Double standard on freedom of religion?

Your editorial page on Feb. 11, 2005, makes reference to two different CBC interviews. The first was your reference to the interview that Nunavut MP Nancy Karetak-Lindell had with the CBC on her position on Bill C-38, and then there was the letter from Johanne Coutu-Autut from Rankin Inlet making reference to some comments made by Tagak Curley on a CBC North TV newscast.

With reference to Nancy’s interview, your advice to her is to put her conscience first. I have no problem with that. That is what all elected officials need to do — to be true to their conscience.

You wisely counsel Nancy that “her greatest obligation to her constituents is to give them her best judgment… She cannot rely on her constituents to make the decision for her. By all means, she should listen to them. But in the end, Karetak-Lindell must not allow her constituents to dictate her vote. As a trustee of the public good, her vote is hers, not theirs.”

In the letter to the editor on the same page written about Tagak Curley, however, the author states to Mr. Curley, “You represent all people in your riding. Not everyone shares your personal religious views.”

It is your editorial, together with this letter, which in my view illustrates the double standard that is so evident in the debate on same-sex marriage. The Nunavut MP should vote according to her conscience. We all agree.

But in the case of Mr. Curley, he is being told to keep his conscientious beliefs to himself, and that somehow his public comments on the CBC are out of order, even if they are in line with his conscience and personal belief.

The bottom line is that while church and state are separate, no elected official can separate certain faith assumptions and religious beliefs (be they humanistic or theistic) from public policy. Each, at the end of the day, must vote according to their conscience.

When you say that “freedom of religion is already guaranteed by the Charter of Rights,” it is as clear as the day that this freedom does not include, in the eyes of some, the right of an elected official to state his conscientious beliefs publicly on the CBC. They must be, in that view, completely privatized and not spoken aloud.

Such a view is the antithesis of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, the very first rights that are guaranteed in the Charter. Meanwhile, the Charter is used to justify a humanistic religion, the faith that man, and man alone, is the measure of all things, as the only acceptable state policy and state religion.

The judges become the new civil priests, and their interpretation of the Charter becomes the sacred writings which must be believed by faith that sexual orientation, without any definition whatsoever, is a human right in the same category as ethnicity and gender. That cannot but open the door to a pansexual agenda in which every sexual behaviour is indiscriminate.

To those who say this is nonsense, I ask, “Why don’t you insist that the term ‘sexual orientation’ be defined, then?”

Johanne Coutu-Autut’s comparison of Mr. Tagak Curley’s views to Nazi thought was particularly inappropriate, inasmuch as Mr. Curley, in a 10-minute news feature seen all over the nation of Israel on Channel Two on Feb. 18, was able to communicate to the nation his great love for the Jewish people, as well as for the Arabs.

The facts are, the Jewish people themselves see him as a champion of their right to exist, rather than as an enemy of human rights.

Roger Armbruster
Niverville, Man.