Time Immortal

The Alberta Human Rights Commission hasn’t quite gotten to that point, and so is not quite on par with e.g. the government of Iran. However, it should be noted that the lengths that the AHRC is demanding that Christians go to in order to distribute materials or host a teaching retreat certainly smacks of the various controls and pressures that the Soviet state exerted on the Russian churches.

Consider:

The couple was very concerned about their freedoms here in Canada because they’re offering a teaching on Biblical sexuality that is based in the Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) and a small part of their teaching does address homosexuality as sin. They were thinking about cancelling due to risk of prosecution but I encouraged them to keep it in the church and they should be ok. Still apprehensive, the couple decided to contact the Alberta Human Rights Commission to enquire about the legalities surrounding their presentation. You can read the phone log of the conversation with Ralph Roman an officer of the AHRC below.

An interesting point here is that this couple was advised by Ralph Roman to get a lawyer to draft a consent form and to also have the person declare that they will keep it private and not make the information public.” …PLUS…, she was advised to have the curriculum reviewed by the Police. Ralph Roman went on to inform her that even with a consent form there was still no guarantee that a complaint could not be filed IF someone was offended….like a teacher for instance.

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He said the following recommendations were the responsibility of the people who invited me, not my responsibility.

2. Ask the church to get a signed consent form from everyone, parents and children, everyone, stating that they are not forced to attend and are there of their own free will. Later he added that this consent should be drawn up by a lawyer who is familiar with the human rights Laws.

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4. The church needs to contact the education people and take a curriculum of the program and demonstrate that it is an educational program that is not unwelcome by the group there and everyone is there by consent. Also, the church needs to ask the education people if a license is required. At this point Ralph was uncertain and seemed to think a license would be helpful if problems occurred.

5. The church needs to contact the police to make sure they do not view the program as bordering on criminal activity—need to show them the curriculum so they know what is going on and do not arrive on the scene.

I told Ralph I would be dealing with the “hookup mentality” of this generation and teaching abstinence. He said that is a religious belief that lots of people have, but it cannot be forced on anyone and not taught to anyone who is not a part of the group.

I then told Ralph that the church had already distributed a CD of mine to each of their families to prepare for the retreat that had some statements on it about homosexuals. He said that they needed a consent form from each family that this was not unwelcome material and that their kids would not be talking about any of it in the schools.

Welcome to Alberta. You have papers, yes? Papers please!

So now it appears that it is legitimate for the state (here taken to mean the province of Alberta) to infringe upon, and to regulate, religious expression, subjecting each and every aspect of it to supervision and approval by the relevant state organ?

Good gravy…what country is this?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

If you’re not reading ProWomanProLife, O Reader, you’re missing out. Case in point:

I once read that abortion was the right to kill in order to protect the right to copulate. Since then, I have never ceased to be amazed at the lengths we are willing to go to protect these “rights.”

Case in point: We worry more about the effect of estrogen from contraceptive pills on the smallmouth bass of the Potomac river than on the women who take it daily.

Would that women’s hormonal health was as significant as that of the smallmouth bass of the Potomac watershed.

One possible response to the above is that, quite simply, we value the lives and well-being of other (non-human) animals more than we value the lives and well-being of other human beings. After all, it would be a terrible thing if all the smallmouth bass went extinct. Equally, it would be a terrible thing if, for whatever reason, men and women started taking responsibility for their own sexuality, or started acting with moral reasoning in regard to said same. That might imply that they were something more than animals, and that there was something more relevant to our moral decision making than raw desire and animal instinct…and in our secular world, we wouldn’t want people thinking like that! Besides, we have to save the smallmouth bass!

So apparently the Senate, already being expert in the field of national governance, have expanded their knowledge base to include cutting-edge theology. Or perhaps “bleeding heart Theology” — I can’t really tell anymore.

My respect for Senator Anne Cools has gone up a few more notches, however. Though a member of the unelected portion of the Canadian government, she displays a level-headedness and clarity of principle that the and NDP seem completely devoid of, that the Bloc Quebecois sometimes displays but limits in focus to Quebec, and that the Conservative Party could display if they ever stopped trying to placate both the Liberal government and the liberal media.

I wonder exactly where the fundamental understanding of Jesus and His message goes wrong with Senator Marilyn Trenholme Counsell. On the surface, it seems she thinks of our Lord as some sort of hip swinger, someone who’d permit anything in the name of being “fair”.

Not exactly the picture of Jesus painted in the Gospels, is it? Certainly, Jesus’s message was one of peace and understanding, and certainly He tore down many barriers between Jew and Gentile, man and woman, slave and master, invader and invaded. He preached that all were equal in God’s eyes, and never turned away those who sought him.

Okay, that part sounds kind of like the picture our Senator paints. But is that the whole picture of Jesus?

As I recall it, if people came to Jesus as sinners, one of the first things He would do is ask them to repent and sin no more. If people came to Jesus who were sinners but did not realize it, or thought their actions permissible/moral/justified, He would correct them, often in a very direct and sometimes harsh way. He was especially harsh with the self-righteous authorities, those convinced of the correctness of their ways because of their status in society (not unlike, I would wager, a certain Senator I could name).

When he stopped the stoning of the adulterous woman, He did not condone her sin. He stood up not in support of her right to fornicate herself silly — instead, He stood up against the hypocrisy of those would would overlook their own sin in their zeal to condemn her, since all sins are equal in magnitude before God. And when her would-be executioners had left, He turned to her and (much more gently, but firmly nonetheless) told her to end her sinful practice.

When Jesus met the woman at the well in Galilee, He treated her as an equal, a valued child of God and a person. He did not condone her five (or was it six? Curse my memory…) marriages, nor the fact that she was shacking up with someone she was not married to (note: tacit condemnation of common-law relationships, people!). In fact, He pointed these things out to her as an example of her sin, and His frankness with her inspired her to repent.

Would Jesus support gay-marriage legislation? I think anyone who claims to speak for Jesus, as our Senator has done, is guilty of blasphemy, and so I won’t come out with a “yes” or “no” answer. But I will leave this parting thought:

Christian moral philosophy teaches that proper sexual relations have two seperate but indivisible parts: unification and procreation. If a couple engages in sexual union that is open to one but blocks the other, this is a sin, because it violates the natural order and God’s intention for humanity. Proper sexual relationships should be a joining, strengthening force in the lives of the couple, but the couple should always be open to the possibility of bringing forth a child. (And no, this isn’t the Monty Python conflation that “every time they have sex, they have to have a baby”.)

Bearing that in mind, and assuming for just a moment that the Church has got something right in its understanding after 2000 years of ministry, one has to ask whether a homosexual union qualifies. Certainly, I will be the first to concede that homosexual sexual relations, like heterosexual relations, can be unitive in nature. I admit that’s speculation on my part, having never had a homosexual affair myself, but I would wager it likely. But even in that case, that’s only part of the puzzle, isn’t it? And we could start the debate over artificial insemination and surrogacy, but let’s cut to the chase on that one: procreation, in its natural state, involves one zygote from each partner in the sexual union, so that the child will be biologically related to both of the people it will come to know as “parents”. Wake me when that’s possible in a non-heterosexual setting.

And really, given that same-sex marriage is already a morally contentious issue, do we really need to open the “embryos debate” can of worms too?

Do I support “equal rights” for homosexuals? That depends on what you mean. As I understand it, they are human too, and as such already have equal rights under the law in Canada, even before the various related Supreme Court filings. Should they not be discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality? My first answer is yes. But I think even there I need to disclaim. I think respect is a two-way street, and I think that homosexual lobbyists should not force their agenda on those whose personal beliefs hold the homosexual lifestyle as immoral. That means no bullying town mayors who don’t want to take part in “Pride” days. That means accepting that religions institutions may not condone promotion of that lifestyle in their classes. That even means accepting that some churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples will refuse to perform marriages for homosexual couples…not because they are discriminatory, but because for them the morality of the issue is anything but settled. And in return, I say that yes, homosexuals should not be targets of hate crimes, should not be denied employment (see caveat above), and should continue to enjoy the same full legal protection of the that they have since its institution in 1982.

But, as Anne Cools noted in the Senate debate: “Marriage is not now and has never been a right…No sacrament of the church has ever been a right.”