By Dipo Ola

4th of August, 2003.

Finally after years and months of getting agendas rammed down their throat and having their values defined by politically correct clergy and politicians, the Catholic Church in Canada has woken up. Predictably it is a Bishop from the West, Alberta, who warned the Prime Minister of the catastrophic moral consequences of supporting Same-sex marriages. On the 31st of July, the President of the Ontario Conference of Bishops, Jean-Louise Plouffe challenged the frontrunner of the Liberal party leadership contest, Paul Martin, noting that he was kidding himself if he thought he could be a good Roman Catholic and a supporter of same-sex marriage at the same time. It would appear that the Catholic Church in Canada, rather than being ‘bullied’ by the Vatican (as constantly alleged by gay-rights advocates), has been prodded by the Vatican into realizing that its very soul is being eroded by the life-long politicians both within the church and the government who choose politics over principle/values.


There are those who would argue that faith has no place in politics. According to Michael Leshner, a recently wed gay-man in Toronto: ‘The Charter of Rights trumps the Bible.’ Well, that is the fundamental fallacy that must be confronted. For people who are agnostic there is obviously no problem with that statement, but for people who profess to be Christians, and especially Ministers who profess to act in obedience to God, the essence of Christianity is that the law of God is supreme. Even among people who are not Christians, there is a moral code which is not entirely escapable. That was why the Nuremberg trials of 1945 – 1949 refused to excuse mass murderers who complained that they had merely been soldiers or officers following orders. In the present situation, there is a higher morality that must guide all human beings who claim to be people of faith and whenever that higher morality loses its relevance to them, they can no longer claim to be people of faith. In response to Bishop Jean-Louise Plouffe’s words, Paul Martin asserted that a politician must have ‘a wider perspective’ than his or her personal faith when it comes to political policy. That may be so, but a politician cannot totally exclude his personal faith in matters of public policy when a large portion of the people who elected him to office did so because of their perception that he shared common values and faith with them. That is quite simply put, fraudulent and unconscionable. If Mr. Martin wants faith to play an insignificant factor in his public policy decisions, then he should make it clear to voters that he is not a man of faith, and voters will then be able to make an informed decision on who to vote for. On the contrary however, Mr. Martin has seemingly put his faith right on his sleeve, and is said to clearly seek out churches to attend, whenever he is on the road. In other words he wants the benefits of obvious faith (votes from Christians) but not the responsibilities of faith (fidelity to morality).


As a lawyer who has studied Constitutional law, I am unable to pinpoint the part of the Charter that says that politicians must completely ignore their faith and their constituencies’ faith/values, in making political decisions. In fact the Charter seems to indicate that everyone is free to hold and sustain their beliefs as long as they do not trample upon the rights of others. The only question is whether it is a fundamental right of people who adopt a deviant lifestyle, to impose that lifestyle upon the majority of the population in disregard of the values/faith of the majority. In order to answer this question the majority of the population has to decide WHAT exactly their values/faith and this is usually done with reference to their faith. Consequently, the real issue here appears to be the politically correct or scripture-ignorant minority attempting to deprive the majority of their Rights under the Charter, to freedom of religion.


The argument that there should be a separation of Church and State in this issue is a patently fallacious, even casuistic argument for two reasons. First because there is no separation of Church and State under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On the contrary, Section 2 of that Charter specifically grants citizens the right to freedom of religion of conscience. This would seem to grant religious leaders the right to speak on the present issue, and would also seem to grant rights to citizens to act and vote based on their conscience and religion.  Secondly, the very institution of marriage in North America is based on the Judeo-Christian teachings and precepts that have to a large extent been incorporated into the common and civil law codes over hundreds of years. Anybody can perform whatever acts they want in private with whoever they want, but nobody should be entitled to use the very institution (marriage, whether Church or registry based) spawned by Judeo-Christian teachings to formalize the very depravity that the teachings condemn. 


Until now the Church for the most part has been shamefully silent on this evolving insanity except for Churches like the United Church of Canada which have actually gone so far as to endorse same sex partnerships. The Anglican Church of which I used to be a member has been gradually diluting its stand on the issue (as in other issues) and both in England and in Canada, the word ‘Anglican’ has grown synonymous with confusion, acrimony and politically-diluted values. Apart from the Catholic Church, The Pentecostals in the U.S. have been for the most part the only consistently scripture-obedient Church, and they have taken the usual criticisms of being ‘racist’, ‘bigoted’, ‘inflexible’. In the present age, principle, discipline and fidelity to scripture is tantamount to all those labels, but the good thing now is that it would be tough for anyone to call the Pope racist or bigoted. Sure there are those who feel that the Pope and most obedient Catholics are bigoted dinosaurs from the past who should be ignored, but if these people say what they are thinking, then the substance of their sweet, syrupy politically correct words will be exposed for what it is –  scorn for faith, scripture and moral traditions. And so they stick with words like ‘the need for tolerance’, ‘diversity’ and ‘equal rights’. By doing that they deceive those who are susceptible by virtue of their ignorance or who are so anxious to be ‘progressive’ that they fail to appreciate the difference between progressiveness and moral chaos.


According to Bishop Henry who spoke on CBC Television on the 1st of August: ‘What we’re attempting to do right now is try to wake up the laity who, by and large, have been pretty passive and sitting on their hands on this particular issue,” The Bishop further pointed  out that  parishioners must be encouraged to speak out against any move by their government to change the traditional, legally recognized definition of marriage because they have a responsibility to communicate their views and values to the Prime Minister and other politicians. Again, as the Bishop stated in an article in the Globe and Mail on August 2, 2003, ‘_There cannot be two parallel lives: on the one hand, the so-called “spiritual” life, with its values and demands, and on the other, the so-called “secular” life in a family, at work, and in the social realm of public life and culture.” The Bishop is dead-right, and hopefully Catholics and other Christians will take his words to heart. The Catholic Church has made many mistakes in its history, most recently in not promptly addressing sexual abuse within the church (a fact constantly used by its detractors to demean the Church) but that does not deprive it of the right to remind the Catholic/Christian public on what the scriptures say. It has been wrong before but it is right now. And not a moment too soon.

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