Gay Lobby Intolerance Toward Christians in Canada

From the Catholic Educator’s Resource Center, an account of how the gay lobby in Canada has used the power of the state to persecute Christians who disapprove of homosexuality. Here are some examples:

In May 2002, a Catholic high school in Whitby, Ontario, was forced by the Ontario Supreme Court to allow a homosexual student, Marc Hall, to take his boyfriend to the graduation prom, even though the church-run school has strict prohibitions against condoning any kind of homosexual behaviour.

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Mr. Hugh Owen is an evangelical Christian employed as a prison guard. He placed an ad in the Saskatchewan Star Phoenix. The ad was a picture of two stick men holding hands, with a red circle with a bar across, superimposed on them. Below were four scripture references, but not the actual Bible verses. In 2001 he was convicted of a hate crime by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal and forced to pay his three accusers $1500 each. The judge in the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench suggested that using Bible verses in a newspaper ad like this, could be construed as hate literature. So there is now legal precedent in Canada that the Holy Bible is hate literature.

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Stephen Boissoin of Calgary, is an evangelical pastor who wrote a letter to the editor questioning the promotion of homosexuality in the public school system. A University of Calgary professor has charged him with discrimination under the Alberta Human Rights act. Last May, at a fund-raising dinner for him held in a Calgary hotel, masked homosexual thugs burst into the dining room and disrupted the meeting, chanting “Right wing bigots go away, Gay Militia is here to stay.” They carried a banner saying “Liberation: Queer Invasion.” Their tactics remind me of the Nazi Brownshirts of the 1930’s.

Several mayors of Canadian cities have been taken to Human Rights Tribunals for refusing to declare Gay Pride Days in their cities. The most prominent one was Diane Haskett, mayor of London, Ontario. She was found guilty of discrimination in 1997 and fined $10,000. Her sentence was issued during her re-election campaign, and she stopped campaigning. She won re-election by an overwhelming margin anyway. Also targeted were the mayors of Fredricton, New Brunswick, Hamilton, Ontario,(Brad Woodard and Bob Morrow), Kelowna, BC and Oliver, BC, as well as Ernie Reine, the Chief of Police of Regina, Saskatchewan. In the year 2000 every city in British Columbia was threatened with a Human Rights Tribunal lawsuit if they did not proclaim a Gay Pride Day by a group called the Rainbow Coalition. Many cities did, but some cities stopped making proclamations of any kind just to avoid the whole controversy. The Mayor of my town, who is a devout Catholic, refused to sign the proclamation after the city council passed the Gay Pride Day resolution over his objection.

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Prior to the last election, Revenue Canada officials, the tax department, called in representatives of the Catholic and Evangelical Christian churches to warn them that they could lose their charitable status if they tried to influence their members to vote for parties which oppose same sex marriage.

The author, Chris Kempling, goes on to detail the persecution he as subjected to:

Then there’s my case. On May 9th of 2002 I was convicted of conduct unbecoming a member of the BC College of Teachers. The reason was because I expressed my opinion in my local newspaper. Between April 1997 and July, 2000, I wrote one freelance column and six letters to the editor of my town’s newspaper, which questioned the wisdom of promoting the homosexual agenda. I provided factual information on rates of promiscuity and disease infection which had been previously published in scholarly journals. I said that many religions consider homosexuality to be immoral, that it may be caused by negative psycho-social influences, and that it was nothing to be applauded. I said that I would refuse to be a false teacher, compromising my faith to teach information which the Bible clearly says is immoral. I said this not in my classroom, or my staff room, but on the editorial pages of my local newspaper.

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My school district supervisors have also decided to silence me. They have disciplined me repeatedly for speaking out, including for advertising my intention to offer orientation change therapy services through my private practice. On March 31, I must appear before a formal hearing of the Quesnel School Board to explain why I publicly criticized the government’s same sex marriage legislation.

“Tolerance” used to mean that you had a right to disagree with certain behavior, but you were required to allow people to do as they please. The current liberal version of tolerance means you have to approve of all behavior they happen to think is acceptable, and they will punish you if you don’t.