Religious freedoms in Canada: Another hit
November 30, 2005 · By Peter Rempel
For at least a year now, intelligent conservatives have maintained that the Liberals’ same-sex marriage legislation represents a significant threat to religious freedoms in Canada (see here, here, and here for examples). Today we received the first substantiation of those claims:
“The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has ruled in favour of two lesbian women who claim they were discriminated against by a Catholic men’s organization when they booked a hall for their wedding reception in the fall of 2003.”
The ruling is complex and not a complete victory for the complainants, as their weird lawyer, Barbara Findlay, points out. The tribunal ruled that the Knights, “failed in their duty to accommodate the plaintiffs when they refused the rental of the hall to them.” Which leaves one to wonder (and other complainants to test) whether the tribunal would have refused to penalize the Knights had they made more efforts to accomodate the lesbians and, if so, what the thresholds for these accomodations are. I suspect that the threshold will be of the mobile variety: the religious organizations will always come up a few inches short of the required degree. “Ooooh, so close!”
But there are other problems with the judgement. First: The Knights did make accomodations once the hall rental was cancelled. They returned the money and offered to help the lesbians find another venue, but by that point the two had already found a new hall for their reception. Findlay’s assertion that”…they took no steps to respect the dignity of my clients” is nonsense. Second, the tribunal, despite speaking in the appropriate language of compromise between two sets of rights, failed to address whether the lesbians accomodated the religious freedoms of the Knights. The lesbians claimed to have had no clue that the Knights were a religious organization (this despite extensive time in the offices of a religious organization and with its officials) and, while touring the facility and going through the preperations to reserve it, made no mention of the fact that they would be marrying one another. Those are some dicey sets of coincidences if you ask me. And ignorance hardly seems to be an excuse for potentially afronting the religious freedoms of this organization, Findlay’s snide description of “this erstwhile bingo hall” to the contrary notwithstanding.
Today, yet another protection of Canadians’ religious freedoms disappeared.
Crossposted to Rempelia Prime.
I didn’t realize that the renting of halls was a religious freedom. I never came across this in my 4 years of seminary study. I must have skipped that day.
[...] Which is fascinating given the highly principled manner in which the tribunal responded to the complaint of two lesbians against the Knights of Columbus for denying the rental of their convention hall for a gay wedding. As everyone knows, there are lots and lots of places for lesbians to get married in the Lower Mainland and ample evidence that the lesbians chose the Knights of Columbus hall solely to provoke a human rights complaint. And yet the tribunal found that the lesbians had been discriminated against despite the availability of other such facilities. [...]