft Course may have been considered a ripple: a minor result of the Corren Settlement Agreement, having the potential to directly affect only a few students (though its indirect effects have the potential to be much greater).

Now, with the publishing of the approved teachers’ guide Making Space, we see the first wave resulting from this same agreement, which gave two pro-homosexuality activists a special role as prior advisors regarding all provincial curricula before they are released to the general public. Making Space, we are told, “is designed to help K-12 teachers in virtually every subject area find ways to promote awareness and understanding of the diversity that exists within our society . . . , ¹ ” The statement indicates the intention of its authors to affect the whole school curriculum. Promoting awareness and understanding of the diversity that exists within our society sounds like a laudable aim, but we need to ask, “Just what kind of awareness and what sort of understanding does this document encourage?”

Among the differences students should be concerned with according to Making Space (or Teachers’ Guide) are those of religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and gender identity.² So we see that some of the topics for consideration are delicate, and we need to examine how they are likely to be treated by a teacher following the promptings of the Guide. The researcher who is familiar with the use of the term “diversity” by various activists will want to inquire just how wide-ranging the diversity is that will be studied and what attitudes the teacher is expected to inculcate in the process of leading students in such a study.

There is no denying that some of the aims of the Guide are desirable: for example, “to ensure that differences among learners do not impede their participation in school, their achievement of prescribed learning outcomes, or their capacity to become contributing members of society.³But any positive aspects should not blind us to the way in which the guide empowers the would-be propagandist in the classroom.

The Guide provides the teacher with a “rating instrument” entitled “Self-Assessment: How I Address Diversity and Social Justice in my Teaching Practice.”⁴ One of the statements this rating instrument provides for the teacher to use as a means of evaluating his teaching practice is this one: “The guest speakers and visitors that form part of my instruction reflect the diversity within the local community.” This is in keeping with another criterion given: “My classroom activities [are] designed to promote social justice address and are inclusive of all forms of diversity (visible and less visible).” One can readily see the advantages of students being exposed to racial diversity when that is relevant. But the idea that classroom activities and guest speakers should reflect all forms of diversity found within a community poses a problem. Are all forms of diversity really to be represented? Surely not the diversity represented by those advocating the free use of recreational drugs, for example. It is unlikely that the authors of Making Space had such advocates in mind, but if the reader is familiar with the practice of bringing in speakers to reflect diversity in sexual orientation, he can readily see one likely effect of the policy of having speakers reflect all forms of community diversity.

One of the statements contained in the “ranking instrument” seems to suggest that the teacher’s value as a teacher may depend on his outside activities (ironical in light of the treatment meted out to Dr. Chris Kempling for his outside activities). The sentence is: “I support various national and international initiatives that promote diversity and social justice (e.g., International Women’s Day, International Day to Eliminate Racism, National Aboriginal Day, International Day of Disabled Persons, International Human Rights Day), and promote the activities planned within the school and district during that week [sic].” This sentence provides, in effect, a criterion for a teacher’s likely effectiveness.

While one may value a teacher’s participation in some of these activities, one questions whether it is a good idea to have a government document present such participation as a measure of a person’s suitability for teaching. Also, we note that these are but examples. Would participation include going to “gay pride” parades, which the school-sponsored clubs usually known as gay-straight alliances have encouraged students to attend?

We recognize the worth of promoting respect for individuals of widely varying kinds of diversity such as diversity of race or ability, for example. Nevertheless, we know that teaching respect for diversity has been used as a cover for inculcating a favourable attitude towards harmful forms of diversity. Principally we have seen, in recent years that it has been used to inculcate a favourable attitude towards sexual diversity in the form of homosexual activities. So if our suspicions are aroused by the repeated use in the Guide of the term “homophobia,” for example, we believe that we are not showing paranoia but exercising our judgement in the light of what we know is being advocated in educational circles.

That these suspicions are justified is confirmed for us in the latter part of the document we are considering. In “Appendix A: Learning Resources,” for Kindergarten to Grade 3, the document lists the book Asha’s Mums (infamous in British Columbia for its being promoted by pro-homosexuality activists in Surrey School District, an action that resulted in a Supreme Court of Canada case). ⁵

The bias of the authors of this document shows clearly in the list of websites given as references. The website addresses of “Status of Women Canada” is given, but no reference is given to any “REAL Women” website. The Gay and Lesbian Educators of BC (GALEBC) website is given, but none for any group with opposing views.

Throughout the document the Ministry of Education sidesteps acceptance of responsibility for their promotion of certain viewpoints and organizations in contrast to those of differing points of views. Regarding the website resources the teacher is reminded: “As with all supplementary resources, local approval is required before use with students...” (This is an appropriate reminder in itself, but when combined with the bias shown towards certain points of view, the repeated use of such disclaimers amounts to an abdication of responsibility.)

Sean Murphy shown admirable perception in writing the following ⁶ (Though it was written regarding the draft guide, his remarks may be applied also to the approved guide now published.):

             Despite the language used in Making Space, Giving Voice ("teaching diversity and social justice," "performance
            standards," "expectations"), it is not part of the provincial curriculum, which is limited to what the Ministry of Education purports to define
            specifically in ‘learning outcomes.’ Thus, it does not direct schools or teachers about what must be taught in the classroom. As its subtitles
            indicate, it is only a guide. From the perspective of the Ministry of Education, this is probably a convenient arrangement for several
            reasons.

First of all, while Making Space, Giving Voice conforms to the requirements of the Corren Agreement, the Minister can still assure parents that the curriculum is not being changed, even as her Ministry advises teachers to use lessons in other subjects to "[further] a social justice agenda."

Second, the document provides a licence for teachers with a particular "social justice agenda" to impose it on their students, but does not require anything of others. This satisfies the Correns et al without the risk of generating opposition from teachers who do not agree with them . . . .

Within state schools (or compliant independent schools), Making Space, Giving Voice could be used as a basis for the legal and professional persecution of teachers who, in whole or in part, reject the Correns’ agenda for their students. A department head could impose it as a standard to be applied in teacher evaluations, threatening opportunities for advancement by those unwilling to inculcate approval of homosexual conduct and relationships. Activist teachers sharing the Correns’ agenda (or others) can cite Making Space, Giving Voice to pressure colleagues, department heads and administrators, and to overawe, mislead or intimidate parents who challenge them, but who are not aware of the distinction between prescribed curriculum and a teachers’ guide.

The course of action the Ministry of Education has taken may be legally clever, but it should not blind citizens to the fact that it has produced a document which, if adopted, is capable of exercising tremendous power in enabling activists to use the schools of British Columbia for propaganda purposes.

In spite of the innocuous or even commendable elements in Making Space, this document can be compared to an angel-food cake with poison pills. The public may be impressed by the innocuous or desirable elements in the Guide, but for students the indoctrination promoted in it could result in their ingesting harmful doses of dangerous propaganda.

E.S. (Ted) Hewlett
British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life

Endnotes:

¹Making Space: Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice throughout the K-12 Curriculum: “Introduction and Context: Background and Rationale,” P. 3 online. Links to the various sections of the guide are given at: http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/program_delivery/ss.htm .

²Ibid., P. 3
³ Ibid., P. 4

⁴Making Space, Pp. 7-8

⁵For a comment on this case see: http://www.bcptl.org/gay.htm#Landolt

⁶ The quotation following is from Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League, from a draft section of a review that was shared during an exchange of views about Making Space, Giving Voice. (A footnote given in his draft is omitted from the quotation.) Readers may contact Mr. Murphy by e-mailing him at ccrl-west@shaw.ca for the complete and final version of his review.

What Has Canada Taught the Young by
Awarding Morgentaler the Order of Canada?

July first, 2008, is a day that will live in infamy for Canadians who value human life and who are conscious of the direction our nation is heading. The awarding of the order of Canada to Henry Morgentaler, infamous abortionist and propagandist for abortion, is a shame to our nation. The awarding is sad because of what it says about the supposed Canadian elite who chose Morgentaler as a recipient, and it is also sad for what it teaches young Canadians now living and will teach to Canadians yet unborn.

“The law is a teacher.” Recently the parliament of Canada , by the recognition of same-sex “marriage,” taught that such a union could be equivalent to marriage between a man and a woman. It was not long before we were being told by activists that the acceptance of same-sex marriage was one of the essential Canadian values. Government is a teacher by other actions besides making laws, and the act of the Governor General, encouraged by her advisors, in awarding membership in the nation’s highest order to this prominent abortionist, is teaching a false and very harmful lesson. We are told on the Governor General’s website* that this abortionist was awarded the honour for “his commitment to increased health care options for women, his determined efforts to influence Canadian public policy and his leadership in humanist and civil liberties organizations.” This means that the promotion of abortion is being singled out as a noble pursuit, that by implication Morgentaler’s breaking of the law is being held up for admiration, and that he is being treated as a noble example to be emulated by generations of Canadians yet to come.

The wanton killing of unborn babies is a greater tragedy by far than the mere awarding of the Order of Canada to this man, but the tragedy of abortion is compounded by his official recognition by Canada , a recognition that is a poisonous lesson for the youth of our land.

By raising our voices in protest against the dishonour towards our nation inflicted on this year’s Canada Day, perhaps we can help to counter the false teaching of the Morgentaler award.

* at http://www.gg.ca/media/doc.asp?lang=e&DocID=5447

The following guest editorial was written by a member of the executive of British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life:

A Chain of Consequences--Exodus from the Public Schools

The re-definition of the institution of Marriage was a devastating blow to society – the moral chaos that we are now left with severely impacts every aspect of our lives – our children and grandchildren, parental rights, education, health and health care, and finally the economy.

We now see a trend in education that is leaving public schools with an ever-increasing number of dissatisfied and upset parents and citizens. Responsible parents are moving their children from public to private schools, or even into homeschooling, despite the added expense and burden it places on them. As the education ministries throughout Canada try to exert an ever-increasing pro-homosexual influence in public schools by way of pro-gay curriculum, they will continue to see the schools emptying out.

What will the federal and provincial governments do? Will they follow a path of true democracy (as touted by many politicians), OR will they increase the pressure by way of human rights commissions, suppression of truth (in public schools), and bills to muzzle Canadians (hate crimes legislation)?

Canadians will now be left on their own to protect their children from those who would indoctrinate them--unless governments will take the responsible course and protect parental rights.

Deanna Fernandes

References for the article immediately above:

Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun, March 25, 2008, "
Parents urged to protest teacher guide on
diversity: Catholic Civil Rights League claims
guide conflicts with values"

"Parents Opt to Send Children to Private Schools" (republished in CanadianChristianity.ca)

A Backgrounder
on the Motion Picture Brokeback Mountain

[This backgrounder is presented in view of the fact that a lesson aid has been posted on a British Columbia Teachers' Federation website. This factual backgrounder may help to decide if they should have their students see the film. We think parents should read it to see if they want their offspring to see the film.-- Editor of this website]

Brokeback Mountain is an Ang Lee directed adaptation of Annie Proulx's short
story, depicting the homosexual love affair of two Wyoming cowboys in the
1960's. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) first
hook up while herding sheep one summer on the flanks of Brokeback Mountain.

Their initial sexual encounter (Ennis sodomizes Jack) is not graphic but there
is no doubt about what is occurring. [Teachers may wish to explain that there
is still a law on the books in Canada outlawing sodomy for those under the age
of 18--both sexes.] There are numerous passionate mouth on mouth kisses in
this scene and throughout the movie. The men have been hired to take turns
watching the sheep at night, but their desire to spend nights together results
in predators attacking the flock. Later on, when Jack re-applies for his old
job, his employer, played by Randy Quaid, refuses to re-hire him, citing his
failure to carry out his assigned duties. [A good object lesson for young people, actually.]

There is a considerable amount of heterosexual sex as well. Jack meets
Lureen, played by Anne Hathaway. She strips off her top exposing her breasts in the back seat of her T-bird on her first meeting with Jack. They
eventually marry. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams) and has two
children. They have two bedroom scenes including one where Williams is nude from the waist up.

The level of obscenity and profanity in this film is prolific, with the F-word
being used by most characters on a frequent basis. All of the main characters
smoke cigarettes heavily, and drink whisky and beer frequently. One scene has Jack and Ennis toking on the same joint while they drink whiskey. There are several fight scenes, and two dead bodies, beaten to death with tire irons,
are depicted. Ennis describes the death of one man who was dragged behind a pick-up truck by his penis until it severed. His father takes Ennis (age 9)
and his brother to view the corpse, lying in a ditch, as an object lesson.

Ennis and Jack carry on their adulterous affair over 20 years, cheating on
their wives in regular "fishing trips". Alma is devastated and eventually divorces Ennis. Teachers may wish to comment that approximately 85% of
bisexual men do not inform their wives of their orientation prior to their
marriages. Jack regularly accesses homosexual prostitutes across the border
in Mexico. He also carries on another homosexual affair with a business
associate, the husband of his wife's friend.

On the bright side, Alberta looks beautiful as the scenic backdrop for the
film. In short, Brokeback Mountain is a strong story, well acted, especially
by Ledger and Williams. In the US it has a Restricted rating. There is
graphic violence, graphic sex, frequent male and female nudity, drug use, high
levels of tobacco and alcohol use, frequent obscene and profane language,
themes of adultery and promiscuous sex, including use of prostitutes.

If any colleague runs this backgrounder by their principal, and still gets approval for their field trip, please let me know and I will send them a box
of licorice cigars.

Chris Kempling
Quesnel

Resolving Canada's crisis in education

Education in Canada is in a crisis. The crisis is national in scope-even
international. Therefore the solutions will have to be broader than the
jurisdiction over education given by the Constitution to the provinces.

The worst of the crisis is at the post-secondary level, but because the
universities train our elementary and secondary teachers - and our lawyers
(who become our judges) and journalists - the effect is felt throughout the
educational system and throughout society.

The crisis is ideological, but the effects are intellectual, moral, and
economic.

The cause and shape of the crisis was brilliantly introduced in 1980 by
Canadian educator Dr. Kathleen Gow in her exposé of "values clarification"
in her book Yes, Virginia, There is Right and Wrong.

That was followed by the late Professor Allan Bloom in his seminal 1987 book
The Closing of the American Mind.

Then came Dinesh D'Sousa's 1992 exposé of Political Correctness on campus
Illiberal Education and Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple in that
same year, and in 1993 William Kilpatrick's penetrating Why Johnny Can't
Tell Right from Wrong, in which he stated "Educational fads come and go, but
some stay long enough to do substantial harm."

Thos books were followed by Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and Shadow
University by Professors Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silvergate, both
published in 1998.

These books, all by serious academics, take several different approaches -
from the corrupting influence of "values clarification" and the
anti-intellectualism of postmodernism, to the violation of students' civil
rights and intellectual freedoms by tenured 1960s-era radical professors.
But they all have two things in common: they all warn of the corrupting
influence of the illiberal education Establishment - and they were all
ignored by that same Establishment.

Over the years, the education Establishment, lavishly funded by the federal
governments of Canada and the USA, has built itself into an almost
unassailable fortress. From that fortress, it has resolutely attacked the
foundations of morality and civic responsibility upon which this nation and
western civilization were founded and built.

Students who dare to think for themselves are ridiculed, and their grades
are slashed; those who conform to the rebellious 1960s ethic of "flower
power" win the professors' approval - and become Teaching Assistants who
perpetuate the disinformation while the tenured professors do research,
lecturing and writing. Some, like Gerald Hanlon of Ryerson, supplement their
salaries by prostitution.

The politically correct atmosphere on university campuses has many sacred
cows: killing you baby is a "right"; homosexuality is described as "normal"
and a "civil right"; business, free enterprise and capitalism are "bad";
western civilization is "racist, oppressive, patriarchal and just dead
wrong"; socialism, communism and rebellion are "progressive". And so on and on and on...

Alan Bloom, who was still teaching philosophy at the University of Chicago
when The Closing of the American Mind was published, said there is only one
thing a professor can be sure of as he faces his freshman class: almost
every one of them has been taught to believe that there are no absolutes -
absolutely not! To them, "tolerance" is the only real virtue - and they will
not tolerate being told that there are any other virtues!

It's absolutely imperative that Canadians understand that unless this
anti-intellectual stronghold over "education" is broken, Canadian society
and western civilization will not survive.

How can the stranglehold of political correctness and postmodernism be
broken? The best answer is to find a way to stimulate true academic freedom,
in place of the fake variety that now dominates the nation's campuses. And
the best path towards that goal is through the introduction of free-market
economics into the fiefdoms of academe.

Because the Constitution gives provinces jurisdiction over education, the
federal government cannot legislate a change - even if we had a government
that understood the problem and/or cared, which none of the parties now in
Parliament seem able to do.

However, because the provinces have already agreed to accept . . . nearly 80 percent of post-secondary education, the federal government can accomplish a significant change merely by altering the mechanism for delivery of those funds: by giving education vouchers to the parents of . . . secondary students, and to students themselves for post-secondary education (including technical and trades training and apprenticeship).

The "consumers" of education could then direct those funds to the schools
that will provide an education they - the parents and students - consider
worthwhile.

Under such a regime, many parents and students would choose private (and
most often Christian) education; since the funds would be going directly to
the students and their parents, their governments could not mandate
anti-social courses, such as the study of "intergenerational sex",
anti-Christian bigotry and revisionist history... and schools would find
that such programs would no longer be useful. Indeed, the continuation of
the pap that dominates most of the "soft" sciences would threaten the
survival of those schools.

And that would be a good thing.

By RON GRAY CHPLeader@chp.ca

The following article by Royal Hamel, is addressed to his fellow-Christians--as will be immediately obvious to the reader.

CASTING OUT DARKNESS

By Royal Hamel

Recently it has come to my attention that only about 50% of Christians ever bother to vote. Anecdotal, to be sure, but from my own experience entirely believable. How else can we account for the fact that we live in a country that kills unborn babies, experiments on tiny human life, has now institutionalized homosexual “marriage”, and is considering legalizing prostitution?

Many conservative Christians believe the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and that all they need to do is just hang on until Jesus comes. They would argue that the only lasting help for the world is the preaching of the gospel, so why be concerned about lesser enterprises like getting involved in the great moral and political issues of our country. Many of these same Christians might agree that we should pray about moral issues, but would be very reticent about political activism.

The tragedy of the above portrait is that it doesn’t square with the New Testament. To abandon the world for individualistic piety denies Jesus’s call to be salt and light. When Christians abdicate their civic duty, and give over the power structures to secular humanists they effectively refuse Jesus call to, “love our neighbour as ourself.” For when politicians decree abortion a right, while Christians sit on their hands, we have failed to love our unborn neighbour. And when we cede political control to moral relativists, we set the stage where one day the daughter of our neighbour may be enticed into prostitution at a local legalized brothel. Yet, Christians might have blocked that brothel had they bothered to vote.

Institutionalized evil laughs at passive, pusillanimous Christians. Jesus doesn’t. He weeps.

Fact is we are called not only to speak the gospel; we are called to live it. And the faithful living of it demands that believers involve themselves in their society to bring about substantial healing. Note that full healing must wait until the coming of Jesus himself. But lives that are salt-bearing and light-giving will bring significant healing to a sin-sick world at the present time. Faulty logic confuses many Christians at this point. For far too many say something like, “The real hope of the world is the preaching of the gospel, and that’s what we must do”. Now while it’s true that the ultimate hope of the world is Jesus Christ, it is error to imply that the Christian is to be involved only in preaching and teaching. For this is not an either/or proposition. It is a both/and proposition. Believers are called to preach and teach Jesus, but they are also called to live as disciples, called to love their neighbour, called to be salt and light to a world that needs both. To do only one is disobedience to the Master.

Francis Schaeffer, pastor, theologian, and founder of L’Abri Fellowship, saw this so clearly some 25 years ago. He was concerned about the loss of moral consensus in the USA particularly regarding abortion. And he was questioning the lack of participation from Bible-believing Christians. In an address to Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida in 1982 he said the following: “We must recognize that this country is close to being lost. This country is almost lost because the Bible-believing Christians, in the last 40 years, who have said that they know that the final reality is this infinite-personal God who is the Creator… have done nothing about it as the consensus has changed. There has been a vast silence!”

Schaeffer’s words relating to the United States could just as well be applied to Canada over these last 25 years. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that our country is not irretrievably lost. In fact it is not. But the present moment may be the last opportunity for change. For we are in the midst of an election that will have weighty consequences for years to come. If ever there was a time for “salt and light” people to become involved in politics, study the issues, and to vote only for candidates who will uphold righteous standards, that time is now.

May God help us as believers to repent of our vast silence. And may we have courage to shine light into cultural darkness. For if Canadian Christians will leave behind their sorry voting record, and faithfully go to the polls, they may well change the future of Canada.

A Brief of the British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life

to the Board of School Trustees of Surrey School District

Why Surrey School Board Ought Not to Approve Pro-Homosexuality Books and Other Pro-Homosexuality Resources for Use
as Teaching Materials in the School District

Introduction of our Position

British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life is an organization with members in many parts of British Columbia, including Surrey School District. One of our stated purposes is “to support the legitimate rights of parents as the prime educators of their children to determine the nature of their children’s education.” We have followed with great interest and concern the issue of whether the public schools should approve materials promoting a favourable view of homosexuality. It is our view that Surrey School Board was right at the time of its refusal to approve such materials as teaching resources. Extensive research since has only served to confirm in our view the wisdom of the School Board’s position. We note with approval the efforts of Surrey School District to ensure the safety of all students, no matter what their background. We now urge that Surrey School Board stand fast and refuse to allow the propagandizing of students for the viewpoint expressed in such materials.

Summary of Events

In 1997 Surrey School Board was taken to the British Columbia Supreme Court by pro-homosexuality activists over its refusal in April of that year to approve as teaching resources three books which had been submitted to it. These books had not been approved by the provincial government and the proper body to decide on such books was, therefore, the School Board.

The books rejected by the Surrey School Board as teaching resources were portrayed as innocent children’s books. However, an examination of Asha’s Mums and of One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads (two of the books in question) reveals a definite agenda of promoting a particular and controversial view. In Asha’s Mums, a classmate of the child hero says, “My mum and dad said you can’t have two mothers living together. My dad says it’s bad..” The child hero of the book replies, “It’s not bad. My mummies said we’re a family because we live together and love each other.” Thus the book redefines the family and contradicts the standards of many children’s parents. One Dad, Two Dads . . . is published by Alyson Publications—which, an end-note in the book proclaims, “publishes a wide variety of books with gay and lesbian themes.” By subtle association with the question of skin colour, the book portrays the homosexual life-style with approval.

The promotion of the books was in fact part of a much larger plan. Mr. Chamberlain had previously asked the Ministry of Education for approval of the books (but had received a non-committal response), and (according to Mr. Justice Mackenzie) “Mr. Chamberlain’s correspondence with the Ministry covered a wider list of resources than the three books at issue.” [The Honourable Mr. Justice Mackenzie in Section 46, Reasons for Judgement, in the case of Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36, heard later in the Court of Appeal for British Columbia ] And, prior to the School Board’s being taken to court, the Gay and Lesbian Educators of British Columbia had launched a vigorous campaign which resulted in the BC Teachers’ Federation in March of 1997 voting to develop a program “to combat homophobia and heterosexism” within the schools.

The judgement of Madam Justice Saunders of the Supreme Court of British Columbia was an astounding one. In her judgement rendered in December of 1998 in the Supreme Court of B.C., she ruled, in effect, that a very large and diverse group of parents and other citizens were denied the right to influence Board policy in moral matters. Judge Saunders ruled that the School Board had erred in the way it arrived at its decision on the teaching materials precisely because it gave significant consideration to the fact that the books would conflict with the views of parents who are religious. She wrote, “I conclude that the words [in the School Act stating that schools should be] ‘conducted on strictly secular . . . principles’ precludes a decision significantly influenced by religious considerations.” In the rest of her “Reasons for Judgement” she makes clear that even the firm conviction of parents that educational materials are in conflict with their moral beliefs is not to be given significant consideration if those beliefs derive from religious teaching. (The judge quotes statements supporting the Surrey School Board’s stand from religious leaders who are Christian, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu; yet instead of acknowledging that these statements count in the Board’s favour, she uses the fact that they are religious leaders to discount their right to influence the Board’s judgement.)

The Surrey School Board had no responsible choice but to appeal the Saunders decision to the British Columbia Court of Appeals. In September of 2000, the judges of the Appeals court overturned the Saunders ruling. In what was in effect a stinging rebuke to Justice Saunders’ interpretation of the law, Mr. Justice Mackenzie wrote:

“Are only those with a non-religiously informed conscience to be permitted to participate in decisions involving moral instruction of children in the public schools? Must those whose moral positions arise from a conscience influenced by religion be required to leave those convictions behind or otherwise be excluded from participation while those who espouse similar positions emanating from a conscience not informed by religious considerations are free to participate without restriction? . . . . A religiously informed conscience should not be accorded any privilege, but neither should it be placed under a disability.” [The Honourable Mr. Justice Mackenzie in Section 28, Reasons for Judgement, in the case of Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36, September 2000] In what ought to be regarded as a major pronouncement on behalf of liberty, Justice Mackenzie also said, “No society can be said to be truly free where only those whose morals are uninfluenced by religion are entitled to participate in deliberations related to moral issues of education in public schools.” [Ibid., Section 34]

At this point, the refusal of Surrey School Board to approve pro-homosexuality materials as teaching resources stood vindicated in the courts. But the activists promoting the use of this material had not given up. And in October, 2001, in spite of missing the deadline, the complainants in the so-called Surrey Book Case won the right of appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Supreme Court of Canada decision sent gloom into the hearts of those of us committed to defending parental rights in education. The ruling was as follows:

"Held (Gonthier and Bastarache JJ. dissenting): The appeal should be allowed. The School Board's decision was unreasonable in the context of the educational scheme laid down by the legislature. The question of whether the books should be approved as supplementary learning resources is remanded to the Board, to be considered according to the criteria laid out in the curriculum guidelines and the broad principles of tolerance and non-sectarianism underlying the School Act."

The above statement of the Supreme Court’s decision is followed by a host of statements betraying an extremely faulty line of reasoning. Nevertheless, we believe the Board can reconsider the question of the books’ approval as outlined in the decision above and still reject as teaching material the pro-homosexuality material designed to propagandize the students on behalf of a vocal minority. It is our hope that the Board will continue to defend the legitimate rights of parents and children in this way.

Cogent Reasons for the Rejection of Pro-Homosexuality Materials
as Public-School Teaching Resources

At this point we would like to state why we believe Surrey School Board and other public- school boards should refuse to approve of pro-homosexuality materials.

In the case of the Surrey School Board there is a special reason for the trustees to do this. Members of the Board who have been known for their opposition to the approval of the pro-homosexuality books and to the use of the schools for pro-homosexuality indoctrination have been elected time and again. The people of Surrey School District have overwhelmingly supported their decision regarding the materials, and expect the Board to continue to defend the schools against the misuse that these materials represent.

Secondly, the approval of these materials would not be the end of the matter. It is only rational to look at the logical result of such approval. Once these materials are approved for primary students, it is practically inevitable that advocates will come forward to demand approval for material of the same sort but geared for older students. It will be argued that it is certainly discriminatory to provide material for younger students and neglect the older. In fact, pro-homosexuality “education” across the board is already being demanded, and in many places, is already being implemented. It is only right that we look at the nature of the materials advocates of pro-homosexuality education are suggesting be used.

In the year 2000 the Surrey Teachers’ Association Ad Hoc Committee on Homophobia and Heterosexism published “Moving Beyond Silence” Addressing Homophobia In Elementary Schools. This book lists “Fiction and Non-Fiction Resources for Classroom Use (K-7).” Under the heading “Primary—Fiction,” one of the books listed is Daddy’s Wedding. The comment given by the STA authors is: “This picture book, a great discussion starter, follows logically from ‘Daddy’s Roommate.’ Dad and Frank have a commitment ceremony, celebrating with their supportive friends and family.” Daddy’s Wedding promotes among children a particular position with regard to same-sex unions.

A book on the list headed “Non-Fiction—Secondary and Adult” is The Gay Agenda—Talking Back to the Fundamentalists. The review of this book reads: “Spiritual and humanistic, this book provides powerful insights into the historical and current methods of persecution of queer people by the church. It provides a sometimes scathing but accurate critique of fundamentalist dogmas and shows how the feminist movement, gender roles, abortion issues, traditional family values, contraception, sex education and homosexuality are all interrelated in the eyes of the extreme right. A must read for anyone interested in understanding and learning how to better challenge the myths and negative stereotypes perpetuated by the extreme right.”

It appears the authors of “Moving Beyond Silence” are not averse to taking theological sides against the fundamentalists (who in the language of pro-homosexuality activists seem to be any religious people opposed to homosexual behaviour). In contrast to the desire to promote hostility to religious beliefs they disagree with, is the attitude the authors of the STA handbook expect of religious people. On Page 5 of “Moving Beyond Silence,” we read that "People with moral objections . . . are fully entitled to them--at home" [the right to remain silent?] and "Religious points of view have no place in the classroom and biases must be checked at the door." Is this desire to expose students to only one side of a question a sign of the intent to propagandize?

The effort to propagandize is very evident in Challenging Homophobia in Schools, a pro-homosexuality resource published in July, 2000, distributed to British Columbia schools, produced for BC educators, and financed by the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, the BC Human Rights Commission, and the Gay and Lesbian Educators of British Columbia. Commending letters in the handbook come from the then president of the BCTF, from M.P. Svend Robinson, from Mary-Woo Simms, former Chief Commissioner of the British Columbia Human Rights Commission, and from the executive director of the Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of B.C.

Although the handbook makes the usual statements about intending to protect youth of all kinds (a laudable aim), this handbook like its predecessor, the Surrey Teachers’ Association’s “Moving Beyond Silence”: Addressing Homophobia in Elementary Schools, actually conveys the message that there is nothing wrong with homosexual behaviour, something that many thousands of B.C. parents object to on religious grounds and because they fear the dangers to health that are associated with this behaviour.

The quotations that follow, taken from the handbook, and some brief comments, serve to highlight some of causes for concern this resource creates:

“Asking parental permission to discuss homosexuality with their child. . . Usually guarantees that some children will not hear the information they need.” (“Rationale,” Page 18)

“For LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people it is natural to have sexual attractions and relations with members of one’s own gender. . . . . To act on those feelings is natural. Not to act on these feelings would be unnatural and would force people to hide who they are and cause them great pain. It is the quality of the relationship one is in that is significant, not the gender of one’s partner.” (“Background,” P. 17) (So much for the claim made earlier in “Rationale,” Page 18, that “Teaching positive values about homosexuality is not about teaching sex.”)

In a chart (“Background Page 44), under the headings "Ways in Which Oppression is Perpetrated: Homophobia and Heterosexism,” in the category of “Religion” are the phrases “—only heterosexual unions acknowledged” and “-viewed as abnormal; immoral.” In other words, the teaching that homosexual behaviour is immoral is identified as a form of oppression.

Under “Strategies” (Page 3) is this advice for the educator: “Use the word ‘couple’ to denote same-sex as well as male/female relationships; use ‘partner’ instead of ‘wife’, or ‘husband.’ ”

“There is a difference between tolerating and celebrating family diversity . . . . Celebrating lesbian, gay, or transgender-headed families means willingly supporting them and openly working on homophobia and transphobia within the schools.” (“Strategies,” Page 28)

“Ensure that books depicting alternative family patterns are included in school libraries.” (“Strategies,” Page 29)

Among the many men and women listed on six pages in “Lessons,” pp. 49-54, as “Famous Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals” are the following:

“Augustine (Saint) - (354-430) English Roman Catholic Bishop, Religious Writer”

The confusion of Augustine of Hippo, whose confession regarding his life prior to his conversion may be the basis of his inclusion on the list, with the later Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 604, may be indicative of the quality of research that went into the compiling of the list as a whole.

“da Vinci, Leonardo—(1452—1519) Italian Artist, Painter, Sculptor, Scientist

David—(1035? - 960?? BC) Israeli King, Biblical Lover of Jonathan”

Enough has been quoted from Challenging Homophobia in Schools to show, we think, that it is an example of a pro-homosexuality resource which gives sufficient reason for school authorities to beware of it for its bias and lack of factual accuracy alone.

The whole tendency of pro-homosexuality material is to inculcate the idea that homosexual behaviour is normal, acceptable, and safe. Though it is true that the primary material may not specifically mention sex, the picturing of same-sex couples as parental figures (for example, two mums or two dads) will undoubtedly have the effect of preparing young children to later accept homosexual behaviour as acceptable and normal.

A major reason for not embarking on the program advocated by pro-homosexuality activists is to ensure that the schools are not involved in encouraging behaviour which must be characterized as dangerous by objective, scientific standards. As evidence of this danger we may cite the following statistics from a website of the Centers for Disease Control
[http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/stats.htm]. Though this is an American organization, the similarity between Canadian and American societies makes the data very relevant to us. We quote from their website:

The following data are summarized from the CDC annual HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report. Numbers are based on AIDS cases reported to CDC through December 2001. . . . .
Exposure Category Male Female Total*

Men who have sex with men 368,971 - 368,971

Injecting Drug Use Injecting Drug Use 145,750 55,576 201,326

Men who have sex with men and inject drugs Men who have sex with men and inject drugs 51,293 - 51,293

Hemophilia/coagulation disorder Hemophilia/coagulation disorder 5,000 292 5,292

Heterosexual contact Heterosexual contact 32,735 57,396 90,131

Recipient of blood transfusion,
blood components, or tissue Recipient of blood transfusion,
blood components, or tissue 5,057 3,914 8,971

Risk not reported or identified Risk not reported or identified 57,220 23,870 81,091

*Includes 3 persons whose sex is unknown.

It is evident that the exposure category of “Men who have sex with men” is by far the group at the highest risk of developing AIDS.

The health risk for male homosexual behaviour is not limited to the development of AIDS. The Washington Times website
[http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20021101-63191947.htm] reported on November 1, 2002: “The U.S. syphilis rate rose last year for the first time in a decade, primarily because of outbreaks among homosexual and bisexual male populations, the federal government says in a report released today.”

Here is another significant quote [from a family Research Council website at http://www.frc.org/get/is01b1.cfm]:

“A study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on the mortality rates of homosexuals concluded that they have a significantly reduced life expectancy:

In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age twenty for gay and bisexual men is eight to twenty years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged twenty years will not reach their sixty-fifth birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.⁷⁸ ” [Footnote 78: “Robert S. Hogg et al., ‘Modeling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men,’ International Journal of Epidemiology 26 (1997): 657.”]

School boards should not allow pro-homosexuality propaganda in the public schools. It is wrong to present as benign a behaviour that has many deadly consequences.

A related reason for refusing to approve or allow the use of such material is the danger of litigation against school boards. School boards might find informative the paper entitled The Legal Liability Associated with Homosexuality Education in Public Schools, published by “Citizens for Community Values” and available online from the Citizens for Community Values website [at http://www.ccv.org/Legal_Liability_of_Homosexuality_Education.htm]. Some of the general principles enunciated should be applicable in Canada, but some of what is contained in this paper will only be true for the United States. Since the recent movement to promote pro-homosexuality education in the schools apparently originated in the United States, the opposition to that movement has produced many more resources there than we are likely to find in Canada.

We foresee the time may come when students, exposed in schools to the physical and mental health risks fostered by a cavalier attitude to homosexual behaviour, will take legal action against those institutions which allowed them to be propagandized. This backlash against the public school system may result in massive penalties being levied against those who allowed such propagandizing to be carried out in the schools.

Finally, school boards need to refuse to approve or allow the use of the schools for social engineering by pro-homosexuality activists because to approve or allow it would be a betrayal of the rights of parents as those responsible for their children’s education to determine the most basic nature of that education. In “Per Gonthier and Bastarache JJ” —a statement in Chamberlain v Surrey . . . of the opinions of the Supreme Court of Canada judges who dissented from the majority in the Chamberlain v. Surrey School District Number 36 case—we read the following:
“This Court has reiterated the paramount parental role by construing the nature of the authority schools and teachers have over children as a delegated authority. The notion of a school's authority being delegated, if it allows parents to remove their children from the public school system, must also guarantee to parents the role of having input with regard to the values which their children will receive in school.”
This is surely a very important statement, and to fail to defend this principle is to fail in the first duty of a school trustee: to represent the legitimate interests of parents in the welfare of their children.

This Board is known for defending the legitimate rights of parents and students. There has no doubt been a cost involved. There have no doubt been vicious verbal attacks and misstatements of the Board’s intent. But we would urge this Board to hold fast and not to yield to pressure, but to stand once more and defend the rights of parents and the welfare of students in this School District, and in so doing make a stand for the rights and welfare of parents and students across the length and breadth of our land. n

Stories

[Note: Internet URLs given were checked June 2, 2003, to ensure they were accurate for the information given.]

Address to Christian Coalition Information Session at TWU April 9, 2005

By Ron Gray, National Leader, Christian Heritage Party of Canada

It’s good to be back on campus of best university in Canada!

. . . .

The reason I call TWU the best university in Canada: it teaches the various disciplines from a coherent world-view. J.I. Packer said on this campus, almost 20 years ago, that Canada’s secular universities had already been captured by what he called “a kind of goofy anti-intellectualism”—he was referring to the philosophy of postmodernism.

Postmodernism has now captured almost all our Universities. There are a few other exceptions: The King’s College in Edmonton, Redeemer College at Ancaster, ON; St. Stephen’s University in New Brunswick. But the collapse of the intellectual core of Canada’s universities has had disastrous results: it has plunged Canada into a virtual civil war…

Postmodernism was originally an understandable reaction against the hubris of modernism which, after two centuries of the falsely so-called ‘Enlightenment’, produced the 20th century—the bloodiest era in human history.

People often warn against mixing religion and politics; but the 20th century gave us Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tsedong, Pol Pot, Nikolai Ceaucescu and Erik Honneker—who, in the name of atheism and paganism, killed more people than all the religious wars in history.

No, it’s the mixture of IRreligion and politics that’s truly dangerous

Alas, postmodernism, in fleeing from modernism, didn’t run into the arms of the Judeo-Christian Biblical wisdom upon which Western Civilization had been carefully built; instead, it fled into irrationalism, abjuring every trace of the canon of Western Civilization—all the way back to Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction: as J.I. Packer said, postmodernism tries to embrace mutually contradictory ideas simultaneously. That why postmodernism is actually anti-reason.

And that’s why it has produced, in Canada and elsewhere, a virtual civil war. The postmodernism that corrupted our universities more than a quarter-century ago has also affected the graduates of those universities, who became our journalists and our lawyers… and, as Gwen Landolt has lucidly pointed out, the definition of a judge, in Canada, is “a lawyer with good political connections.”

And so we now have postmodernists on the benches in Canada—including the Supreme Court—and in most of the newsrooms of the nation.

And that’s what has produced our virtual civil war.

Being a Canadian conflict, it’s been polite and bloodless so far—unless you count nearly three million babies cruelly dismembered in their mothers’ wombs; that’s been one tragic result of this not-so-civil war.

The heart of the conflict is actually about Canada’s constitution. And to explain that, I have to take you back to about 1980, when the late Pierre Trudeau conceived his project of patriating our Constitution. He first asked the Supreme Court of that day—not yet populated by postmodernists—to define Canada’s constitution; they told him that it consists of two equally-important parts: the written document itself, and a body of tradition that goes all the way back to Magna Carta.

There are two very important principles at the heart of that tradition:

• One established that there is a higher law, which even the Crown must obey—and that it’s found in the Bible.

• The other is the separation of powers of the government: the legislature makes the laws, the Cabinet and civil service administer the laws, and the courts settle disputes according the law, as they find it written.

And that’s where the conflict comes in; because after Pierre Trudeau switched Canada from its Common Law tradition to Europe’s Charter Law tradition, and entrenched the Charter of Rights in our new Constitution, the judiciary suddenly felt it had the scope to usurp the law-making authority that had previously belonged only to the elected legislature.

And that is exactly what has produced today’s conflicts.

Today—this very day, April 9—you can see the conflict in the streets: tens of thousands of Canadians are right now gathering in front of the Supreme Court and Parliament, and thousands more in front of MPs offices across the country, to demand the preservation of the traditional definition of ‘marriage’.

I have to tell you about these gatherings because there’s a very good chance that our postmodern media will censor the reports of these rallies—or much of the relevant information about them—right out of tonight’s news.

The postmodern press isn’t any more reliable than the postmodern judiciary, I’m afraid. And I say that as a former journalist who cares, passionately, about the free press—a free and responsible press.

The usurpation of legislative powers by the judiciary is a kind of civil war… and it threatens the end of constitutional democracy in Canada.

How did this happen?

To answer that, we have to look at the development of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It should have been a Charter of Rights and Responsibilities, and it should have included the right to private property; but the Marxist bent of those pushing it onto the nation did not want either responsibilities or private property included.

But by the grace of God, however, the Preamble to the Charter still includes the unequivocal statement that

“Canada was founded on principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

Unfortunately, the activist judiciary that has ascended the throne of the High Court has, according to Ian Hunter, Professor Emeritus in the faculty of law at the University of Western Ontario, abrogated both of those principles.

When Parliament was drafting the Charter, and when the legislators came to Section 15—the ‘Equality Rights’ section —it was suggested that ”sexual orientation” might be added to the list of protected categories. It was pointed out by a lawyer-MP that the term ”sexual orientation” is so ill-defined that “it doesn’t belong in any legislation!”

They debated that one point for two days, and finally voted 22-2 to leave ”sexual orientation” out.

That was the form in which the Charter went back to Parliament; that was the form in which it was passed, and entrenched in the Constitution; that was the form in which it was sent to the provincial legislatures to be ratified; and that was the form in which it became the highest law in the land.

Without “sexual orientation”.

It wasn’t as though Parliament absent-mindedly forgot to include the phrase; they very deliberately decided that it didn’t belong.

But 13 years later, when the Nesbitt & Egan case came to the Supreme Court, the postmodernists on the bench blithely violated the Constitution and the traditional separation of powers by ordering that the phrase “sexual orientation” must henceforth be “read into” Section 15.

That was why the provincial courts in BC, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick had to rule that the Marriage Act was “unconstitutional” for excluding same-sex couples: they had been ordered to interpret Section 15 that way, by the Supreme Court of Canada.

In making that rule, the Supreme Court was, in effect, amending the Constitution.

But the Constitution has an amending formula built into it; and that formula requires, for even a minor change, the agreement of the federal Parliament and seven of the ten provincial legislatures, representing at least 50 per cent of the population of Canada. That’s for a minor amendment.

A major change—and I submit that this was without question a major change—requires the unanimous agreement of all 11 legislatures.

This change, however, was made arbitrarily by five of the nine judges. Unconstitutionally.

Our Constitution, in the Charter, also guarantees freedom of expression and freedom of religion; you’ll learn later from Chris Kempling just how valuable those guarantees are in Canada today.

Remember, the Constitution of the Soviet Union also guaranteed freedom of religion. But such guarantees are worthless unless they’re defended.

That’s why it’s urgent that someone now stand up and defend Canada’s Constitution from judicial activism.

A few years ago, I attended a conference about judicial activism on Parliament Hill, where one of the speakers was the admirable Senator Ann Cools. She said—and I quote—“The problem is not just judicial activism. It is also cowardice in the House of Commons.”

Cowardice. A harsh word. But in a civil war, when the defence of constitutional democracy is at stake, defectors from the fight deserve harsh criticism—if only to awaken them to their duty!

Martin Luther famously said:

“If I profess, with the loudest voice and clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ...

“Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”

As Senator Cools has noted, no one—that is, no party now sitting in the House—has shown the courage to confront the Supreme Court, draw a line in the sand, and say, “You’ve gone too far. Get back where you have legitimate authority, and come out no further than that!”

Until and unless Parliament is willing to do this, you and I no longer live in a constitutional democracy; we live in a judicial oligarchy. It’s a ‘krytocracy’—a dictatorship of judges.

Why, do you suppose, are these good men and women—many of them our brothers and sisters in the Lord—why are they unwilling to defend the Constitution and the truth?

I submit that it is because of their fear of man—specifically, the fear that the media may say something unkind about them.

And may I point out, with regard to public policy on marriage, that

(a) we must not submit the question to a referendum; for that would establish the principle that a vote of 50%+1 has the authority to turn ‘evil’ into ‘good’… which is nonsense.

No, the definition of ‘marriage’ was ordained long before the institution of civil government; and no court, parliament or referendum has the right to change it.

(b) recognizing homosexual ‘civil unions’ is just as bad as legalizing same-sex ‘marriage’; it still gives official approval to immoral behaviour. If Parliament approves immoral, unnatural and unhealthy behaviour, many young people—thinking, “It must be OK if the government says so”—will be tempted to experiment. Some of those who experiment will become addicted, and those who consent to public approval of immorality will share the responsibility for sentencing those children to a miserable life and a premature death.

Of course the media will call them names if they defend virtue! Because on the most controversial issue of the day, the courts and the media have already decreed that there is to be no debate. They have decided that “gay is good”, and no other opinion is to be allowed.

It is one of the clearest examples of “My mind’s made up; don’t confuse me with the facts.”

I’ve been encountering this personally; I’ve submitted several factual, peer-reviewed articles documenting the dangers of promoting the homosexual agenda in the schools, in the media, by perversity parades in the streets, and by legislation.

The editor’s response? He refuses even to read it! As far as the Abbotsford TIMES is concerned, the issue is settled. There will be no debate… no other opinion. He says that what consenting adults do in private is nobody’s business.

But when private behavior impacts the rest of society— whether financially, through the increased drain on the health-care system; or socially, through the impact on our children; or morally, through the degradation of public morals in the streets and in the news and entertainment media—it is our business.

What is desperately needed is someone with the intestinal fortitude to declare that it is our business—and a medium to carry that declaration to the people.

That’s why I’m grateful to the Christian Coalition for this informational meeting: it’s an opportunity for the people on the other side of this issue to become our own media.

It is not enough to stand aside and be neutral. In moral matters, there is no neutral ground; there is no fence to sit upon.

Dante Alighieri wrote, in his Inferno, that

“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”

And if we’re willing to look to the classics of philosophy for guidance, Thomas Hobbes—arguably the first modern philosopher—wrote in Leviathan:

“… the foundation of all true ratiocination [by which he means ‘reason’] is the constant signification of words, which… dependeth not (as in natural science) on the will of the writer, nor (as in common conversation) on vulgar use, but on the sense it carries in the Scripture.

That’s something for our parliamentarians to reflect on, while they contemplate re-defining the word ‘marriage’. What Hobbes is saying is that reason—thinking—depends upon retaining the meaning of words… and not just their historic meaning, Hobbes says: he means the meaning each word is given in the Bible.

Even Hobbes, a modernist, recognized the unique authority of the Bible; for it is the very foundation of Western Civilization.

It is also, as Canada’s Constitution clearly declares and as history clearly shows, the very foundation of this nation.

Those who seek to revise that foundation are in danger of destroying what gives them the freedom to speak, and think, and act. We must warn them that they will come to regret their o’er-hasty and juvenile defiance of all authority.

The slogan of postmodernism—if it could clarify its thinking long enough to adopt one—would be:

“No one’s gonna tell ME what to do!”

It’s adolescent rebellion made into public policy. And it can only lead to social and moral disaster if Parliament continues to allow it free rein.

When my own children were adolescents, I used to tell them, “You must at some point come to terms with the fact of authority in your life. You can choose to recognize it in any of the successive spheres of authority that surround you.

“Closest to you, and the most gentle and loving, is the authority in your family. Your family loves you, and wants what’s best for you.

“If you choose to reject the authority of your family, you will encounter the authority of the State. The State will also, to some extent take care of you; but it cannot love you.

“If you defy the authority of the State, you become an outlaw; but you will still be under authority—the authority of the natural world, which is hard, implacable and unyielding.

“And if you step outside that authority, you’ve had the biscuit. You are dead. You will then come face to face with the authority of your Creator.

“But at some point, you must come to terms with the ineluctable fact of authority over your life.”

That’s true, too, for all the people clamoring to change our laws and morality to suit their own hedonistic willfulness.

About a year ago, the Prime Minister said, “The Constitution exists to protect minorities.”

I wrote to him and said, “No, Mr. Prime Minister, you are wrong: the Constitution exists to protect principles; if minorities adhere to them, those principles will protect the minorities; but if we allow anyone to abrogate the principles of the Constitution, nothing remains to protect any of us.”

We have to carry that message to Parliament. And if Parliament will not listen—and act—to protect the Constitution, then we must change Parliament.

At the beginning of this session, I introduced Arne Bryan of Prayer Canada. Arne has organized more prayer for the leaders of this nation than anyone I know. Sometimes, his prayer for them is, “Lord, either straighten out their thinking, or remove them.”

Let that be our prayer, and our purpose, as well.

No party and no politician… and I include my own party and myself in this… no party and no politician is worth the space they take up if they will not preserve the very foundation of our freedom—the Constitution and its recognition of ‘the supremacy of God’.

Thank you.

Kasserian Ingera—Standing Up For Our Children

Trinity Western University, April 9, 2005

Dr. Chris Kempling Psy. D. R.C.C.

Different cultures have different ways of greeting one another when they meet. The form of that greeting is a reflection of what is important to that culture. In English, we say “Hello, how are you?” In New York, I discovered on my trip there last month that “Hello” is not necessary. All you need is “How you doin’?” The emphasis is on inquiring after the other person’s well being. Nothing wrong with that—it’s considered the polite thing to do. When Sikhs meet they say “Sut siri akal” which means “True Great Lord”. Their greeting reflects their common faith and puts the emphasis on giving honour to God as the first order of business when greeting one another. The Masai tribe of Kenya have a different approach. When they meet one another they say “Kasserian Ingera”, which means “How are the children?” The first order of business when Masai meet is to inquire after the children, and not just the individual’s children, but all the children in the village. The tribe’s survival is inextricably linked to the well-being of all the children.

But isn’t that true for every tribe and nation in the world? The well-being of our children needs to be everyone’s concern. The well-being of children has been my passion for the past 25 years. It’s why I am Big Brother volunteer. It’s why I have been a member of the Quesnel Child and Youth Support Society since 1981. It’s why I am an elementary school counselor and family therapist. And it’s why I have refused to keep silent when activists from the homosexual community have been trying to impose their self-serving agenda on the public school system. They have been very successful in convincing those is authority that their actions are in the best interests of children, especially those who are confused about their sexual identities. But are they really committed to the best interests of children? Let’s look at the evidence.

The McCreary Centre Society conducts research on school aged children in British Columbia. In 1999 they specifically examined the well-being of children of non-heterosexual orientation. They found that homosexual youth were four times more likely than heterosexual youth to have had four or more sexual partners in the past three months. In that same survey, the study authors found that gay and lesbian youth were three times more likely than heterosexual youth to have ever had a sexually transmitted disease. So-called homophobia is not the cause of this behaviour.

A study of homosexual young men in Vancouver found that over 40% of them were engaging in the practice of “bare-backing”, a euphemism for unprotected receptive anal intercourse. According to Health Canada, over 70% of all the new HIV infections between 1994 and 2002 are young homosexual and bi-sexual men, even though the last census found that only 1% identify themselves as homosexual, with an additional 0.8% stating that they were bi-sexual. A 1993 McCreary Centre Society study found that less than 1% of young people identify themselves as gay or lesbian. Another Vancouver based study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 1997 found that the life expectancy for gay men is 8-20 years shorter than heterosexual men, and that half of current 20 year old gay men would not reach their 65^th birthday. In the US, Dr. Patrick Cameron studied the obituaries of 18 homosexual publications and found that that average age of death for those infected with AIDS was 39. If they didn’t die of AIDS, the average age of death was 42. You might recall the case of William Bennest, the Burnaby elementary school principal who was discovered to have pasted the face of a former student onto a naked boy’s body. That former student was lured into homosexual activity by Mr. Bennest, and was passed around at sex parties with other gay men. He died of AIDS at the age of 22.

The main causes of premature death in the Cameron study were AIDS, drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Speaking of domestic violence, a 1992 study by Patterson and Kim found that 37% of gay men reported that they had been raped by men they knew, which is almost double the rate for heterosexual women. Lesbian women have the highest rate for domestic violence of any social group, with some studies reporting 50% relationship violence.

In Cameron’s study, the average age of death for lesbian women, as reported by the obituaries in their own publications, was 44.

This may be hard to believe, but some homosexual men actively seek to become infected with HIV. An article by Makebra Anderson, national correspondent for the National Newspapers Publishing Association, dated July 12, 2004, stated that some gay men identified themselves as “bug chasers”--in other words, they are seeking someone to infect them with the HIV virus. Those who offer to help them with that goal are called “gift-givers”. Bug chasers search for “gift givers” on the Internet using such phrases as “breed me”, “welcome me to the brotherhood” and “convert me”. “Conversion” parties are held in most major US cities, and arranged over the Internet. As bizarre as this sounds, “bug chasers” consider it a sign of true intimacy to allow someone to infect them. They also see it as a kind of excitement to live life on the edge, or a “why not get it over with, I’m going to get it some time anyway” attitude. The drug cost for treating someone with AIDS is $1500 per month, not including all the time and expertise of thinly stretched health care professionals. This is truly a tragic situation.

Such behaviour seems evidence of a serious mental disorder. Research done in New Zealand, the US, Britain and the Netherlands have demonstrated that homosexual young people are at high risk for a host of mental disorders. The New Zealand study, published in a 1999 edition of the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that gay, lesbian and bisexual young people had a fourfold risk of major depression and were six times more likely to have attempted suicide. Is this due to so-called homophobia? In the Netherlands, which is probably the most gay friendly country on the planet, a 2001 study by Sandfort and his colleagues found that the rate of mental illness among homosexuals in that country, including depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsion disorders, eating disorders, and drug addictions, was up to nine times that of the general population. If homophobia was the cause of this, one would expect the rates of mental illness to be higher in the United States, which has more negative social attitudes towards homosexual behaviour. But the rates of mental illness and suicide attempts are similar in both countries. The problem is not homophobia. The problem is high levels of relationship instability, exploitative promiscuous sexual practice, sexual transmitted diseases, and drug abuse which are endemic in the homosexual community. One potential source of these emotional disorders is the high rate of child abuse reported by those who identify as homosexual. One study of over 1000 men seeking treatment at an STD clinic in Pittsburgh (Doll et al, Child Abuse & Neglect, 1992) showed that 37% reported that they had been sexually abused. The average age of their abuse was 11 years old, 94% by older gay men. This is three times of abuse rate reported by heterosexual men. We know that being sexually abused can lead to a host of emotional and behavioural problems later in life. I think the evidence clearly shows that homosexuals are at high risk, not because of so-called homophobia, but due in part to being victimized by homosexual pedophiles. One study by Abel and his colleagues at Emory University in Georgia (1987, Journal of Interpersonal Violence) showed that the average number of victims of non-incarcerated homosexual pedophiles was 150.2. Astounding! The average number of victims of heterosexual pedophiles was 19.8. One of the things many homosexual men have in common is being introduced to sexual activity by an older boy or man. These older men seek out those who are most vulnerable, as William Bennest did, those hungry for adult male attention. Most gay men will say that their primary purpose in accepting attention from adult gay men when they were younger was intimacy, not sexual activity, but they got caught up in the sexually promiscuity as a misguided means to attain intimacy.

Why do homosexual activists want access to the public school system? They will tell you it is because they want to educate students and teachers about how to understand the particular needs of gay youth, and to reduce their harassment. I’m not saying that is not a valid goal at face value. It’s very persuasive, because who can oppose reducing harassment or improving understanding? But there is another goal that is not so laudable. I was reading the background rationale for a 1997 AGM resolution of the BC Teachers Federation, whose goal was reducing homophobia and heterosexism. The writer stated that they wanted to create an environment where “bi-curious” youth could feel free to experiment with same sex behaviour. Given the data I’ve just given you, such experimentation could be a death sentence. One US Senator recently got into trouble with the media for stating that the gay lifestyle was more of a “deathstyle”. But given the evidence, I think he was not too far off the mark.

A revealing article was penned by Capilano College philosophy instructor Stan Persky in Xtra West gay newspaper, June 29, 2000. He admits that one of the goals of the homosexual lobby is to recruit heterosexual young people into the gay lifestyle. Here are his own words: “I was a sympathizer with …the idea about homos ‘recruiting’. Especially since the Good Grey Gay Establishment stood up, to a man, and solemnly, but hypocritically, assured one and all that good homosexuals would never do anything so sneaky and underhanded as to persuade someone to be gay or engage in homosexual acts. The official gay leadership insisted that gays were born gay, and that no one who wasn’t gay could be turned into a homo, not even for 10 minutes. Of course they were lying through their teeth…And even worst of all, they persuade other people—often young people who aren’t necessarily gay—to give it a go. And guess what? Some of those who give it a go keep on going.” Persky goes on to state that since he is “one of those people who thinks that the main battleground of the homo movement is not the wedding aisle of a nice church, but the nasty schoolyard, I think that being up-front is a better strategy than any other.” I had a personal email interchange with Mr. Persky after this. He stated that since there was nothing morally wrong with homosexuality, he didn’t see what the problem was in trying to convince young people to try it out. In June 1997, a meeting of traditionalist parents in Vancouver was disrupted by a mob of homosexual radicals who chanted, “Ten percent is not enough. Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!” Dr. K-John Cheung, president of the Canadian Alliance for Social Justice and Family Values, who was chairing the meeting, told reporters that “They can’t procreate, so they have to recruit”. And what better way to recruit than Gay Straight Alliance Clubs, currently set up in over two dozen lower mainland high schools, as well as the tax funded gay youth drop-in centres. The gay newspaper Xtra West, is distributed free to all gay youth centres. It is filled with pornographic classified ads of those seeking casual sex partners, as well as ads for bathhouses which are notorious for being venues for orgies, drug abuse and perverse sexual behaviours involving human waste.

In August 1996, when I attended a workshop for teachers and counsellors sponsored by the Ministry of Education, called Youth at Risk, we were all handed a copy of Xtra West and urged to leave it laying around in our counselling office waiting rooms. I was appalled, but later confirmed with an employee of Xtra West that several Vancouver area high schools have it available to their students.

After writing to the Minister of Education, to my union, and to others I thought might be concerned about the distribution of pornography to students, I learned that no one in authority really thought this was a problem. That’s when I started writing publicly about my concerns, alerting parents as to what was being proposed for their children. That is why I have been censured by the BC College of Teachers, and disciplined by my own school board. I am being persecuted because I refuse to stand idly by, while homosexual activists attempt to desensitize and delude everyone with the message that engaging in homosexual behaviour is normal, moral and safe. It is nothing of the sort.

In the state of Massachusetts, where homosexual activists are allowed free access to the school system, children as young as 12 years old were invited to a workshop at Tufts University in March, 2000, delivered by department of education employees. They were given graphic descriptions of how to engage in homosexual behaviour, including the disgusting and dangerous practice of fisting, the insertion of the entire hand inside someone’s rectum. One of the students asked, “why would anyone want to do that?” Out of the mouths of babes…A parent who secretly taped the session and blew the whistle was sued by the workshop presenters for “invading their privacy”, and is facing $100,000 in legal expenses.

The Gay and Lesbian Educators of BC have a web site that is listed as an approved resource site for teachers to access, on the Ministry of Education’s Personal Planning curriculum guide web site. Here’s what I found on GALE-BC’s web site as some of the goals of their organization: Mandatory queer friendly resources; comprehensive view of queer issues in religious discussions, insert queers into history, literature, art and film; non-optional queer sensitive sex education; break down the myth that there are only two sexes; remove male or female boxes from school forms, challenge binary; cross dressing and gender bending a common occurrence; and student field trips to queer community events [such as they did in San Francisco in June, 2003 where children were bused in to march in a gay pride event where men and women were parading down the street naked]. I saw on the news recently that organizers of the Gay Pride parade here in Vancouver have had to ask for an extended parade route to allow for all the crowds that want to watch bare breasted lesbians and promoters of sado-masochism parade by. People bring young children to watch this. What is the matter with these parents? The prophet Isaiah said, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” Jesus said, “Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” There will be a price to pay at the judgment day for those who lead little ones astray. Unfortunately, some of those little ones end up paying for being misled, with their own lives, as I’ve already shown.

Currently, Mr. Murray Corren, a homosexual teacher from Coquitlam has a case before the BC Human Rights Tribunal that will be heard this summer. The purpose of the case is to force the BC Ministry of Education to change the entire curriculum to insert “queer issues” [his words, not mine] into the curriculum of every course and every grade. The goals are posted on the GALE-BC web site as I just read to you. If he is successful with this goal, then every private school who accepts ministry of education funding will have to show that they are teaching the curriculum in order to continue to receive funding. It is a very smart strategy. My question is to you is, are you going to allow this to happen?

Abraham Kuyper, the founder of the Dutch Christian Democratic Party said this, “When the principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then the battle is your calling, and peace has become sin. You must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy with all the fire of your faith.” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The ultimate measure of a man (and I would add woman as well) is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” There is no doubt that this is a time of challenge and controversy. Where do you stand? Will you stand up to defend our children? Will you speak up? Will you speak out? The fate of all our children are in your hands.

So what can you do? Let me make it clear that I believe that Christian young people should go out of their way to offer friendship to their peers who are struggling with this issue. They should intervene and defend anyone they see being ridiculed, harassed or name-called because of their orientation. Let it never be said of Christian children that they participated in the harassment or name-calling of those with this problem. Henri Nouwen, one of the most beloved Christian writers of the past century, struggled with this issue his entire life. “You who are without sin cast the first stone.“

I believe that every Christian university such as this one should be offering training in their pastoral counselling programs for those who are called to ministry to homosexual people, because the secular universities don’t believe in it. We must be prepared to demonstrate Christ’s love to these people as he did toward the woman caught in the act of adultery. He did not condemn her. First he protected her from abuse. Then he called her to repentance and to change her ways. Likewise, we must not condemn, but offer the hand of friendship and protection, and, as appropriate, the cousnelling and therapeutic resources to help them to overcome their undesirable same sex attractions.

I share with you now a word of prophecy given to me on January 8, 2003 at 8:30 in the evening, while I was sitting in my living room reading Brennan Manning’s The Relenteless Tenderness of Jesus. It is a message for all homosexual people. “Hear the Word of the Lord, the Most High God: ‘I know what you do in secret. I did not make you for this purpose. Yet I do not condemn you, but will forgive you. Repent, turn from your ways, and I will heal you and give you rest from all of your burdens,’ declares the Lord God.” Jesus Christ expects repentance, but offers forgiveness and healing. And some of you listening to this message are being called right now to be God’s servant in this area of ministry.

I will close with one more quote. It is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letter from Prison, shortly before his execution by the Nazi’s in 1945. This section he entitled, “On Civil Courage”: “People flee from public altercation into the sanctuary of private virtuousness. But anyone who does this must shut his mouth and eyes to the injustice around him. Only at the cost of self-deception can he keep himself pure from contamination arising from responsible action. In spite of all he does, what he leaves undone will rob him of his peace of mind. He will either go to pieces because of this disquiet, or become the most hypocritical of Pharisees.

Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.”

What is that call of God? To be the watchman on the wall. I have answered that call to be a watchman, to call out warnings to the people, and I have paid a personal price for doing so. Won’t you help me? Don’t leave me like Uriah, pulling back when the enemy presses hard, but stand with me, to defend our children. I need your prayer support and your financial support. Will you allow Christian children to be defined as homophobic simply because they believe what the Bible says? Will you allow homosexual activists into our schools to recruit young people and promote their unhealthy lifestyle? Will you stand silent while young people are exposed to great risk to their mental and physical health?

Kasserian Ingera. How are the children? The answer is in your hands. Thank you for inviting me to speak, and may God bless you and give you the courage and wisdom to stand up for our children.

Dr. Chris Kempling Psy.D. R.C.C.

Quesnel, BC

March 27, 2005

kempling@telus.net

The following speech was given on April 9th, 2005, by the former leader of the BC Unity party at the Christian Coalition seminar at Trinity Western University

CULTURAL ATHEISM AND HOW TO DEFEAT IT

By Chris Delaney

. . . .

In 1940, Great Britain found itself in desperate straits.

The day that Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, the German’s launched their long-awaited Western offensive. Most observers believed that Britain could never survive the assault. Some in government even suggested that they should seek terms with the Nazis. Churchill, however, would have none of it. There would be no British Vichy.

His resolve not to surrender the vision of a free and democratic Europe was rewarded with the signing of the Atlantic Charter, bringing help from the United States.

The day of the signing, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, which had already been battered by the Bismarck. In an emotional Sunday service, American and British sailors sang together "Onward Christian Soldiers". And as they sang, both the steel willed Churchill and Roosevelt had tears streaming down their cheeks.

They understood that this war was one between faith and godlessness.

They understood that losing would mean the loss of freedom and democracy.

They understood that freedom was their birthright, and that they would have to fight to keep it.

Less than 65 years later, western society has entered a time of cultural decay and government corruption that would have horrified those same leaders.

None of them could ever have imagined that only a generation later their nations’ would be engaged in a battle from within over the very freedoms they were preparing to die for.

The idea that one day western governments would become so corrupt as to not only legalize abortion, but to arrest their own citizens for protesting against it, would have sickened them.

The idea that those same governments would hand over their hard won democratic rights and responsibilities to activist courts that would mandate same sex marriage in defiance of their own people, would have enraged them.

The idea that the western democracies would be fraught with excessive taxation, family breakdown, pornography, crime, corruption, child murders and murderers, would have horrified them.

The peace and prosperity brought by those who sacrificed themselves for freedom in the great wars, has had an unfortunate result:

The worship of God has been replaced by the worship of the self.

And to support this new God, we have placed ‘tolerance’ as the philosophical equivalent of the Ten Commandments.

But that tolerance has been selective. It is often a tolerance of evil, buffered by an intolerance of anyone who calls that evil for what it is.

This is the new religion.

Three years ago, Canada had its first refugees to flee FROM our country.

28 mothers and 80 children, members of the Church of God in Aylmer, Ontario, fled to the United States to escape persecution by Ontario government officials who wanted to apprehend their children. Their crime? Believing in corporal discipline.

A year ago, a Catholic high school in Toronto was ordered to condone a homosexual relationship by one of its students at the senior prom, in direct defiance of the Charter Rights guaranteeing religious in Canada.

And now, provincial governments across Canada, including the Liberal government in British Columbia, have ordered marriage commissioners to perform same sex marriages or be fired.

The former Soviet Union once had a Charter of Rights guaranteeing all kinds of freedoms too, including freedom of religion.

But in practice, the Soviet government, like governments in Canada today, consistently acted to undermine and destroy religious freedom.

Communism’s driving philosophical objective was not a freer society, but the destruction of faith. An ‘amoral’ society built on the supremacy of man.

As Vladimir Lenin put it in 1920, “We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.”

The result was a brutal and perverted misanthropy that led to an orgy of state murder exceeding 61 million of their own people, and the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Today, cultural atheism has replaced communism as the choice to destroy freedom in the world.

Its tools are materialism, media, movies, games, drugs, sex, distractions – all designed to numb our brains into believing life is meaningless beyond what man proscribes.

And just as people once believed that communism could not be defeated, there is a tendency today to believe that cultural atheism, communism’s surviving twin sister, can not be defeated either.

But as Churchill and Roosevelt showed us, freedom is our birthright, and we must be prepared to fight for it.

Polls tell us that most Canadians are believers.

And even if they do not attend a church, synagogue or temple regularly, it does not follow that they prefer to live in a society without freedom or democratic values and practices.

Yet this is precisely what is happening.

Everywhere, godlessness reigns as a philosophy, and as the consequences stare us straight in the face, we can only bury our heads in the sand and pretend that science or psychology will solve everything.

You have only to turn your television set on each night to see the rape, murder, war, and butchery of our fellow human beings.

By cultural atheism, I am not referring to the many good and virtuous people who are themselves without religion or even faith in God. I have known many such people, and they can be as good or as bad as anyone who claims to have a faith.

I am talking about a philosophy. I am talking about the core of where that philosophy comes from, and where it is headed.

Cultural atheism stems from pride, and the pursuit of power for power’s sake. And it always yields the same result: the loss of freedom, the loss of individual dignity and value, and the loss of wealth and prosperity.

There has never been a free, wealthy or successful state that has lasted without faith in a Higher Power than man.

It is not a coincidence that as freedom and religion were destroyed in the Roman Empire, so too was their society, their wealth and their prosperity.

It is not a coincidence that as freedom and religion were destroyed in the Soviet Union, so too was their society, their wealth and their prosperity.

And it is not a coincidence that as freedom and religion are under attack in Canada, that our society, our wealth and our prosperity is faltering.

Freedom is both the pillar supporting religion and family, and the engine of all wealth creation.

Freedom is our birthright. We must fight to keep it.

Just as communism divided east and west – cultural atheism divides our society today. The cold war has simply mutated into the culture war.

And the goal is the same – to place man above God.

The war is the same – an attack on faith, family and freedom.

And the result will be the same – great social and economic destruction, followed by victory of the forces of faith, family and freedom.

But as we prepare for this battle, we must remember that as Christians in Canada, we have not always lived up to the ideals of our faith.

We have only to look at the terrible treatment of our native brothers and sisters by religious people in residential schools; or the racism practiced by some of our forebears against non-Christian immigrants; or the intolerance and ridicule displayed by some toward homosexuals, to see the evil that has been committed by people cloaked in the name of God.

But it is important to distinguish between a few people acting in direct contravention of the core philosophy of their own faith, which is,

“Love your neighbor as yourself”, and the core philosophy of cultural atheism, which is: “Love yourself.”

Cultural atheism has only selfishness, lies and destruction to sell its message. It will crumble under its own weight, and we must be there to show the way home.

Freedom is our birthright. We must fight to keep it.

U.S. President Ronald Regan was dismissed in his day as a naïve idealist. But he was instrumental in helping to defeat atheistic communism, with faith.

We will defeat cultural atheism the same way.

But we will do well to remember that this central battle of life is not, and never has been, about earthly victory.

It is a fight of the spirit. A battle for the soul of humanity.

When we realize the battle we are fighting today was fought as recently as 15 years ago against Communism, and before that against Nazism, and before that against Rationalism, and so on throughout the history of the world, we begin to realize it is not a battle to restore our comfort so we can go back to washing our new cars, or putting another log on the fire while we sing Christmas carols.

It is the essence of what life on this earth is about.

Like a dam that holds the tide back, we must be ever vigilant. There will be no definitive victory on which we can rest. There will only be never ending battles that must be fought.

We may yearn for peace, but we are born into war. We must be warriors.

Spiritual warriors.

Cultural warriors.

Political warriors.

To those who say you have no right to bring your religious beliefs into the public discourse – remember for atheists and socialists – politics is their religion.

To those who say that government is the author of human rights and morality, remind them of Hitler and Stalin, who shared their belief.

To those who say that freedom and democracy represent the tyranny of the majority – remember that is both a tactic used to thwart democracy, and an unwitting admission that they and their views are in the minority.

Witness the recent US election, where rigorous democracy and freedom are still the hallmarks of their political system:

Same Sex marriage was defeated in all 11 states that voted on the matter, including even liberal states like Oregon.

By comparison, not one government in Canada has dared to pass a vote on same sex marriage, for they know what the result would be.

So they use the courts to do their dirty work instead. Yet 5 of the 12 provinces and territories are refusing to yield to court enacted same sex laws that have been decreed in the other 7 provinces.

And while 5 of 12 is still a minority, it is a telling sign that in 2005, when the proponents of cultural atheism tried to force same sex marriage on our nation, some resisted.

Compare that to 1968, when the curse of legalized abortion first appeared in our Parliament, and most stood in shock and silence.

Finally, we are starting to see the enemies of freedom for what they are, and people of good will everywhere are fighting back.

Freedom is our birthright. We must fight to defend it.

But unlike Communism, cultural atheism has no discernable leader. There is no identifiable source of cultural atheism.

And this is one of its most pernicious weapons – the belief that the cultural dismantling of our traditions, beliefs, and values has just ‘happened’. That these ideas have just ‘evolved’ seemingly out of thin air.

I have read almost every conspiracy theory ever thrown out there.

We know that the media promotes cultural atheism.

We know that Hollywood glorifies it and ridicules religious practice and belief.

We know that many large institutions work to undermine our basic values both within and without their organizations.

But why? Why do these organizations choose the philosophy of atheism over faith?

Why do governments promote same sex marriage when they know the majority of their voters disagree?

Why do so many politicians, corporations and institutions act as if there is no God, when the overwhelming majority of people believe there is?

If it is all about votes, or box office receipts, or cash register sales, then why promote ideas and values contrary to your own interests?

The answer is – pride.

It doesn’t matter whether that pride is rooted in communism, socialism, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, the Illuminati, Freemasonry, the Council on Foreign Relations, the UN, or any other group of world elite.

The source of atheism is pride, and it depends upon cooperation with our own pride to succeed.

People always want to appear ‘hip’, ‘trendy’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘intelligent’, ‘progressive’.

Those who promote our cultural decay know that if they can replace the values of truth, justice, fairness, courage, dignity and independence with lust, greed, anger, envy, and selfishness, they can destroy our freedom, and with it our independence.

We then become the chattels of their insatiable lust for power.

But like Stalin on his deathbed, shaking his fist in defiance at almighty God, they can not escape their own mortality.

And that is the bane of their existence – that it leads only to a dead end.

And make no mistake, they know this better than you or I. But rather than face this truth and turn back, they prefer to drag the rest of us over the abyss with them, such is the driving slavery of pride.

To a Christian, indeed, to religious Jews, Sikhs, Muslims and billions of others of faith and good will, politics is an extension of religion, but not a replacement for it.

And we must remember that our greatest allies in the war against freedom and the family are the people of other faiths in our country.

They are as stunned and as devastated by the social engineering they see as we are. They came to Canada because they were attracted to its Christian values.

We are now a multi faith country, and that is a strength.

The destruction of our values comes not from immigrants, or people of other faiths, it comes from an imported, self loathing, cultural atheism.

A cultural atheism which has become indigenous to Canada, because it has been embraced by our political elite under the false guise of tolerance and unity.

To those who say you can have your religious beliefs, just as long as you keep them to yourself, remind them of the defiant Russian poet, Tanya Khodkevich, who, during the totalitarian regime of Stalin in the Soviet Union, wrote,

“You can pray freely - But just so God alone can hear”

She received a 10 year prison sentence in the gulag for those lines of verse.

Anyone who thinks we are far away from that need only look at the Surrey School books controversy, or the persecution of mayors in
Kelowna and London by human ‘rights’ tribunals, or the story of printer Scott Brockie in Ontario.

We must resist these boulders of persecution rolling down the hills in our land. For too long, we thought we could simply avoid them. But there are too many now, and they risk crushing us all.

Freedom is our birthright. We must fight to defend it.

We do not have to look far for examples among us of freedom fighters: Heather Stilwell, Chris Kempling, and Senator Anne Cools are all speakers here today who provide shining examples of successful, practical resistance.

Heather began as a lone voice speaking for family values and the freedom of parents to decide for their families what is good or not.

She was ridiculed by the media, told she was out of touch, that she was forcing her religious beliefs on others.

Then she was elected to the Surrey School Board with the largest majority of any school Trustee in British Columbia history.

Over the years, the attacks only intensified, but so did her election win majorities.

Today, her values and ideas are embodied by a super majority on the Surrey School Board, and are now recognized as the way to get elected to school board in her city.

Everywhere, people are searching for truth, justice, and spiritual values. These values are written on the human heart by our creator. They are the flames that burn inside every human being.

And while they can be demoralized and degenerated, the long and relentless battles of history tell us they can never be permanently extinguished.

This is our secret weapon. Not our ideas, not our words, not even our deeds, but human nature itself.

Rely on it, and resist with all your might the forces of atheistic tyranny, and we will win.

There is great hope, because buried deeply in the human psyche is a yearning for truth and goodness that is stronger than the belief in lies.

I personally experienced an example of this during the 2001 provincial election, when I was invited to the CBC television youth debate. The audience was filled with young people, mostly of the radical left.

A reporter from the Georgia Straight asked me if BC Unity’s policy to promote alternatives to abortion and to provide pregnant women in crisis with support services to help them keep their babies, was the beginning of the end of freedom of choice in BC.

The young crowd booed in support for the reporter’s obvious position on the subject.

I replied that the only freedom being threatened in BC was freedom of speech.

I told them how a young woman named Mary Wagner had spent 3 months in prison for peacefully handing out roses in the ‘bubble zone’. That, I said, was the real threat to freedom.

To the shock of the reporters on the panel, the young crowd burst into applause.

They knew the truth when they heard it. It was written on their hearts by their Creator.

It is this reality which gives us hope.

Just like the defeat of same sex marriage in the US, abortion is now set to fall.

Like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, I believe legalized abortion will crumble onto the ash heap of history, sooner and faster than any of us can imagine.

The seeds for this victory of life are right now being sown in the United States.

The challenge for Canada is not to be left behind in the spiritual and moral reawakening that is happening in this new millennium.

We must assert the principles that made this nation great, and which are embodied in the Canadian Constitution, which begins with the assertion that we are “Founded upon principles that recognize the Supremacy of God and rule of law.”

In Canada, we have decided that God is Supreme – not the media, not the universities, not the courts, not even our parliament.

Our constitution also says “everyone” has the right to life. That means abortion is against the supreme law of our land. We must stop accepting the interpretation of those who say otherwise, and begin standing up for this principle.

Our Constitution also says nothing about sexual orientation as a special right in the charter, yet our judges have ‘read that in’.

They can not read the words “everyone has the right to life” when they are written in plain English right in front of them, but can see words that do not even exist.

As an explanation for such judicial activism, we are told that our constitution is a ‘living’ document.

So let us take them at their word. Let us reinterpret our constitution, and let us use it to uphold that re-interpretation, by using the power of our Charter, in Section 33 – the notwithstanding clause.

But, we are warned, to use the full power of the constitution would destroy it.

Well, if that is true, then better to destroy the constitution and start over, than to destroy our nation.

Do not be afraid to hold politicians and judges to the principles upon which our nation was built and which make it great.

Do not be afraid to define the differences between philosophies. Between our philosophy of true freedom, and the atheistic philosophy that leads to slavery.

Do not be afraid to provide choices, and to make those choices clear so people can see for themselves. Because unlike the promoters of cultural atheism who subvert free will and democracy to advance their cause, we will not.

We will stand with confidence in freedom and democracy, because we believe that when people know the truth, they will choose it over lies.

It is time to expose cultural atheism for what it truly is: an arrogant and failed philosophy that, if not stopped, will eventually destroy our society.

We must be warriors against cultural atheism, and we must put our spiritual battle into practice on a political level. We must use both personal prayer and practical resistance as our weapons.

We must resist our friends when they promote same sex marriage.

We must resist our doctors when they promote abortion.

We must resist our teachers when they teach promiscuity to our children.

We must resist our politicians when they promote evil in the name of tolerance.

We must resist our professors when they tell us our values are outdated.

We must resist the pollsters when they twist the truth to push an agenda of lies.

We must resist journalists when they tell us we have no right to our beliefs.

We must resist the desire for social acceptance at the expense of truth and justice.

We must resist our preachers when they preach compromise, our neighbours when they are indifferent, our judges when they are hypocritical, and our bureaucrats when they try to govern rather than serve.

For in resistance we are sowing the seeds of cultural atheism’s defeat.

By resisting, we are piling the weight of truth on top of atheism’s lies, and it will buckle, not we.

Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire’. Cultural atheism is an “evil philosophy”. And it must be defeated.

People of faith – we must gather together to shine a light to our fellow Canadians to show them the way home.

You and I have a date with destiny in this, our beloved Canada. And it is coming fast.

Alexis de Tocqueville said it in 1835, and it is as true today as it was then, “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty can not. Religion is more needed in democratic societies than in any other.”

Freedom is our birthright. We must fight to defend it.

Freedom and democracy depend upon faith and belief for their survival. The faith that there is a higher power than man, and the belief that we are born free.

These are the core values that will save our nation from self corruption and eventual collapse.

And we must pass this burning flame of freedom on to each generation. Because the battle for freedom will never end.

Freedom is our birthright. We must fight to keep it.

And we must never, ever give up.

Thank you and God bless.

Fetal Intelligence and Masculine Men

By Dr. Chris Kempling March 27, 2004

Fraser Valley Pregnancy Centre Fundraiser

St. Joachim’s Catholic Church, Aldergrove, BC

He hiccoughs and reacts to loud noises at nine weeks. He “walks” around the inside of the womb, licks the uterine wall, and likes it when his mother reads Cat in the Hat. These are all documented behaviours of the human fetus, whose antics have been investigated by a variety of researchers into fetal intelligence. I probably don’t have to tell you that the blood vessel which becomes the heart begins beating rhythmically between the third and fourth week of gestation, and that there are measurable brain waves by the eighth week. These are the two most recognized signs of human life. Yet the pro-abortionists would have teenage girls in distress over an unwanted pregnancy believe that their babies are mere blobs of tissue. That is only the largest lie they tell. They also do not tell these girls and young women that their unborn babies are smart, and behave like human beings mere weeks into their development.

It turns out that human fetuses are a lot smarter and aware than we thought. As early as 15 weeks, the fetus can grasp, frown, squint, and grimace. It will react with the same reflexes as a new born when its eyelids or the soles of its feet are touched. In fact, a 32 week old fetus behaves (at least in neurological terms) just like a newborn baby. As early as nine weeks it “breathes” amniotic fluid, responds to light and sound, flexes its body and opens its mouth.

What is interesting psychologists who specialize in fetal research, is the fetus’ clear ability to learn and remember. To learn, of course, an organism needs a functioning brain. By 24 weeks gestation, all of the neurons needed to operate the brain and the body are present and functioning. By 32 weeks, the fetus has the characteristic eye-movements and brain waves of REM sleep, the dreaming part of the sleep cycle, causing some researchers to speculate that fetuses dream.

Research conducted in the U.S., France and Britain have shown that not only do fetuses hear, but they remember what they have heard in the womb after they are born.

In North Carolina, psychology professor Anthony DeCasper devised a soother-equipped set of earphones. If the newborn sucked faster it would hear its mother’s voice; slower sucking would produce a stranger’s voice. Even newborns a few hours old preferred their mother’s voice. Not only that, it would prefer its mother’s voice speaking English over a foreign language not often spoken by the mother.

Another U.S. researcher has found that the fetal heartbeat slows perceptibly when its mother is speaking, as if calmed by her voice. DeCasper’s research also indicated that if a story is read to a newborn that was habitually read aloud to it before its birth (they used Cat in the Hat for the study), the newborn prefers the “known” story over a new story.

A French study showed similar results. The fetal heartbeat will slow down when a familiar story is read near the mother’s stomach, but not change when read an unfamiliar story. They can even tell strangers’ voices apart, preferring a “familiar” stranger’s voice.

British researcher Peter Heppner carried out a fairly novel experiment with expectant mothers. He divided his study group into those who watched Britain’s most popular soap opera, with its very distinctive theme music, and those who never watched it. Within hours of the birth of each baby, he played the theme music of the show to the babies when they were crying. As soon as they heard the music, the babies in the first group stopped crying and became alert. The babies in the second group paid no attention to the music and kept right on crying. Heppner speculated that the babies associated the music with their mothers’ time of relaxation, and that those positive feelings were transferred to their babies in the womb. This is clear indication that fetuses can not only hear, but are paying close attention to what is happening outside the womb. So the moral of the story is, be careful what you say around pregnant women because someone else, a real person, is listening.

This is marvelous, isn’t it? We are fearfully and wonderfully made, and are sentient beings within a few weeks of conception. Women in distress over an unwanted pregnancy need to hear that their fetuses are babies, little human beings who feel pain, sense light, like being read stories, and even remember soap opera theme music. But everyone in this room knows that women will still seek abortions even if they know this information. And why is that? Is it depraved indifference? Selfishness? Desperation? Feeling abandoned or pressured by the young man, or her own family? It may be some combination of all of these.

But, frankly, young women cannot become pregnant without young men. We need to address the root issue: the sexual behaviour and attitudes of our young men. We have failed as a nation, as a culture, to properly raise our young men. We have failed to teach them to control their sexuality, and respect the virginity of our young women. Instead we put condom machines in middle school washrooms, but teach virtually nothing to them about honouring their bodies by practicing chastity and restraint, and showing dignity and respect to the young women they date.

Abortion is not the only end result of this failure to train our young men. I also believe that the root cause of homosexuality is the failure in our culture of heterosexual men to behave in a God honouring masculine way, in the way their raise their sons and daughters, but that is an entirely new topic which I do not have time to present to you tonight. But let me at least say this. Young men and young women raised by caring, involved fathers and mothers in a loving home virtually never embrace homosexuality. Because homosexuality, I believe, and the research supports, is socially conditioned, not biologically determined. And to properly socially condition young men requires thorough planning and highly significant initiation rituals.

You’ve heard of feminists. I am a masculinist. A masculinist is someone who believes that adolescent boys and young men must be intentionally initiated into the role of manhood, something that ancient cultures have always practiced. Even in our own Northern European traditions, pages were taken into a knights household as junior apprentices. At about 16, they became squires, apprentice knights. And after appropriate training in the martial arts and courtly behaviour they were initiated into knighthood. They knew when they became a man. In fact, there were some cultures in pre-European contact Africa and the South Pacific whose initiation rites involved homosexual behaviour, yet adult homosexuality was totally absent from those cultures. It is not a rite of passage I condone, of course, but in those cultures, young men knew when they became men, and they know what is expected of them in their manly roles. We have virtually lost that in our culture. The only rite of passage ceremony we have that is remotely similar is the high school graduation, and since that is a mixed ceremony it doesn’t even come close to doing the job.

As a masculinist, I have written a set of guidelines that I am sharing publicly for the first time. I wish I could say I meet all the criteria myself, but I can not. These are 12 worthy goals for all men, though.

And I ask the women here to listen closely, too, and perhaps tell me if this is the type of man they could respect.

What does it mean to be a man? Masculinity is defined by culture, not by biology, and in our pluralistic society, it has become increasingly difficult to find a model of manliness that most men can identify with.

I call this model the Masculinist Creed.

Honouring God

A masculine man will honour and reverence God. He will choose the manner of reverence consistent with his beliefs, and respect those of other men. He will strive to develop his spiritual knowledge, and teach his children to do the same.

Honouring the Self

A masculine man recognizes that he is made in the image of God, who has endowed him with spiritual, physical and vocational gifts. He will strive to develop those gifts, and share them with the world. He will treat other men with respect, yet accept no mean-spirited denigration from any person. He will defend his honour, and that of his family’s. A masculine man acknowledges that honour is a man’s gift to himself, and the result of living his life with faith, courage, honesty, industriousness, and integrity. A masculine man who lives this way is never ashamed of who he is. He endures what must be endured, perseveres through trials, and celebrates his victories.

Honouring Women

A masculine man will show respect for all women, and particularly those of his own family. He will honour his life’s partner in all ways, consult with her in matters great and small, and be attentive to her needs. He will do his utmost to maintain the relationship, and will only consider divorce after exhausting all other efforts. A masculine man will cherish his life’s partner above all others, and faithfully maintain every marriage vow.

Raising Children

A masculine man will plan his family, and in concert with his partner, provide for their physical, educational, emotional and spiritual development. He will not exasperate his children with unreasonable rules, but guide them with firm and fair discipline. Should circumstances lead him to become a parent to another man’s children, he will raise them as his own. He will show affection for his children and be attentive to their needs and dreams. He will expect the highest standards of conduct from his daughters’ boyfriends, and teach his sons to maintain the same standards with other men’s daughters. A masculine man shall never abandon or fail to support his children, no matter what the circumstances.

Earning a Living

A masculine man shall not be defined by his job, recognizing that his true worth does not depend on how he earns his living. Nevertheless, he will do his utmost to seek and keep legitimate employment. He will give full value for his income, and strive for integrity, excellence, and continual improvement in all his work responsibilities. He will treat all of his co-workers, supervisors, subordinates, and customers with respect. He will consult his wife and children before committing to any major change in employment. If circumstances or choice preclude employment, he will give his energy freely to maintaining his home, his family, and his community.

Finances

A masculine man will behave responsibly in all financial matters, paying his bills, and not using his income frivolously or selfishly. If circumstances force bankruptcy, he will endeavour to repay his creditors fully in his lifetime. He will support charities generously and give aid to those in need.

Respecting Sexuality

A masculine man will show respect for himself and all others in matters of sexuality. He will not use other men for sexual purposes, or allow himself to be used sexually by other men. He will refrain from all sexual contact with children, animals, prostitutes, or other men’s wives. He will show respect for women by refraining from viewing all forms of pornography. In his intimate relationship, he will never force himself on his partner, and will seek her pleasure as his own. A masculine man will practice self-control, safety and restraint in his sexuality, and teach his sons and daughters to do the same.

Recreation

A masculine man will add balance to his life by pursuing stimulating and enjoyable recreational activities. He will endeavour to maintain his physical health by proper diet and exercise. Whatever his choices are, he will exercise them responsibly and cooperate with others who share his interests. His behaviour will be marked by fair play, honesty, obedience to laws and rules, positive competition, and respect for those in authority.

Respecting Creation

A masculine man recognizes that he has a responsibility to treat his environment with respect, as the gift of God that it is. He will act as a good caretaker of land and resources he uses or controls, being mindful of the needs of all creatures and other users, both for the present and for future generations.

Community Responsibilities

A masculine man will show commitment to the welfare of his community by participating in civic and voluntary activities of his choice. When called upon, he will assist in projects or emergency activities to the best of his abilities, including military service. A masculine man will speak out courageously when he perceives that the best interests of his community, or of those least able to speak for themselves, are put in jeopardy.

Mentoring

A masculine man will seek out a mentor whose judgment he trusts, to help guide him in important matters of life. The mentor will be additional resource to parents, grandparents, and other respected elders. After middle age, a masculine man will mentor younger men, teaching them, and participating in the passages of manhood of boys and young men in the community.

Manhood Rituals

A masculine man will teach his sons to honour their manhood, by developing meaningful manhood rituals for major transition times. While exact times may vary, the following five life transition times are recommended: Puberty (age 12/13); Age 16; High School Graduation; College Graduation/Career Commencement; Marriage. A father will seek the advice of his mentor and other older men to assist his sons in their rites of passage. A recommended resource is Raising a Modern Day Knight by Robert Lewis (Tyndale Press, 1997).

Our society will be well served by men who follow this creed. And if all men did, I’m convinced that the scourge of abortion, and the tragedy of homosexuality would fade into obscurity, a bad dream of the 20^th century. So men, let us be men, real men, who stand up for what is right. And let us start by training our boys and young men to be masculine men. Well trained men will not be indiscriminately impregnating women, then abandoning them to the choice of single parenthood or abortion.

I chose to have a sword engraved for my son’s initiation. It is the Lion Heart Sword, a replica of King Richard the Lion Heart’s crusader sword. It has 12 scripture verses, and four themes: Courage, Wisdom, Honour and Faith. And with four of my five brothers, we initiated my son Justin as a Kempling man on a lonely island in the middle of Quesnel Lake. And those who know my son will tell you that he is one of the most confident, assured and socially responsible young men they know. This is no accident. Fathers, take the task of raising sons very very seriously, because the future of our society depends on you. And if you are a single mother, seek out a mentor for your sons, because this is a task only men can do.

I will close with a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor imprisoned and executed by the Nazis in 1945. He is talking about civil courage:

“[Some] people flee from public altercation into the sanctuary of private virtuousness. But anyone who does this must shut his mouth and his eyes to the injustice around him. Only at the cost of self-deception can he keep himself pure from the contamination arising from responsible action. In spite of all that he does, what he leaves undone will rob him of his peace of mind. He will either go to pieces because of this disquiet, or become the most hypocritical of Pharisees.

Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but the man who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and the call of God.”

Friends, I encourage you to keep standing up for what is right, and may your whole life be an answer to the call of God. God bless you all.

The Great Divide: Ethical Divisions between Social Liberals and Social Conservatives
Regarding Sexual Behaviour

By Chris Kempling M.Ed. M.A. R.C.C. November 23, 2003

The raging public debate over same sex marriages in Canada, and now Massachusetts, has highlighted the great divide between those who are socially liberal, and those who are socially conservative. Generally speaking, the socially liberal are found on the centre-left of the political spectrum, and include labour unions, women’s and gay rights organizations, human rights tribunals, much of the popular media, a good proportion of the “intelligentsia”, and, it may be argued, the judiciary. Social conservatives tend to occupy the political right, and may be found in large numbers among those who adhere to organized religions, and many immigrant cultural groups. The socially liberal appear to be in the ascendancy and have been remarkably successful in achieving many of their goals to “modernize” culture and society. Social conservatives decry such “progress”, seeing instead a degradation of moral behaviour and standards of social conduct.

A very thoughtful analysis of why this great divide exists is contained in an article entitled “Sexual Morality: The cultures and emotions of conservatives and liberals”, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology (Haidt and Hersh, 2001). Haidt and Hersh argue that, in the area of sexual conduct, social liberals operate within a narrow moral framework which they call the “ethics of autonomy (EOA). The ethics of autonomy hold that only acts that cause harm to self or others should be condemned. Acts which are consensual and are perceived not to cause harm should be tolerated or even affirmed. Under EOA, rationalization for approval of various non-traditional sexual behaviours is justified under the concept of the right of individuals to behave autonomously, acting according to their own conscience, rather than a higher authority.

It can be argued that EOA is foundational to the arguments social liberals make for re-defining what types of sexual behaviours and relationships are acceptable in today’s society. Thus, when people say that there is nothing wrong with allowing homosexuals to marry, or that homosexuality should be taught as a normal variant in public school sex education classes, or that adult-child sex is not really harmful and should be permitted, they are using the ethics of autonomy as the philosophical base for their position. The EOA recently prevailed in the US when the Supreme Court struck down the anti-sodomy laws of Texas. Pierre Trudeau’s decision in 1968 to remove homosexual acts from the criminal code, because “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nations”, was also an EOA based decision.

Social conservatives operate on a much broader moral plain. Haidt and Hersh posit that social conservatives base their attitudes of what is morally acceptable on two additional sets of ethics: the ethics of community (EOC) and the ethics of divinity (EOD). The ethics of community are concerned with duty, perceived social roles, traditions, mutual respect, and what is appropriate for maintaining social order and family life. EOC is found in such organizations as Focus on the Family, REAL Women and the Canadian Alliance for Social Justice and Family Values. The latter organization is almost entirely made up of Chinese Canadians. Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural groups (religiously Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus) would also ascribe to EOC values.

People holding to EOC values are genuinely concerned about the decay of family and societal values, and perceive that those who ascribe to EOA values rank hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, as more important than maintaining the social fabric.

The ethics of divinity (EOD) are concerned with the sacred, purity, and with living a life consistent with the requirements of God, generally as revealed in sacred scriptures. Those who ascribe to EOD believe in a universal moral order, ordained by God, and that to depart from it risks eternal separation from the divine in the life to come. All the world’s great religions hold to these beliefs. Thus, in the area of sexual morality, EOD believers have behavioural standards much more restricted than those who hold to EOA beliefs. This is why when EOD people write publicly, they often tend to cite holy scripture as the justification for their concerns. The reaction from those in the EOA camp is often dismissive, because they generally do not subscribe to the concept of accountability to a divinely ordained universal moral code. Heidt and Hersh found in their research, not surprisingly, that study participants from conservative church groups were much more likely to use EOD than EOA in their assessment of what types of sexual behaviours were acceptable. Atheists and the non-religious tended to use EOA in their assessments, and consequently were more accepting of non-traditional sexual behaviours.

There has been a growing tendency among those in the EOA camp to accuse those in the EOC/EOD camp of “homophobia” if they dare to speak or write publicly about their concerns. Indeed several Christians have been successfully prosecuted by gay activists in the courts and human rights tribunals for publicly expressing their opposition to homosexual behaviour. Moral disapproval for certain sexual behaviours based on EOC/EOD positions ought not to be defined as an irrational or phobic reaction, however. Yet that is the sledgehammer those in the EOA camp have been employing with considerable success in the past decade. Currently, there is general acceptance of the term homophobia, and general agreement that it is a negative influence in public life. To this end, there is a concerted effort by gay and lesbian lobby groups, and supported by teachers’ unions, to implement anti-homophobia and anti-heterosexism programming in Canadian public schools. Regrettably, there has been very little attempt to accommodate the concerns of the EOC/EOD side, resulting in divisive and expensive court battles, most notably the Trinity Western University and Surrey Book cases.

Those who hold EOC/EOD positions are not prepared to compromise their religious beliefs or cultural values to accept as normative, sexual behaviours condemned by tradition or holy writ. It is necessary for those in the EOA camp to understand that EOC/EOD believers may be homonegative towards certain sexual behaviours, but homopositive in affirming the inherent worth of homosexual persons. This position is affirmed by all responsible religiously based social conservative organizations, but seen as unacceptable by leaders of the EOA camp. They argue that sexual orientation and the accompanying behaviours are inextricably linked, and that to condemn the behaviour is the same as condemning the person.

The EOA position that sexual orientation is inherent and unchangeable is simply not supported by social science research. Indeed, even the psychiatrist most responsible for the removal of homosexuality from manual of mental disorders (the DSM) in 1973, Dr. Robert Spitzer, has published research affirming that orientation change therapy has been shown to be beneficial and effective for the majority of his study group (Can Some Gay Men and Lesbians Change Their Sexual Orientation? 200 Participants Reporting a Change from Homosexual to Heterosexual Orientation, Archives of Sexual Behavior, October 2003, 403-417). The majority of his group were motivated by desires to marry, to maintain their marriage, or to live a life consistent with their religious beliefs.

To that end, most major religious groups in North America have established therapeutic resources for those in their faith communities who are distressed over unwanted same sex attractions, and who are motivated to re-orient towards heterosexuality. For Jews there is JONAH, Mormons have Evergreen, Catholics call theirs Courage, and Protestants have Exodus. Furthermore, there is a network of professionals who conduct orientation change therapy collectively called NARTH (National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality: see www.narth.com for more information). These organizations exist because those with unwanted same sex attractions have asked for help for dealing with their distressing symptoms. The treatment category in the DSM IV is 302.9(3) “persistent and marked distress over one’s orientation”. Ironically, it is a denial of the concept of autonomy for those in the EOA camp to try to prevent these people from gaining access to these types of services. Gay and lesbian lobby groups have vigorously (but unsuccessfully) lobbied the American Psychological Association to declare orientation change therapy unethical. The personal stories of those who have undergone re-orientation therapy successfully are posted at www.peoplecanchange.com.

Mandatory indoctrination of all public school children with EOA ideology in the area of sexual behaviour, is profoundly disrespectful and manifestly unethical, as it violates the rights of EOC/EOD parents to transmit their values to their children. The United Nations has repeatedly affirmed that this is an inalienable right of parents. Educational authorities have delegated roles in the education of children, and do not have the right to impose an EOA value system without parental consent. Furthermore, such efforts violate the specific requirements of the BC Teachers Federation code of ethics to respect the sensibilities of their students, and to refrain from using their roles for ideological gain.

We live in a pluralistic society where a broad spectrum of values are cherished. It is the duty of public educators to acknowledge all three ethical positions. Denigrating those who adhere to ethics of community or ethics of divinity is no way to achieve social harmony, or even improved social conditions for sexual minorities. Let us agree on what we can agree on: affirmation of the inherent worth of everyone, non violence, eradication of harassment, bullying and name-calling, and promoting understanding of each other’s profoundly held values. Against this ethic, there can be no argument.

Chris Kempling is a Registered Clinical Counsellor and NARTH member living in Quesnel, BC Canada. Feedback at Kempling@telus.net is welcome.

Stealthy Change and Same-Sex “Marriage

By Ted Hewlett

The twentieth century was a period of enormous change. Those who lived through it were conscious of much of that change. The names given to the major events of that century speak of that consciousness: “The Great War,” “World War,” “The Great Depression,” “The Atomic Age.” But some changes in history have come stealthily, like Carl Sandburg’s fog, “on little cat feet.” In fact, history is full of examples of changes that have come about while their extent was masked by the continued use of old terminology. People in Western Europe thought of themselves as citizens of the Roman Empire long after the original empire in the West had passed away. Yet the phrase “Roman Empire,” as in “Holy Roman Empire,” still had a residual power. In the development of parliamentary democracy in eighteenth– and nineteenth-century Britain, the extent of the shift of power to parliament was masked by the continued language of monarchy.

We see that same sort of stealthy change in Canada today. Canadians by and large still think of themselves as living in a democracy. Parliament still sits and goes through the motions of making decisions. But in fact there has been an enormous shift in power to the appointed courts. This has been brought about through the generalized nature of the Charter and the will of activist judges, but even more by the desire of elected politicians to avoid responsibility for difficult decisions on social matters. Hence we are a nation with no limits on abortion; and are now apparently becoming a nation dominated by a variety of politically-correct movements, including the pro-homosexuality movement. Politicians for the most part seem afraid to confront radical movements even when what they advocate is destructive to our society. In many cases politicians are glad to use the courts as cat’s paws to implement or encourage fundamental social changes.

We have just seen acquiescence to a major change in Canada in the form of the federal government’s acceptance of the recent audacious ruling of the Appeals Court of Ontario, which brought about a major and immediate alteration in law—mandating same-sex “marriage”— without even giving parliament time to consider the issue. This must surely mark a high-water mark—so far—in the gradual taking-over of power by the appointed courts. Yet no doubt most Canadians will carry on with little or no concern—certainly not enough to take action.

If, even before this ruling and the federal government’s acquiescence to it, the Supreme Court of Canada could take it upon itself to micromanage the affairs of a distant western school district of Surrey in the interests of pro-homosexual activism, surely the acceptance of “same-sex marriage” by the government of the land can be a means of implementing a much more far-reaching program of propaganda in the schools of the nation.

In fact, without even the implementation of one further measure, the effects of the Ontario ruling and federal acceptance of it can be enormous. It has been said that the law is a teacher, and one of the effects of what we have just seen happen is that a stamp of approval has been placed on homosexual unions. The federal government had a choice. It could have used the notwithstanding clause and preserved the status quo. Or it could have decided to turn “the marriage business” over to the churches and established a law of civil unions. But it has chosen so far to cave in to a provincial court, ignoring the previously-stated will of parliament that marriage should remain a matter involving a man and a woman. In so doing it has placed its stamp of approval on “same-sex marriage.” What is legal is not necessarily the same as what is moral, but many people do not differentiate, regarding the decisions of government as a reliable indication of what is right.

The federal government has been ready to sacrifice a major principle of government in its supine acceptance of the Ontario ruling. In so doing, they have given significant additional impetus to a movement which seeks to make the acceptance of homosexual behaviour mandatory for all citizens, and a guiding principle in the education of the young.

The Power of Canadian Courts

By C. Gwendolyn Landolt
National Vice President
REAL Women of Canada

In no other country in the western world do judges have power comparable to
that now held by Canadian judges. The latters’ appointments to the courts are made solely by the Prime Minister, without being either screened or scrutinized.

Contrary to popular belief, most of this remarkable power now held by our

appointed, unaccountable judges was not given to them under the Charter of

Rights, but rather has been greatly expanded by the judges themselves in a series

of cases which have enabled them to determine public policy issues, which was

formerly a matter for Parliament only.

The Charter does provide in S.24 that the courts may provide “such remedies as the courts consider appropriate and just in the circumstances.” This provision does not provide, however, that judges may take legislation and ‘write in’ or ‘write out’ words at will. Rather, the courts have assumed this prerogative for themselves, frequently, in doing so, ignoring the purpose and intent of the legislation passed by the elected legislators.

The Canadian courts have broadened their powers to such an extent that they now have become a second legislature, reducing the elected Parliament to a mere secondary role in the political process.

Perhaps the most important Charter decision to expand the courts’ power to interpret the Charter at will was the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1986 decision, in Regina v. Oakes. In that case, the court set out the parameters by which it could determine whether laws were “justified” in our democratic society. Unfortunately, the effect of the Oakes decision was to give the court a free hand to second-guess government policies.

The courts’ powers were further widened in Reference re Provincial and Electoral Boundaries (Saskatchewan, 1991), in which the Supreme Court of Canada pronounced a new doctrine which provided that our Constitution was not static, but was rather a “living tree.” With this metaphor, the courts accorded to themselves the right to broadly change the wording and meaning of Charter provisions, and to change laws according to judges’ own philosophical and ideological views.

The most recent application of the “living tree” doctrine was made by Madam Justice Louise Arbour in her minority decision in December 2002 in Attorney General, Quebec v. Gosselin, in which using the “living tree” argument, she put forward the astonishing proposition that judges know better than legislators regarding the allocation of the scarce resources of the public purse. This decision, dealing with welfare payments by the Quebec government, was a narrow one (4-3) and if just one other judge had moved over to Madam Justice Arbour’s line of reasoning, it would have resulted in the Quebec government having to pay hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars in compensation to welfare recipients. It is worrisome that the Supreme Court has promised to revisit this issue at a later time!

The Supreme Court of Canada’s interpretation of “equality rights” under S.15 of the Charter, is just as bizarre. In Law v. Canada (1999), the Supreme Court held that equality rights were threatened if an individual’s “human dignity” is undermined. In that case, the courts held that “human dignity” exists only if an individual or group feels that self-respect and self worth are present. That is, according to the Law case, an individual or group’s human dignity can be undermined if they feel marginalized, ignored and devalued. This means that equality rights under S.15 of the Charter now rest on the claims of a person’s feelings. This is an extraordinary criterion for courts to use and has given courts a wide opportunity to protect their favourite groups, regardless of the intent of Parliament, the plain wording of the legislation, or the views of the public.

The truth is that judges do not have special or secret knowledge with which to interpret the general and ill‑defined words in the Charter of Rights. Instead, judges come to the bench with their own political and ideological axes to grind, and are now eagerly shaping public policy issues, with impunity, without the slightest deference to Parliament.

The courts, however, should not determine public policy because they are not set up to carry out this important function. Unlike Parliament, courts do not have access to the social facts of the issues before them; they do not have the luxury of time to adequately reflect on the issue; they do not have access to research facilities as do Parliamentarians; and they do not have access to the practical experiences of the public on issues which are growing increasingly complex, economically, socially and scientifically. Nor are the courts equipped to evaluate the full range of policy alternatives which are available to the government. As a consequence, it is not possible for the courts to entirely grasp the long-range implications and ramifications of the arguments placed before them by the litigants.

This extraordinary power grab by the Canadian courts has occurred because there are no checks and balances on them, and the courts rightly reason that they can do whatever they please, no matter how spurious their reasoning, or how unhealthy their decisions are to democracy.

We do not have a strong tradition of criticism of the judiciary in Canada, but in the interests of democracy, perhaps it is time we developed one.

May 15, 2003

British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life is non-partisan. However, we are happy to publish the following essay from Ron Gray, Leader of the Christian Heritage Party, as we would be happy to publish any essay so insightful and so pertinent to the issues we face in Canada.

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS IN CANADA!

The recent Ontario Appeals Court ruling on marriage has highlighted a growing constitutional crisis in Canada, and the urgent need for Parliament to restrain unconstitutional activism in the judiciary.

The whole basis for this Ontario Appeals Court ruling was the 1995 the Supreme Court of Canada decision that inserted "sexual orientation" into Section 15 (the "equality rights" section) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

That action by the Supreme Court was itself unconstitutional, on two grounds:

1 - The Charter is part of the Constitution of Canada; there is a formula for happy legislatures in 7 of the 10 provinces, comprising at least half the population. A major change requires the unanimous consent of all 10 provincial legislatures. But in 1995, the Supreme Court arbitrarily amended the Constitution, completely by-passing the amending formula that is part of the highest law of the land. When the Supreme Court acts illegally, to whom can we appeal? We can only go to Parliament for redress.

Section 15 of the Charter had been prepared by a committee of Parliament that debated for two days whether to include "sexual orientation", then voted 26-2 to leave it out because it is too ill-defined to be in any law. The Charter was passed by Parliament in that form, and was sent to the provinces in that form to be ratified. The Charter became entrenched in the constitution WITHOUT "sexual orientation" in Section 15 - or anywhere.

That is the only legitimate version of the Charter. The Supreme Court's adulterated version is illegal!

2 - The Supreme Court in 1980 ruled that the Constitution of Canada comprises two parts: the written text, and tradition. That tradition divides parliamentary government into three branches: the Legislature makes the laws, the Cabinet and civil service carry out the laws as passed by Parliament, and the Judiciary resolves disputes by applying the law as it finds it, interpreting it according to the body of precedent built up over centuries in our English Common Law heritage. The Supreme Court of Canada has repeatedly violated that traditional part of the constitution by usurping Parliament's exclusive authority to write laws.

Parliament must act quickly to rescind the unconstitutional 1995 Supreme Court ruling in the Egan & Nesbitt case, and to rescind the Ontario, BC and Quebec lower-court rulings based upon that arbitrary and illegal ruling.

If Parliament fails to leash our now-unaccountable Supreme Court, we no longer live in a democracy, but in a judicial dictatorship.

Ron Gray,
National Leader
Christian Heritage Party of Canada

The following letter is from the Rev. Royal Hamel of Guelph, Ontario. It is an updated version of an open letter that he wrote in the fall of 2002. We publish his letter with his kind permission.

Letter to Canadian Clergy on Hate Speech Bill C-250

May 16, 2003

Dear Pastor and colleague in ministry,

I wish you and I could sit down for a coffee at Tim Horton's and have a long chat. That's not possible, of course, so please allow me to share with you some alarming news. There is a good chance you haven't been told that some of your basic free speech rights are threatened by Bill C-250 which may return to the House of Commons for third and final reading as soon as May 27, 03. I believe this is one of the most dangerous bills for Christians to ever come before the House of Commons.

We all know that the normalization of homosexuality continues to make alarming inroads into Canadian society. Gay ?marriage? is being promoted and pushed by our judicially activist courts and could become a reality in this country in a very short time. But how many of us know that homosexual activists are trying to use hate speech law to shut down all opposing views of their lifestyle? Bill C-250 will add the category of "sexual orientation" to sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code. The end result will be to criminalize most public speech that opposes homosexuality (For more information see: www.familyaction.org and www.evangelicalfellowship.ca.

Pastor, this proposed amendment may well be used against those who preach the biblical position on homosexuality. Furthermore, it may be illegal to publicly read the portions of the bible that deal with homosexual behavior. Bruce Clemenger of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada says, "The Bible may well be censored and the distribution of Bibles threatened"(EFC letter, August, 02). Brian Rushfeldt of Canada Family Action Coalition thinks that within six months of its passage that some Christians will be charged, convicted and sentenced to jail. Their ensuing criminal record will affect their travel and employment for the rest of their lives.

Please don't write this off as something political and therefore not our concern. For is not the preaching of the gospel and the defining of biblical morality a major part of our calling under God? And is it not clear to everyone that homosexuality was a moral and theological issue long before it became a political one?

I am not unsympathetic with the demands and burdens of the pastorate in our day. Nevertheless, in the midst of many pressing duties we must fulfill our role as watchmen (Ezekiel 33). For part of our mandate of mercy is to identify and expose the sin of the culture so that precious people can repent and turn to God. Can we then, in good conscience, permit ourselves to be muted by an ungodly law that will effectively censor the full preaching of the gospel?

You may be convinced that the end is near and there is nothing we can do to stop or slow down the spread of evil. Jesus spoke a parable to some who thought the kingdom of God would appear immediately (Luke 19:11ff). The main command given by the nobleman to his servants was this, "Do business until I come", or as another translation puts it, "Occupy till I come". Even if the end is near, we must not abandon any part of the work he has given us, and that includes being salt and light in this present moment.

In Canada right now for whatever reason homosexuality has become a pivotal issue for the church. How will we pastors respond to the challenge? Some shepherds, to be sure, in the name of prophetic ministry have crossed the line and become overly aggressive and unnecessarily offensive. But, as John Piper eloquently says, " For every
sick shepherd who offends unnecessarily, a hundred are so frightened to offend that the sword of the Spirit has become rubber in their mouths and the mighty biblical mingling of severity and kindness has vanished from their ministry" (Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, p.xii). Let's all be clear that every biblical message on the theme should start and end with love for the homosexual, and God's offer of grace and reconciliation should be graciously presented.

Pastor I don't ask you to stand with a sign and demonstrate. But I do urge you for the sake of the gospel and for freedom to stand up and lead. Since most Canadians know nothing about this bill I ask you first of all to inform your people so they can actively resist this attack on the gospel. Secondly, I ask you to preach and teach on the biblical view of homosexuality while you still have that freedom. Thirdly, I ask you to encourage your people to write or telephone your local Member of Parliament to demand that Bill C-250 be defeated since it is an attack on freedom of religious speech in Canada. Finally, the Prime Minister, (mailto:pm@pm.gc.ca), and the Minister of Justice, Martin Cauchon, (mailto:cauchm@parl.gc.ca) should both be contacted.

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo laments that the dark Lord is growing in power. He says, "I wish it need not have happened in my time'. And Gandalf responds, "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time given us" (Book I, p. 78).

My fellow pastors, in the time allotted to us-for the sake of the gospel, and for the sake of freedom for all Canadians, let us stand and lead. It is High Noon for the church in Canada. And if I can use imagery from that movie with the same title, a threat is barreling down the track towards us. Years from now our own grandchildren may ask us, "Where were you when they tried to muzzle the church in Canada?" May history be kind to us. If we are remembered at all, let us be remembered as faithful, unmuted, God-honoring, church-protecting, grace-proclaiming, sin-exposing Watchmen who by the power of God stood up to tyranny and backed it down.

For the sake of the Name,

Rev. Royal M. Hamel

Guelph, Ontario

Royal Hamel served 22 years with the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Canada, Argentina, and Mexico. At present he works in pro-life, pro-family advocacy.

By kind permission of the author, who is a lawyer, we publish the following analysis:

AN ANALYSIS

CHAMBERLAIN VS. SURREY SCHOOL BOARDSUPREME COURT ORDERS HOMOSEXUAL PROPAGANDA IN BC SCHOOLS

By C. Gwendolyn Landolt
National Vice President
REAL Women of Canada

       In an explosive decision handed down the week before Christmas, on December 20^th, the Supreme Court of Canada in a 7 – 2 decision decided, in the Surrey BC School Board case, that the latter had failed to consider the important requirement of “diversity” and “tolerance” required by s. 76 of the BC School Act, when it declined to allow three pro-homosexual books for supplementary use in Kindergarten and Grade 1 classes. As a result, in the Court’s opinion, the School Board’s decision was “unreasonable” and cannot stand.

       As stated by Mr. Justice Gonthier in his dissent (in which he was joined by Mr. Justice Bastarache), the three controversial books pronounced on the morality of same-sex relationships by portraying them as “normal” and “positive”, contrary to the views of the parents in that school district. Positive portrayals are not surprising, since the books were recommended by GALE (Gay and Lesbian Educators of BC). It was a member of this organization, James Chamberlain, who initiated the legal challenge.

      Under the BC Schools Act, the Minister of Education approves the basic educational resource materials to be used in teaching, but confers on local school boards the authority to approve supplementary educational resource material. These supplementary materials are not required to be used in the classroom, but are available if teachers choose to use them.

The Appellant in this case, James Chamberlain, a homosexual kindergarten teacher and a member of GALE, requested that the three contested books be approved for supplementary use by the Surrey Board. It is noted, however, that the Minister of Education did not include books on same-sex parents in its basic resource list, nor did it specify what kinds of families should be identified in the classroom. Moreover, no same-sex parents claimed in this case that there was discrimination against them in the portrayal of family life in the classrooms.

The Surrey School Board examined the books, and declined to include them as supplementary educational material on the grounds that the books were inappropriate for such young children, and that their use would interfere with the rights of parents as the primary educators of their children, and would also undermine the relationship between home and school.

However, Madam Justice Beverley McLachlin, on behalf of the majority, stated in paragraphs 10 – 25 of her judgement, that parental views cannot override the necessity of public schools to mirror the diversity of the community and teach tolerance to children. She further stated that the decision about whether to approve the three books had a human rights dimension, and that the “courts are well placed to resolve human rights issues.” According to Madam Justice McLachlin, the legislature “intended a relatively robust level of court supervision requiring not a rigid and sometimes jurisdictional approach, but a more flexible functional and pragmatic approach to the issue.” She then raised the question as to whether the courts have expertise equal to or better than the local board relative to the particular human rights issue in the case. She answered her question in the affirmative by concluding that since s. 76 of the BC School Act required “tolerance” and “diversity”, this required the acceptance of all family models. Consequently, she concluded that the Court must exercise a “fairly high level of supervision over decisions involving tolerance and diversity.”

      Mr. Justice Gonthier, however, strongly disputed this conclusion of Madam Justice McLachlin when he stated:
Based on the reasons of the Madam Justice, it would seem that a school board could not exclude any book regarding any family model, because to do so would be contrary to the curriculum’s reference to a “variety of models” being addressed.

      Madam Justice McLachlin stated, however, that this issue was so important that it “negates the suggestion that the courts should accord high deference to the Board’s decision.” She did acknowledge, however, that the issue “does not involve the strict application of legal rules or the interpretation of the law, and that the legislature intended to let the board and hence the community have a say in choosing resource material. … This is a case requiring the Board to determine how to accommodate the concerns of some members of the community in the context of a broader program of tolerance and respect for diversity. This question attracts court supervision and militates in favour of a stricter standard.” (Emphasis ours.)

      It is important to note that s. 76 of the BC School Act does not include the words “tolerance” or “diversity.” All that s. 76 of the Act provides is as follows:

76. (1) All schools and Provincial schools must be conducted on strictly secular and non-sectarian principles.

(2) The highest morality must be inculcated, but no religious dogma or creed is to be taught in a school or Provincial school.

      The majority of the Court concluded, however, that the words “secular” and “non-sectarian” in s. 76 of the Act must be interpreted as including the words “tolerance “ and “diversity.”

      Thus, Madam Justice McLachlin found that the decision of the Surrey School Board was “unreasonable” in that it failed to promote respect and “tolerance” for all the diverse groups that it represents and serves, and, therefore, the Board acted outside its mandate under the BC School Act. Madam Justice McLachlin concluded that the message of the controversial books was a message of “tolerance.” She finally concluded “tolerance is always age appropriate.”

      It is clear from Madam Justice McLachlin’s judgement that the Supreme Court may now mould and interpret laws, and determine public policy according to the intention of the judges, but not necessarily according to the intent of the legislators.

      To sum up Madam Justice McLachlin’s extraordinary decision, she and the majority on the Court, applying what can fairly be described as weak and unpersuasive arguments, usurped for itself the jurisdiction to interfere with and re-interpret the plain words of the BC School Act in order to override the decision of the School Board. The result allows homosexual propaganda to be included in the curriculum.

As stated by Mr. Justice Gonthier in his strong dissent, there is no Canadian law or constitutional provision that prevents Canadian citizens from morally disapproving of homosexual behaviour or relationships. He stated, “It is a feeble motion of pluralism that transforms “tolerance” into “mandated approval or acceptance.” He went on to say that “tolerance” does not require the mandatory approval of the books under consideration, and that ‘tolerance’ ought not be employed as a cloak for the means of obliterating disagreement”.

Mr. Justice Gonthier further stated in his dissent:
Paragraph 143.
I believe courts should be reluctant to assume that they possess greater expertise than administrative decision makers with respect to all questions having a human rights component.

Further at paragraph 150, he stated:
To permit the courts to wade into this debate risks seeing s. 15 protection against discrimination based upon sexual orientation being employed aggressively to trump s. 2(a) protection of the freedom of religion and conscience….

A Tiny Ray of Sunshine

There is a slight ray of sunshine in this appalling decision in that the judges agreed that the requirement in the BC School Act that schools operate along “strictly secular and non-sectarian principles” refers to keeping the schools free from inculcation or indiscrimination in the perception of any religion. However, the decision does not prevent persons with religiously-based moral positions on matters of public policy from participating in deliberations concerning moral education in public schools.

Madam Justice McLachlin acknowledged this, but also compromised it by claiming that religious views cannot deny equal recognition of a minority group (read: homosexual).

She stated at paragraph 19 of her judgement:

The Act’s insistence on strict secularism does not mean that religious concerns have no place in the deliberations and decisions of the Board. Board members are entitled, and indeed required, to bring the views of the parents and communities they represent to the deliberation process. Because religion plays an important role in the life of many communities, these views will often be motivated by religious concerns. Religion is an integral aspect of people’s lives, and cannot be left at the boardroom door. What secularism does rule out, however, is any attempt to use the religious views of one part of the community to exclude from consideration the values of other members of the community. A requirement of secularism implies that, although the Board is indeed free to address the religious concerns of parents, it must be sure to do so in a manner that gives equal recognition and respect to the members of the community. Religious views that deny equal recognition and respect to the members of a minority group cannot be used to exclude the concerns of the minority group. This is fair to both groups, as it ensures that each group is given as much recognition as it can consistently demand while giving the same recognition to others. (Emphasis ours.)

The practical effect of this conclusion, however, is that the religious views of parents may be taken into consideration only when they do not conflict with “respect” and “tolerance” for the views (and lifestyle) of others. That is, parents with religious views must not raise objections to those of same-sex parents and teachers in the schools, since this would be disrespectful and intolerant of them. The views of same-sex parents and teachers in BC are now officially protected under this ruling, as they may now successfully request that their views be promoted in the schools, but, under this ruling, parents who have religious views on opposing homosexuality, may not speak out against it.

January 9, 2003

Teaching for Life

What Can a Teacher Do to Foster Respect for Life?

--by Ted Hewlett

What a teacher decides he can do to foster respect for life depends partly on what he thinks is the nature of his job. Teachers are involved in something called education. (They are involved in training too--in the imparting of skills--but that, though important, is not the same as what I refer to in this essay as "education.") Some time before the end of my career as a public-school teacher, I finally put into words for myself a concise statement of what education does: "Education is what frees a person from the bounds of time and space and personality." Teaching, therefore, in my belief, involves, among other things, helping to free the student from dependency on what passes for the received wisdom of the late twentieth century (and now the early twenty-first century), enabling the student to evaluate the thought of those who may be far from us in time and geographical space, and encouraging him to develop a non-egocentric view of the world. In many ways, then, teaching involves countering the very trends which mark our time: the arrogance of many intellectuals, who seem to think that wisdom has begun with them, and the increasing tendency of modern opinion-makers to encourage selfishness.

The teacher can legitimately foster respect for life, and indeed must do so if he is to fulfill his true role. Teachers in non-government schools may have opportunities to do this more freely than do those in public schools, but the teacher can do this whether he is in a government or an independent school.

In this essay I would like to look at some specific examples of how the teacher can try to foster respect for life. I will draw my examples from the humanities, partly because the opportunities seem greatest in teaching in those areas, and partly because my own background is primarily in English and history. The teachers influence can be both corrective and positive. He can counter anti-life thought and he can encourage pro-life thinking.

For a long time now, students have been bombarded with anti-life thought. An now-dated example of this bombardment is the book The Population Bomb, used in social studies classes in British Columbia, I believe as early as the 1970's. It is an example of the anti-life propaganda which students have been exposed to not just by the schools but also by the media and the entertainment industry. The burden of the book was that the survival of the world is threatened by the population explosion and that drastic means to counter this threat are imperative, including free access to abortion.

"One of the more encouraging signs of progress [wrote Paul Ehrlich, the author] has been the change in abortion laws. Since 1967, nearly one-third of the states have liberalized their abortion laws to some degree. There are four--New York, Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington state--which have 'repeal' laws which allow abortion to be a matter between the woman concerned and her physician. . . . . in less than five years, disapproval of free access to abortion has definitely become a minority view."

"Biologists [wrote the author in another place] . . . . must point out that in many cases is much more desirable than childbirth. Above all, biologists must take the side of the hungry billions of living human beings today and tomorrow, not the side of potential human beings. Remember, unless their numbers are limited, if those potential human beings are born, they will at best lead miserable lives and die young."

Who can doubt that any teacher with a respect for life, teaching a course where such a book was either prescribed or used at his colleagues' choice in a school, would have had the responsibility to counter such propaganda? If part of the role of a teacher is to enable his students to think critically, then it is his job to direct students to works which contain intelligent counter-arguments to such propaganda for abortion. This would be a legitimate role for a teacher working in a government school.

Surely, though, the role of professional teachers goes beyond teaching in the classroom. When teachers see the blatant misuse of the classroom for pro-death propagandizing, we have an obligation towards both our students and their parents. We must inform parents of what is going on in the school system. And we need to protest against the misuse of the schools. This, we feel, has been part of the role of "British Columbia Teachers for Life" (now "British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life"--an organization in which teachers join with parents and others in the promotion of education which respects life).

Anti-life influences do not necessarily come in the form of ranting propaganda such as is represented in the passages quoted from Ehrlich. Such influences may come in the form of highly-respected literature. An example is a novel in common use in the public schools of British Columbia and elsewhere. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is the story of George and Lennie, two transients who find work as ranch-hands in California. George looks out for the physically strong but mentally deficient Lennie. Their fantasy--one which Lennie again and again asks George to tell him about, is to have a little place of their own. On the ranch where George finds work is the lonely and flirtatious wife of the boss's son. She first encourages Lennie's familiarity, then panics when Lennie will not stop stroking her hair. She screams, Lennie becomes angry, and--attempting to control her and not knowing his own strength--breaks her neck.

Lennie hides in the bush and George come to him. In an affecting scene, George shoots Lennie to avoid seeing him locked up for the rest of his life.

Steinbeck's book is full of swearing, and that is the aspect which is most obvious to parents who casually pick up the book. But it also leaves the reader with the message--conveyed mainly by the skillful emotional language of the author--that George did the right thing. This message may represent merely the thought of one of the main characters, or it may also represent the thinking of the author, but at any rate there is nothing in the novel to counter the idea that this "mercy-killing" is justified.

The teacher who really respects life, if he teaches this novel--and it may be one prescribed in his particular school--will not let matters rest there. He will challenge his students to question what may appear to be the theme or a sub-theme of the book. And in doing so he will not be negatively propagandizing. He will be fulfilling one of the proper functions of the teacher of literature, which is to point out that the message of an author, no matter how emotionally convincing it may be, is not to be accepted by the student without thought. Too often, I think, we English teachers are content to have the students find the message. Surely an author of any intellectual honesty would not want his readers to merely find the message without thinking about it. And teachers who care about their students' development as human beings should not be content with such an outcome either. Certainly those of us who value respect for life cannot allow our students to be exposed only to the persuasions of those who would take away from that respect.

Although a very different piece of literature, Earle Birney's poem "David," conveys emotionally a message similar to the one Of Mice and Men transmits. Two friends, Bob and David, climb a mountain. David falls to a ledge and is apparently paralyzed. When the narrator (Bob) reaches him, David begs him to push him over the edge. The narrator does so. The implication is that Bob did the right thing, because life as a cripple would not be worth living for David. As in Of Mice and Men, the emotional impact of the work tends to push the reader into accepting euthanasia.

Writers have enormous power because they select from the possible world of their imagination just what they think the reader should be exposed to. The power of the writer's imagination working on the raw material of life can be a wonderful and compelling thing. But the student reader needs to be encouraged to see that from the raw material of life a different meaning might have been conveyed.

It would be wrong to suggest that most of the literature of our public (government) schools conveys anti-life messages. The novel Lord of the Flies, sometimes criticized by parents, does not paint a pretty picture, it is true. But it portrays the willingness to wantonly destroy life as the outcome of a basic element of evil in human nature. Actually the novel is highly consistent with orthodox Christian theology.

Shakespeare's Macbeth may be said to have as its theme the message that the human being who gives himself over to the powers of evil brings about his own ruin and destruction. The wanton destruction of human life is the result of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's giving themselves over to evil for the sake of ambition. Lady Macbeth's attitude to her own femininity and to motherhood has a particular interest for those of us who deplore the widespread adoption of a pro-abortion position by the feminist movement. In a soliloquy which makes graphic the horror of her choice, Lady Macbeth calls on evil spirits to take away her womanly, gentle nature:

"Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts! [she says] unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top full
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Whenever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, 'Hold, hold!' "

Later, when Lady Macbeth is trying to persuade Macbeth to murder Duncan, she says,

"I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this."

Lady Macbeth's prayer to the evil spirits has been answered. Her feminine instincts for gentleness have been eradicated. But more than her feminine instincts have been eliminated. Her basic humanity has been, in large measure, also. Her spurning of the standards of morality has resulted in large measure in what C. S. Lewis called "the abolition of Man."

Although she wants to get rid of her own femininity, ironically, Lady Macbeth pressures Macbeth to go through with the assassination by appealing to a false standard of manliness:

"Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life [she says],
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage?"

Macbeth replies,

"I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none."

But he yields to Lady Macbeth's persuasions, and uses his courage in a perverted way, killing his kinsman and monarch, the good King Duncan.

Macbeth goes on to show his disregard of human life as he pursues his path of overweening ambition.

Neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth, however, escape the consequences of their own acts. They not only perish but go down to bitter defeat. Lady Macbeth shows in the famous sleepwalking scene that the horror of her own actions has come back to haunt her. And Macbeth in his speeches in the last act makes it clear that he is dying a failure, and that life has become meaningless to him.

"Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

There is plenty in English literature to support respect for human life. In Lord of the Flies and in Macbeth it is supported by the way these works portray the negative consequences of a disrespect for life. These stories make striking examples, but there are many works of literature showing characters with positive attitudes to human life.

The teacher in his legitimate role of teacher has ample scope to teach respect for life. It is his job to teach the student to examine critically the opinions which are expressed in their geography and history texts and in literature. Out of that examination can come a realization of truth, including the truth of the sacred nature of human life. It is the teacher's job, also, to call to his students' attention the messages contained in the literature of both today and past eras: messages which often contain wisdom which transcends the facile but fallacious slogans to which young people are all too often exposed in the popular media. The task of education is to pass on the elements of true civilization--and surely respect for human life is one of the most important of those elements.

HOPE versus PRIDE:

Moderate Homosexual Opposition to Gay Extremism

Dr. Chris Kempling Psy.D. R.C.C.

Introduction

In May, 1997, two Prince George, BC pastors organized a community conference in that city to publicly debate the issues surrounding homosexuality. It was fairly well attended and included a speech by former lesbian Marjorie Hopper, who spoke on the reality of orientation change. As part of the literature for the conference, the organizers included a satirical piece written by gay writer Michael Swift, who was advocating recruiting as many straight young people into the gay lifestyle as possible, by force if necessary.

Here is a sample paragraph:

We shall sodomize your sons, feeble emblems of your masculinity.

We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your

gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your

seminaries, in your youth groups, in your army bunkhouses,

wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our

minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image.

(in Bawer, 1996).

The piece was originally published in the Gay Community News, but read into the U.S. Congressional Record on March 24, 1993 by Congressman Mel Hancock. It is a public document. The two pastors, Ed Drewlo and Bob Zayonc, were slapped with a Human Rights complaint by a local gay activist, who felt that using Swift’s article for the conference “discriminated” against homosexuals. The case was abandoned by the complainant, but is an example of how far the radical left in the homosexual movement will go to intimidate their opposition, and stifle any discussion about their lifestyle (Drewlo, October 26, 1998). It did not seem to occur to him that it was illogical to allege that distributing an article by a homosexual writer constituted “discrimination” against homosexual people. Frankly, the article is arguably a good example of hate speech against heterosexuals.

Just exactly what constitutes “hate speech” is likely to be the subject of considerable litigation now that Canada has amended its hate crimes law (in May, 2004) to include the category of sexual orientation. There was strenuous opposition from social conservatives and religious groups to the amendment sponsored by openly gay MP Svend Robinson, as they felt that since “sexual orientation” is not defined in the law, there would be legal protection for pedophiles or those who engage in bestiality (both recognized as “orientations” by the psychological profession). Furthermore, although expression of religious belief against homosexuality was explicitly exempted in the law, conservatives felt that was inadequate protection, since Bible passages concerning homosexuality had already been deemed to be “hate speech”, according to a 2001 judgment against a Saskatchewan man, Hugh Owen, who had published a newspaper ad in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix condemning homosexuality using Biblical citations.

It also begs the question why those who cite religious reasons for opposing homosexuality would be immune from prosecution, while those who do so for non-religious moral reasons could be charged. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out in the coming years. In Sweden, where there is similar legislation, but without the religious exemption, Pentecostal pastor Ake Green was recently sentenced to 30 days in jail for preaching a sermon against homosexuality in his church in Kalmar, Sweden (lifesitenews.com, July 04, 2004).

Promoting A Radical Gay Agenda

Some prominent homosexuals now admit that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. Moreover, since they believe that there is nothing inherently wrong with it, they should be up front about recruiting heterosexuals, including school children. Former Vancouver Sun columnist Stan Persky, who is a philosophy instructor at Capilano College in North Vancouver, admitted as much in an essay titled “Recruit, recruit, recruit” in an issue of Xtra West, the newspaper of the gay community on the West Coast:

…the Good Grey Gay Establishment stood up, to a man, and

solemnly, but hypocritically assured one and all that good

homosexuals would never do anything so sneaky and underhanded

as to persuade someone to be gay or engage in homosexual acts.

The official gay leadership insisted that gays were born gay, and

that no one who wasn’t gay could be turned into a homo, not even

for 10 minutes. Of course, they were lying through their teeth…

And worse of all, they persuade other people—often young people

who aren’t necessarily gay—to give it a go. And guess what? Some

of those who give it a go keep on going…The main battleground of

the homo movement is not the wedding aisle of a nice church, but

the nasty schoolyard…” (Persky, June 29, 2000).

There are other examples of the increasing radicalism of the gay movement. Gay protesters in Vancouver, upset with a meeting of traditionalist parents opposed to the promotion of the gay agenda in the public school system, drowned speakers out with chants of “Ten percent is not enough. Recruit, recruit, recruit!” (O’Neil, October 9, 2000).

In the spring of 2000, a Vancouver group called the Rainbow Coalition blanketed the province with letters to all city councils in the province demanding that each municipality declare a gay pride day (Rainbow Coalition, June 15, 2000). The letter threatened legal action if city councils didn’t comply, specifically mentioning the previously targeted mayors of Kelowna and Oliver, BC as examples of what could happen. Most cities complied, but others simply stopped making proclamations altogether to avoid lawsuits. The mayor of London, Ontario was fined $10,000 in 1998 by the Ontario Human Rights Commission for refusing to proclaim a pride day, which was announced in the middle of her 1997 re-election campaign. In dismay, she stopped campaigning, but was re-elected by an overwhelming majority anyway (Campbell, Spring, 2004).

And on April 17, 2004, a fund-raising meeting for Stephen Boissoin, a Calgary youth pastor accused of hate speech by a University of Calgary professor, held in a meeting room rented at the Coast Plaza Hotel, was crashed by masked men and women in military garb, who chanted angry slogans while the clearly frightened participants prayed in tight circles. The entire incident was caught on videotape. They identified themselves as the “Gay Militia”, and had to be forcibly evicted by the police when hotel staff were unable to persuade them to leave. Charges have yet to be laid for disrupting a religious gathering (Boissoin, April 18, 2004).

The Growing Moderate Voice

This paper is not primarily about heterosexual or religious opposition to gay extremism. The above examples were cited to give a context for the following discussion. There appears to be growing opposition to gay extremism from homosexual conservatives and moderates, who are clearly tired of the in-your-face tactics employed by Swift, Persky, the Rainbow Coalition, and the Calgary “gay militia”. It is a movement that has found a voice—articulate, reasonable, and willing to cut through the rhetoric to deal with the substantive issues. They are confronting the gay left’s long unchallenged position as the spokespersons for the entire gay community. This paper is a summary of their views, collected from a variety of sources, primarily opinion pieces in moderate and conservative magazines.

Many of the sources for this paper are American, but there are some courageous public positions being taken by Canadian moderate gays as well. The most prominent is Toronto’s John McKellar, a journalist and national director of a group called Homosexuals Opposed To Pride Extremism (HOPE). McKellar is quite scornful of the gay left:

The activists are noisy caterwaulers, and their organizations have

impressive acronyms like EGALE and GALA, but they could hold

their monthly meetings in a phone booth. They’re caught up in their

shallow, narcissistic sexual self-expression, so they demand the right

to make the whole world their closet. But they don’t really speak for

most homosexuals (in Woodard, May 11, 1998).

McKellar’s organization rejects the agenda of the radical, militant homosexual fringe, and decries attempts to seek special rights based on sexual orientation as socially subversive. HOPE also holds that marriage remain closed to same sex relationships in order to protect the traditional family unit. Other declarations in their founding charter assert that “gay propaganda not be allowed in schools, that the final authority in sex education be parents, that the age of consent for sex be raised to 16 (18 for anal sex), and that HIV and Hepatitis C carriers be monitored by the government” (in Woodard, May 11, 1998; Campbell, Spring, 2004).

McKellar regards the gay left’s mania for stamping out homophobia as a “contrived slander”. “It doesn’t insult me, as a gay man, to say our society needs to protect and nurture the heterosexual family. Children need mothers and fathers, and anything else is child abuse. The survival of civilization depends on its children. And I’d prefer to see our civilization endure” (in Woodard, May 11, 1998).

Other gays are objecting to the wholesale adoption of the gay left’s agenda in education policy by the BC Teachers Federation (BC Teachers Federation, February, 1998). Lesbian Gail Hunt believes parents should have the right to choose how their children are raised, including the moral values they are taught. “Teachers are paid to teach, not propagandize” (in Parker, March 30, 1998). Ms. Hunt believes that the BCTF’s one-sided approach could foster a backlash against homosexuals. “By insisting that teachers know better than parents, their arrogance will increase opposition to the homosexual community (in Parker, March 30, 1998).

A Call for Maturity and Accountability

Washington DC attorney John Berresford, gay himself, wishes gay activists would shut up and grow up. He argues that gays should stop feeling sorry for themselves. Even if gays are victims, no one really cares, and no amount of legislation can force people to care. He also posits that gays should stop seeing AIDS as anybody else’s problem. “The sad fact is that every gay man who got AIDS by sex got it from another gay man, and by doing something he chose to do. People with AIDS deserve sympathy, but it is the sympathy one extends to a chain smoker who comes down with lung cancer” (Berresford, June 11, 1995).

Berresford also argues for greater accountability in moral behaviour:

As long as our primary image is one of gleeful promiscuity—an

image promoted not only by our enemies but also by our own

magazines and our own bars—we will be ostracized. Until we

start imposing honesty, fidelity, and emotion on our lives—in

other words, until we are wiling to talk about moral standards—

we will make little real progress in social acceptance.

(Berresford, June 11, 1995).

Berresford hits the nail on the head here. One of the most objectionable stances of the gay left is the demand for social acceptance and moral equivalence of their relationships, when there is little evidence of a willingness to be accountable for their promiscuous sexual behaviours, or accept any limitation of their sexual “freedoms”. A cursory glance at the personal ad section of any gay periodical is ample evidence.

Frankly, the personal ads in Xtra West I have perused are much too pornographic to quote verbatim. Incredibly, this newspaper was recommended to the author at a Ministry of Education conference on at-risk youth, as a suitable classroom resource for BC public schools. Here is what I found listed: advertising for casual sex partners outnumber ads for long term relationships by four to one; individuals graphically describe their genitalia; requests for sado-mashochism, sex involving

urine and feces, and bestiality are represented; pornographic cartoons; and mostly nude ads for bathhouses, notorious as venues for orgies, abound throughout (Xtra West, October 16, 1997). It’s refreshing to know that someone with Berresford’s stature in the gay community recognizes that those who wish to be respected are obliged to behave with restraint and self respect first.

Force Attitude Change is Counter-Productive

Phoenix, Arizona writer Jonathan Rauch argues that gays should abandon legislated attempts to change attitudes. Firstly, he correctly argues that forced re-education in principle rarely works and is an anathema in a democratic society. Secondly, he believes that prejudice and homophobia are simply not the most pressing social issues. Fat people and short people endure more frequent abuse than gays. He asserts that it is violence in society that is the real problem:

Personally, being both Jewish and gay, I do not expect everybody to like me. I expect some people to hate me. I fully intend to hate those people back. I will criticize and excoriate them. But I will not hurt them, and I insist that they not hurt me. I want unequivocal, no-buts protection from violence and vandalism. But that’s enough. I do not want policemen and judges inspecting opinions.

(Rauch, October 7, 1991)

Rauch also believes that life is not that terrible for most gays and is becoming less so every year. Moreover, the “gays as oppressed victims” position has lost its utility given the substantial recent successes in human rights and clear evidence of success in many aspects of social life. He writes, “The standard political model sees homosexuals as an oppressed minority who must fight for their liberation through political action. But that model’s usefulness is coming to a close. It is ceasing to serve the interests of ordinary gay people (Rauch, May 10, 1993).

Certainly, “oppressed” gays do not appear to be taking advantage of taxpayer funded avenues of redress made available after strenuous lobbying from the gay left. A widely advertised gay complaint hotline in Alberta (often typified as a hotbed of homophobia) received 31 calls in three months, of which only two were deemed worthy of investigation. And in Toronto, a “hate crimes” unit of the Toronto police department set up to alleviate supposedly widespread gay bashing received only 16 complaints in an entire year (1993), three of which were judged worthy of investigation. Ironically, two of the three complaints turned out to be assaults between homosexuals (Woodard, April 20, 1998). Nevertheless, gay radicals continue to allege pervasive and endemic homophobia, and lobby for more dollars and programs to combat this persistent “social injustice” (BC Teachers Federation, February, 1998).

The rejection of social norms by the gay left is more a statement about radicalism than about homosexuality. Rauch asserts, “the religious right is not wrong about everything. The values of stability and family, hard word and education and thrift and honesty, are bedrock values for society” and should be supported by the gay movement (in Lochhead, August/September, 1993).

Economic and Social Success for Gays Undeniable

Homosexuals as a group are doing quite well in economic, cultural and educational venues. Pro-gay themes are proliferating in the popular media (e.g. Philadelphia, In and Out, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Ellen, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and an entire channel (Pride TV) devoted to gay entertainment). Network TV had a record 29 openly gay characters in the 1998 season (Leland & Miller, August 17, 1998).

Incomes for gays are dramatically above the rest of the general population. The Simmons Market Research Bureau of Chicago found in a 1991 survey that homosexual households in the U.S. average an income of $55,430, 42% higher than the national average household income of $32,144. And given their general lack of dependent expenses, gays have three times the disposable income per capita compared with heterosexual families, according to University of Maryland lesbian sociologist Deborah Blodgett (Woodard, April 20, 1998).

Gays’ higher incomes can partly be explained by their higher overall education levels—15.7 years versus 12.7 for the population as a whole (Rauch, May 10, 1993). Real oppression means systematic denial of opportunities to succeed. Clearly that is not the case for gays in North America.

Oppression Within The Ranks

Oppression and prejudice between members of the gay community appear to be altogether too common. Gay white males are routinely derided by the feminist factions in the lesbian community as being part of the “oppressor patriarchy”. Rigid racial and gender quotas, often with weighted voting towards women, are common in the radical gay and lesbian organizations (Miller, November/December, 1994).

Even surgically altered men are vilified. At the 1993 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, primarily a lesbian event, four post-operative male to female transsexuals were ejected from the festival for violating the “womyn born-womyn only” policy (Miller, November/December, 1994). Thus, even those who had sacrificed their genitals to become women were discriminated against because of their offensive Y-chromosome laden cells! And black writer Eric Booth asserts that the bigotry of the upper middle class white gay community is no better that its straight counterparts (Miller, November/ December, 1994). Clearly, hypocrisy is a factor in all orientations.

Radicalism as Social Subversion

Andrew Sullivan, the erudite editor of New Republic magazine, believes that the “queer fundamentalists” defeat themselves with their radical in-your-face guerrilla tactics such as throwing condoms at priests and parishioners during communion, or simulating fellatio in Pride parades. Political action for them is “essentially an exercise in theatre and rhetoric, in which dialogue with one’s opponent is an admission of defeat” (Sullivan, May 10, 1993). In other words, the goal of gay radicals is performance, not persuasion, a kind of self-expressive therapy with no real strategy beyond shock and six o’clock news soundbites. Writes Sullivan: “…the notion of sexuality as cultural subversion distances it from the vast majority of gay people who not only accept the natural origin of their sexual orientation, but wish to be integrated into society as it is. For most gay people, a “queer” identity is precisely what they want to avoid” (Sullivan, May 10, 1993).

Like Rauch, Sullivan dislikes the politics of victimhood, and feels that designating gays as a disadvantaged group is self-defeating and fallacious. Race is always visible, but sexuality can be disguised by choice. “For lesbians and gay men, the option of self-concealment has always existed and still exists, an option that means that, in a profound way, discrimination against them is linked to their own involvement, their own acquiescence” (Sullivan, May 10, 1993).

Unlike blacks or native Indians, who have suffered systematic communal economic deprivations, openly gay individuals already operate at the highest levels of society and enjoy the economic and political benefits of that influence. Elton John, Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen Degeneres, Scott Brison, Bill Graham (both federal cabinet ministers) and Svend Robinson are all testament to the widespread acceptance enjoyed in modern society by gays and lesbians.

Lawyer John Berresford writes, “After I come out to them, I find that most conservatives are perfectly tolerant (and not as cloyingly condescending as my liberal straight friends) (Berresford, June 11, 1995). Toronto moderate John McKellar appears to concur: “…the only people that irritate me more than gay activists are all the gay positive heterosexuals” (in Woodard, May 11, 1998).

Advocate columnist and best-selling author (A Place at the Table) Bruce Bawer believers that the gay rights movement needs to move toward maturity in activism, and eliminate the ideology that rejects and ridicules everything the average heterosexual citizen believes in. He also considers the activist tendency to treat as heresy any attempt to breach the left wing party line as counter-productive and divisive (Bawer, January 24, 1995).

Political satirist Daniel Mendelsohn wonders what will happen after gays win all the rights they are clamouring for. He believes gay identity politics is limited and ultimately cannot solve the problem of gay happiness. In his mind, part of the problem is gays’ reliance on their bars as social institutions. Those who are tired of being identified by their sexuality still find themselves congregating in places where being gay is all that identifies them. “Our bars are just the flip side of our closets—crowded and badly lit, but cozy in a way…the real test will be to see whether they will leave the former as willingly as they do the latter. You can’t pursue happiness in the dark” (Mendelsohn, 1996).

John McKellar is scathing in his criticism of the radical gay left:

“As a homosexual male, my dignity and worth is constantly demeaned by the infantile whining, the undemocratic tactics, the belligerent arrogance, the politics of victimology and persecution, the toilet stall behaviour and the compulsive promiscuity of a microscopic minority, who purport to represent me. With relentless monomaniacal determination, the homosexual lobbies marginalize, mock and subvert Canada’s longstanding traditions, institutions, principles, statutes and values in their never ending quest to normalize and institutionalize all manner of lifestyle and conduct.

(McKellar, July 15, 1998)

McKellar was responding to a Human Rights complaint filed against him and Evangelist Rev. Ken Campbell, for an allegedly discriminatory ad in the Toronto Globe & Mail on April 18, 1998. The complaint was dismissed, as was a similar one for the same ad filed with the BC Human Rights Commission (Campbell, Spring, 2004).

The Tyranny of Outing

One of the biggest bones of contention between gay radicals and moderates is over the issue of “outing” or publicly revealing someone else’s sexual orientation when they do not wish it. Radicals believe that if one is a gay person in a position of prominence, they have a duty to be “out” in the name of political conformity. Andrew Sullivan writes cogently of what outing really is:

They have attacked the central protection of gay people themselves. They have assailed the ability to choose who one is and how one is presented, to control the moment of self-disclosure and its content. They have declared that the bonds of common sympathy must be sacrificed to ideology, that the complexities of love and loyalty and disclosure can be resolved by the uniformity that is the classical objective of terror. The gleam in the eyes of the outers, I have come reluctantly to understand, is not the excess of youth or the passion of the radical. It is the gleam of the authoritarian.

(Sullivan, September 9, 1991)

Moderate Gay Goals

So what is it that gay moderates want? In a word: marriage. They want full societal recognition and blessing for their relationships. In fact, 85% of gays consider the right to legally marry “somewhat important or very important” (Leland & Miller, August 17, 1998). Registered domestic partnerships, already a fact in Denmark, Sweden, and a handful of American cities, are not adequate, at least according to John Berresford:

It creates a special class of rights for a small class of people. The real beneficiaries would be the lawyers who would litigate the differences and similarities between domestic partnerships and marriage… domestic partners legislation makes us an officially sanctioned class of oddities and freaks. By seeking marriage, we demonstrate our wish to be part of the great American middle-class way of life.

(Berresford, June 11, 1995)

As of this writing, the provinces of Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, and Yukon Territory in Canada have granted gays and lesbians the legal right to marry. The same has occurred in Massachusetts, and “civil unions” are permitted in Vermont. Holland, and Belgium grant the right to marry to its citizens and the matter is being seriously considered in Germany, Norway, Spain and Slovakia. The U.S., however, is proposing a constitutional amendment to forbid the option. Hawaii has already ruled that “marriage is a basic civil right for same sex couples (Pinkerton, June 3, 1993). Pinkerton, a former policy advisor to former President Bush, quotes Andrew Sullivan to bolster his argument for gay marriage: “It would foster social cohesion, emotional security and economic prudence.”

Jonathan Rauch echoes this view in an essay in the Wall Street Journal. He argued that “family values” advocates and moderate gays are actually reading from the same song sheet:

We openly welcome homosexuals who play by the rules of monogamy, fidelity, and responsibility. And we frown on heterosexuals and homosexuals who do not play by those rules.

We believe that marriage and fidelity are crucial social institutions that channel lust into love and caprice into commitment…And we support extended these norms to all American, gay and straight.

(Rauch, November 29, 1994)

John McKellar of HOPE appears to be the dissenter among the group in not pressing for the right to marry. For Bruce Bawer, a practicing Episcopalian, marriage, and particularly church-blessed marriage, however, is the ultimate goal. He laments the church’s unwillingness to recognize gay unions:

For me, my happiness at the weddings of straight friends is always mixed with a constant awareness of the difference between the church’s view of my relationship and its view of theirs. From the moment that couple walks back up the aisle together, they’re viewed as a couple by the church and the state. Their relationship is official. From that moment on, they take for granted a universal acceptance of their membership in each other that to a gay person in a loving relationship seems beyond one’s wildest hopes. Yes, there are gay people who have wedding ceremonies, and some Episcopal priests are even willing to perform them. But it’s not the same: the church and state don’t recognize it, and neither do most Episcopalians.

(Bawer, September 18, 1994)

In 1998, Anglicans from around the world completed their decennial Lambeth conference in Canterbury, England, where the issue of blessing same sex marriages was debated. It followed a 179 to 170 vote by church leaders in the New Westminster diocese to bless same sex unions (Vancouver Sun, August 8, 1998). Delegates to the Lambeth conference did not endorse the concept (actually it was overwhelmingly defeated) and still hold that homosexual practice is not biblical. That position did not stop Bishop Ingham of New Westminster from holding another vote on the matter and deciding to approve the blessings. And this year, the annual meeting of Canadian Anglicans in St. Catherines voted to call same sex relationships “sanctified” or holy. The sister church in the US recently endorsed an openly gay Bishop in New Hampshire as well. These actions have been considered schismatic by the larger Anglican community, and have led to widespread condemnation, withholding of dues, refusal of donations from North American churches by African Anglicans, the rejection of bishops by individual congregations, such as Rev. Ed Hird’s in Deep Cove, BC (a suburb of Vancouver) who wish to remain orthodox and replacement by “flying” orthodox bishops from Africa, and eviction notices to some congregations by those “snubbed” bishops (Hird, June 24, 2004).

Clearly, the widespread acquiescence by senior members of the Western clergy of homosexuality has led to a very disruptive situation in certain Christian denominations.

Summary

It seems that gay moderates are not interested in “special rights” per se, just the same rights as heterosexuals. They do not wish the forcible re-education of heterosexual children, nor do they wish to gyrate down main street on a gaudy float in their jockstraps and feather boas. They acknowledge that such radical antics do nothing for their standing in society and provide considerable fuel for those already inclined towards bigotry. They realize that in order to be perceived as respectable members of society, they will have to seriously address their moral behaviours.

Moderate gays do appear to cling to the belief that orientation is an inherent, immutable condition, with only 11% believing they can change their orientation through therapy, willpower or religious conversion (in Leland & Miller, August 17, 1998). Recent secular research, however, shows that treatment for orientation reversal is quite successful and permanent (Schwartz & Masters, 1984; Spitzer, October, 2003). Moreover, replication studies fail to support the genetic argument for inherency of orientation. Dr. Alan Sanders, a colleague of Dean Hamer who claimed to have found chromosomal similarities between gay brothers in 1993, was unable to replicate his results. “Although the original study found evidence for genetic linkage, ours does not” (in Byfield & Byfield, June 15, 1998).

They also ignore the considerable weight of evidence on the correlations between child sexual abuse and dysfunctional socialization on subsequent orientation development (Van Wyk & Geist, 1984: Doll et al, 1992: Abel et al, 1987) [delineated at length in the author’s previous research paper, Kempling, Autumn, 2003]).

Gay moderates appear to believe that evangelical and Catholic opposition to homosexuality is based on biased interpretation of certain Bible passages. Writes Bawer, “Few things have been more widely taken out of their historical and textual context and more dishonestly and maliciously misused that those passages (Bawer, September 18, 1994).

But frankly, this is the type of moral relativism and self-serving revisionism that was predicted by several New Testament writers. In his second letter to his protégé Timothy, the apostle Paul writes, “For the time will come when men with not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear (in Shelley, 1994).

The Apostle Peter’s second letter to the Christian church warns against false teachers and those who would pervert the truth of God’s word. The quote is from Eugene Peterson’s earthy modern translation:

God decreed destruction for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. A mound of ashes was all that was left—grim warning to anyone bent on an ungodly life. But that good man Lot, driven nearly out of his mind by the sexual filth and perversity, was rescued. Surrounded by moral rot day after day after day, that righteous man was in constant torment…God is especially incensed against these “teachers” who live by lust, addicted to a filthy existence. They despise interference from true authority, preferring to indulge in self-rule.

(Peterson, 1995).

There is simply no escaping the spiritual truth that the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition regards homosexuality as sinful behaviour. No evangelical or Catholic true believer is likely to compromise on that tenet of the faith, nor should they. As Spitzer (October, 2003) found, many former homosexuals from faith communities chose to change their orientation to return to congruency with their beliefs rather than remain unorthodox to justify behaviour condemned as sinful by Scripture.

Moderate gays like Bawer, though, are right about one thing. Gay rights in general are not the biggest threat to heterosexual families. It is divorce, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, family violence, adultery, selfish consumerism, and the tolerance of the morally bankrupt values promoted in the popular media that are the greatest threats to our society. Heterosexuals have a great deal of work to do to clean up our own house. We need to take the “log out of our own eye” before we can self-righteously point our fingers at the moral failings of the gay community.

Nevertheless, there is an implacable gulf between homosexuals who wish to be portrayed as normal and those who practice orthodox Christianity (and other mainstream religions as well). They want complete acceptance and blessing of their relationships, but orthodox Christians will never accept or affirm sexual relationships clearly designated as sinful by the revealed Word of God.

Gays who are so inclined can find a spiritual home with the “ear-scratching” churches, such as the Metropolitan Church, or the United Church of Canada, which began ordaining openly gay ministers in 1988. Or they can gain solace from the public positions of spiritual renegades like New Westminister Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham, or Episcopalian Bishop Spong of New Jersey, who has ordained openly gay priests in defiance of the position of worldwide Anglicanism (Parker, July 27, 1998). And they may be able to convince all the jurists and legislators in the land to grant them full social rights, including marriage. But that does not make their behaviour acceptable in God’s eyes, even if they embrace “monogamy, fidelity, and responsibility” (Rauch, November 29, 1994).

Conclusion

So what should be the Christian community’s response to moderate gays? Frankly, it is quite easy to derail the radical, outrageous positions of the gay left, with their shallow and unsubstantiated arguments. The moderates, however, are much more thoughtful, reasonable and convincing, particularly to Canadians who are prone to slightly left of center liberalism in social policy.

In 1995, the general synod of the Anglican Church of Canada condemned “bigotry, violence and hatred directed toward anyone due to their sexual orientation (Vancouver Sun, August 8, 1998). I agree. There is no place in a Christian community which extols compassionate love as a paramount virtue, for this type of un-Christian thinking or behaviour. We will simply have to agree to disagree about the moral acceptability of homosexuality, with compassion, and without rancour, and acknowledge that the vast majority of homosexual people simply want to live happy, fulfilled lives without harassment like the rest of us.

We do need to remain vigilant, though, to protect our school system and our churches from the insidious moral relativism advocated by radical homosexuals and their politically correct heterosexual supporters. In a pluralistic society like Canada, no one has the right to impose their view of morality against the wishes of parents, particularly in the public school system. And given the BC School Act’s declaration (Section 95, 2) that “the highest morality shall be inculcated”, there is no room whatsoever for allowing the “gleeful promiscuity” practiced by many gays, and shamelessly advertised in their newspapers, to be portrayed as acceptable moral behaviour in public school classrooms.

The BC Court of Appeal, in overturning Supreme Court Justice May Saunders’ decision to oblige the Surrey School Board to allow gay kindergarten teacher James Chamberlain to use pro-gay materials in his classroom, ruled that “the exclusion of people of faith [in this case school board members] from the public square was not only unjust but unconstitutional” (O’Neil, October 23, 2000). The unanimous ruling declared that parental views about sexual orientation should be respected, and that while specific religions may not be inculcated, moral views based on religion should not be excluded.

Justice Kenneth Mackenzie rhetorically asked:

Are only those with a non-religiously informed conscience to be permitted to participate in decisions involving moral instruction of children in the public school? Must those whose moral positions arise from a conscience influenced by religion be required to leave those convictions behind or otherwise by excluded from participation while those who espouse similar positions emanating from a conscience not informed by religious considerations are free to participate without restriction? A religiously informed conscience should not be accorded any privilege, but neither should it be placed under a disability.

(in O’Neil, October 25, 2000)

Nevertheless, both religious and social leaders have an obligation to ensure that the homosexual minority is treated with decency, and to restrain or confront those who would promote intolerance or hatred.

Christianity requires compassion, not condescension or condemnation towards those whose behaviours we disagree with. It is not only our challenge, but the challenge of gays, both moderate and radical, in their attitudes toward people whose sincerely held religious beliefs will not allow them to accept homosexual behaviour as morally honourable. For gays, above all, know how distressing intolerance, stereotyping, and narrow-minded prejudice can be. When it comes right down to it, the only true barrier to a just society is the hardness of our own hearts.

Chris Kempling

July, 2004

Quesnel, BC

Dr. Chris Kempling Psy.D. R.C.C. Registered Clinical Counsellor, is a marriage and family therapist living in Quesnel, BC Canada, and a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church.
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