Conservatives Proposing Defence of Religious Freedom Act
October 4, 2006 · By Tom Cerber
Borrowing a page from Ted Morton’s playbook (the recently defeated Bill 208), the federal Conservatives are planning a Defence of Religious Freedom Act to introduce if (and likely,when) the 2nd parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage goes against them.
According to the Globe and Mail:
Without preventive legislation, some government members fear that church groups and individuals would be taken to court for uttering negative remarks about gays that other members of society view as discriminatory.
That is why the measures are being considered in two parts: to protect individuals from having to perform same-sex marriage, and to protect free speech.
The measures the Conservatives are pondering resemble a private member’s bill unveiled this year in the Alberta legislature, which would have allowed civil service marriage commissioners to refuse their services to gays.
That bill, introduced by Alberta MLA and PC leadership candidate Ted Morton, would also have forbidden anyone from being punished legally for speaking out on or acting on their beliefs against gay marriage.
‘Anti-hate laws already exist to protect people from hate-crimes.’
So Lyndon, what do you call it when MPs (public figures, leader of the opposition) from the Lib and Dipper side of the House CONDEMN a chief of staff appointee, personally, for his views on Christianity?
If he was gay, it would be a hate crime? If he was Muslim it would be a hate crime? Because he is Christian, and Conservative, he is fair game for condemnation?
I am pro-gay rights and pro-gay marriage, and not religious by any stretch of the imagination. The display of anti-Christianity from Libgs and Dippers was appalling in the face of the Charter.
Freedom of Religion already exists under the Charter
In theory, but not in practice.
L.S. – I think the fact that it is redundant is the point. You let the Liberals run the country for a while and you find you need to introduce new legislation just to force people to start following the constitution again!
It’s actually kinda sad that this type of legislation is now required.
Lyndon,
white males are not allowed to complain to the human rights commissioner. Not written down anywhere, but a frequently reported reality. Hence the need for legislation because we have so many institutions packed by activists doing the activist thing.
This is great news. We’ll finally get some equal footing here rather than have people force their beliefs on Christians. It’ll tie up the Human Rights Commissioners who tell Christians that they can only be a Christian at home or in their church. Wonder if they would tell homosexuals the same thing?
Well said Jeff.
This issue in particular highlights how ready so many are to live in a bizarre world where two persons of the same sex can marry, where stating the obvious fact that they cannot—that whatever relation they have is not marriage, nor could it ever be, even if legal—is decried as bigotry and hate.
Whereas freedom of expression attained the benefits of marriage for such spiritually disoriented individuals, those same individuals are more than willing to deny freedom of expression to those who refuse to believe a lie: that same sex marriage is actually marriage.
Having denuded their own intelligence so that stupid notions are more palatable, they can’t stand being told the truth, the very thought that the charade of same sex marriage might not stand the test of time.
Check out the last paragraph of the quote in the post.
Now, what if someone claimed that it was their religious duty to attack any gay couple getting married? That act would be legal under this sort of legislation.
You guys are awfully homophobic. Kinda sad in this day in age.
The reporter wasn’t quoting the legislation verbatim, idiot.
Lyndon: Sometimes broken records need to play for stupid people wake up, hear the broken record, and recognise it’s time to move on.
Did you read my last post?
First, I did not dispute that SSM is legal in Canada.
Second, calling out flawed logic based on false assumptions is easier said than done. Try giving it a proof some time.
The legal argument in Canada for SSM is that it is an “equality right,” guaranteed under s. 15 of the Charter, “sexual orientation” having been read into the Charter. This is a bolony! The only thing equivalent about SSM and real marriage is the numerical value of two, and that’s completely arbitrary.
Various narratives that people tell, on various subjects, can be offensive to religious dogma, OR offensive to common sense, OR both. And causing offense to common sense is the more dangerous of the two because it means a certain constituency is wilfully ignoring, rebelling against, the prima facie (obvious) truth of the matter. SSM as an equality right is offensive to both! SSM as anything resembling marriage is offensive to both!
Even if SSM is legal, it’s still not marriage, it never will be marriage, and everyone knows this is true. The commitment between a man and a woman that is marriage constitutes a unique human relationship that two persons of the same sex cannot equivalently replicate. Furthermore, the relation of two women to each other is unique and fundamentally different to the relation of two men to each other, because men and women are DIFFERENT … obviously!
The inability of a growing segment of society and the legal establishment to recognise obvious common sense truths — that SSM is not equivalent to marriage — that SSM is offense to common sense — makes further protection of freedom of conscience, expression, and, particularly, religion, a pressing matter of concern.
How people move on from hearing a broken record is a good measure of where they will end up, for better or worse.
Broken records taken for broken records are sometime mistaken friends, friends who implore that conversation start with the basics to arrive the truth of the matter.
The basics here are that differences of sex matter in human relationships, and everyone knows this to be true with respect to marriage.
No further dithering required, thanks to Mr. Facino: http://www.thepolitic.com/arch.....y-follies/
Lyndon, stop dicking around and speak to why what I said is materially false; which you are hard pressed to do because it is true.
If you won’t do that, maybe you can answer a few simple questions:
Are men and women different? how so?
On what grounds do a married man and woman, have an equivalent relationship to two committed homosexual women? two committed homosexual men? and how do each differ?
What is marriage?
If marriage is reduced to a contract between two consenting adults, why only two? to what end should these contracts exist?
Why might people who are NOT religious and DO NOT hate homosexuals, some of them being homosexuals, object to same sex marriage?
More generally, you seem to struggle with living in the real world, so:
Why do words matter?
Hmm, reality is what the state says it is. If you say so. But who are you, in this context?
On these nominalist themes, I’d encourage readers to look back at one of my old posts on the problems with thinking reality is socially constructed.
Read Cerber’s past post. All will be made clear!
As for my questions, your answers:
“Men have a penis, women have a vagina. This has nothing to do with the legal arrangement between the two.”
It doesn’t? As an aside, ever looked into the case law on rape?
Since you aren’t interested in dating girls, maybe you don’t appreciate how many woman would brand you an insensitive and vulgar jerk for thinking this is the chief difference between the sexes. No doubt, many a feminist would thoroughly enjoy squeezing your balls until they were blue while you writhe in agony, until, of course, you retract or elaborate on your seeming ignorance.
Feminists have long argued, and correctly, that being a man and being a women make for different physiological experiences of reality. Men have a penis, yes, but they also have higher levels of testosterone and can partake of creature comforts that women miss out on; hmmm, they can pee standing up; they don’t go AWOL every four weeks because they’re PMSing; they never have to worry about getting pregnant; they are generally more prone to violent outbursts, which can be a good thing. Apart from having boobs [you missed those, tsk tsk] and vaginas, women have experiences and inclinations that men often times struggle to fathom; the urge to find a man who will tenderly love them; the urge to have children; the urge to nest once they have children; for career woman, the sense that a hammer will soon fall if they don’t hurry and find a way to balance career and family. The differences that can be listed due to different physiologies goes on and on.
For our purposes, we don’t have to give a detailed account of how men and women are different, we just have to recognise that they are different. And because they are different, sex matters in human relationships. Two men cannot have the same relationship as two women, just as neither can have the same relationship as a man and a women. To state the obvious, only a man and woman can have sex and potentially produce children, only men can truly be fathers and women mothers, and, more generally, men can only empathise with women because they cannot know what it means to be a woman, experientially, and vice versa (this is where both being reasonable is crucial).
To pretend that the human relationship that is marriage, between a man and a woman, is somehow equivalent to that between two men or two women (that even these are equivalent) beyond the arbitrary number two, is just that, PRETENDING.
Human beings do a lot of pretending over the course of their lives, but they get into trouble when they take their pretending selves too seriously, losing sight of basic markers of truth in the real world; because there is a real world that they must inhabit with each other. [Think of the sheer pretentiousness of the language of "sexual orientation," now commonly understood; a far cry from what the psychologists who created the concept were trying to explain.]
Marriage has evolved in step with civil society.
Marriage has historically been polygamist, but it get’s limited to two because only one man and one woman can produce one child; this being a sexually balanced family arrangement. Poligamy has historically been decried as oppressive to women and socially unstable because men, no longer required to commit to just one wife, can take as many as they want, soon competing with their sons — who they soon banish — for each new girl that can be married (re: lost boys in Utah). Polygamy fails to balance off the sexes in family, thereby failing to respect women, leaving many young men to fend for themselves, for better or worse.
As for non-religious objection to same sex marriage, it’s because it offends common sense. Same sex marriage will always be same sex marriage, because sex matters in human relationships. To pretend that two people of the same sex can actually get married is pretentious in the extreme, and earnestly so, because it denies that there is something unique about marriage between one man and one woman.
As for the last question, about why words matter, I’m not going to tell you the answer. But when you find the answer you will understand your fallacy follies.
Look, if you want to make pretense of entering into cosmic willy waggling bliss with another dude, then go ahead. It’s a free country! I just fail to see how that entitles you to the legal benefits of marriage when you aren’t getting married.
Should I ever get invited to such a union, I would no doubt bring a gift; maybe a setting of china for the “fabulous” dinner parties that would ensue. While sincere, I could hardly be all that serious about it, rather a note on friendship and good fun.
“your argument is based on treating men and women differently under the law”
I was illustrating the point that men and women ARE different, which feminists say as well, because it’s true.
Furthermore, men and women ARE treated differently under the law; consider infant circumcision, case law with regard to rape, and various other “reproductive rights” that don’t affect men because they don’t have the same physiology.
Do you think this is inherently bad? how could it be otherwise? should not the law give some consideration to the fact that men and women are different?
Look, what some distilled and crisp version of feminist thought might articulate is not the point, and there is a wide divergence of feminist opinion.
The point is: MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT! Men and women have different physiological experiences of reality by virtue of having different physiologies. That’s not to say one sex is more reasonable than the other, rather that they come at reason from fundamentally different physiological experiences. In other words, it means something different to BE a man than to BE a woman. Relationships between one man and one woman are fundamentally unique, visa vis two men and two women, which are also unique to each other. Sappho wrote about love between women, NOT men (she was a she afterall), and you’re ignorantly over-generalising if you conclude otherwise, that she just wrote “some homosexual love poems”.
What this all means, as gay marriage has been justified in Canada, is that THERE IS NO EQUALITY RIGHT HERE! How could there be since SSM is not an equivalent human relationship to marriage?
As Cerber aptly points out, the gay marriage fight is one over the right to use a word. Gay marriage advocates don’t seem to appreciate that human beings, in the real world, will always distinguish (in some form) between “gay marriage” and marriage; they’re phenomenally different human relationships.
Yes, but the Marriage Act is not about biological differences. It is about shared property rights, tax rights, pensions, survivor benefits, and the seperation of shared property when the marriage is disolved. And to say that someone cannot have the same rights as another person, based on their sex, is exactly an equality right. The religious right used their “anti-gay” and “freedom of speach” spins to garner the support they required to get more donations and fight the political machine.
Lets break it down to make it easy.
Person 1: Man wants to get married.
Choice: Man or Woman (as long as it is not a blood relative, the person is of legal age, and only one person).
Old Marriage Act
Person 1 could not marry who he chose based on the other person’s sex (i.e. could not marry a man, because he was a man… the end)
This equals discrimination based on sex (not sexuality – the law didn’t say gay people couldn’t get married… just that two people of the same sex could not marry).
Ammended Marriage Act.
Person 1 can marry who he choses as long as it is not a close relative that is of the age of concent and it is only one person.
Leave it to George to throw in irrellivant arguments to cloud the issue at hand. This is not about sexuality, it is about discrimination based on sex where biology has nothing to do with the legal rights and responsibilities outlined in the act (where as female circumcision and abortion do).
It just happened that gays and lesbians want to marry people of the same sex. This bull-crap about people reading sexuality into the Charter only clouds the issue. And the issue being, before the ammendment, people were being excluded from the privelege and responsibilities outlined in the Marriage Act because of their sex.
“to say that someone cannot have the same rights as another person, based on their sex, is exactly an equality right. The religious right used their “anti-gay†and “freedom of speach†spins to garner the support they required to get more donations and fight the political machine.”
What are you talking about? how does this relate to what I have said?
“Leave it to George to throw in irrellivant arguments to cloud the issue at hand. This is not about sexuality, it is about discrimination based on sex where biology has nothing to do with the legal rights and responsibilities outlined in the act (where as female circumcision and abortion do).”
This is not about sexuality? Are you trying to completely undermine the gay rights movement?
Stop being a moron and think! Human beings are always discriminating between differences in the real world. Discrimination is how human beings act with good judgement, tell right from wrong, or just consciously do one thing or another. Sex is one of those differences in the real world, so what’s your point?
Lyndon, marrying another dude is not the same as if you were to marry a girl. Obviously! You can’t have sex with another dude, for what sex is, and produce children. Marriage is a unique human relationship between a man and a woman. Two persons of the same sex are not entitled to the benefits of marriage by claiming they have an equivalent relationship to marriage when they do not.
Why two person marriage? not three? not four? etc.
What on earth makes any commitment you make with another man equivalent to marriage when HE IS A MAN, NOT A WOMAN?
There are homosexuals who understand this point, what’s wrong with you?
You are trying to muddy the waters of moral clarity so that you don’t have to live in a real world that seemingly irritates you, a world of both men and women. Apart from any misogynist tendencies, maybe you are simply regretting and trying to reconcile yourself with the stupid notions of sexuality by which you have hereto directed your life.
You’re right.
I’m sorry for the last paragraph, which was untoward.
[...] It looks like the Defense of Religion Act floated a few weeks ago is on the right side of public opinion, if not that of the CBC and the Liberal Party: The Conservative government has proposed introducing a defence of religions act that would allow officials to refuse to perform gay marriages, protect the free speech of anti-gay religious leaders and protect organizations that refuse to do business with gays and lesbians. The COMPAS poll suggested there would be significant public support for such a move, with 72% of those contacted for the survey saying that clergy should have the right not to marry a same-sex couple if it runs counter to their beliefs. [...]
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