WE’LL TAKE IT: Freedom Wins a Round in Court Ruling
Finally, some good news, after so much bad news.
For a while now, the PC police have been on the march.
It began with such subtlety, that many didn’t even see it coming. Some still don’t.
Without the proper context, this victory might not seem such a big deal. But it IS a big deal. It is a big deal specifically because this is the first shift in momentum we have seen in a very long time. Let’s back up a bit… to before we lived under the ultimatum.
Which ultimatum? You know: yield to the new morality, or be punished for it.
Punishment did not seem very menacing in the beginning. Sneers. Finger-wagging, and some name-calling. School-yard stuff, really.
Being called names, like some variation of “out of touch” didn’t seem such a big deal at first.
C’mon, really. How big a deal is this little minority group (roughly 2% of the total population by this reckoning) in the real-world day-to-day life?
Then they wrapped their position in the sacrosanct mantle of human rights (the irony will appear later), and cast all objections as outright hatred.
The way words were used began to change. Next came the laws.
There was some resistance, but not too much.
With common-law marriages, single parents, and commonplace divorce, this new variable was just another way that some people happened to live. The nuclear family had long since begun to erode. And with it, the shock factor was already gone.
Some areas — the redefinition of marriage, for example — put up more rigid resistance. But by this time, the tide of cultural momentum was already in their favour. For the militant cultural warriors, it was just a matter of riding their wave to the inevitable victory.
Soon, it wasn’t enough to be permitted to live life as they wished. Emboldened, the censorship began. Censorship of those who would object to it.
The workplace began to change. New legal obligations and protections were written. It became a consideration in hiring practices, a way to get promoted.
Where did it go from there? The full strength of the legal system was harnessed.
Bakeries were targeted for refusing to produce a wedding cake. Pastors were ordered by the courts never to speak against something explicitly mentioned as sin in their own Holy Writ.
(How is this possible, since the laws permitting homosexual union explicitly give protection to those who object for religious reasons? The preferred tactic of so many tyrants: selective and unequal enforcement of the law.)
Quasi-judicial Human Rights Tribunals were used as kangaroo courts as judge/jury/executioner rubber-stamping complaints. In Canada, one Christian Charity had to change its Code of Conduct requirements.
In England, it went one step further: one man spent time in jail because a passerby claimed to overhear him affirming an opinion that homosexuality was sin in the eyes of God.
In Canada, this “crusade” took a different dark turn.
A Canadian private school (Trinity Western) has a track record of producing exemplary students. It is privately-owned, and receives no government money. Tuition is high. But students like it. They even like the code of conduct they’ve signed. It calls the student body to a high standard of personal conduct, in all areas of their life. It also affirms a traditional view of holy matrimony. And there’s the problem.
Because of this, their graduates are being forbidden by some provincial law societies to take the Bar Examination.
Let me say that again: because they have affirmed (among other things) that the Bible describes marriage according to the traditional meaning, these graduates are disqualified from practising law. This new social order is very much a caste system, and traditional Christians are to be counted among the “Dalit” class in this new caste system.
And there’s the Human Rights irony I promised.
But Trinity Pushed back. This isn’t the first time, either. Last time around (2001), Trinity won their case when their teaching program was the center of attention. The court found in their favor.
And now, the Lawyers are trying to succeed where the teachers failed: to prevent a college that does not adopt mainline secular assumptions to educate those who will one day shape our culture. (And that’s really the point, isn’t it? Their side wanting exclusive access to positions of societal influence and power?)
Now we’ve come to the good news.
Trinity has won this round. It was expensive. The fight isn’t over. But in at least one of the 3 provinces where their graduates were forbidden to practice law, this ban was struck down as unconstitutional.
The fight will still be a long one.
But for now, at least?
For now, we can be encouraged by the fact that the fight is hard… but it isn’t hopeless.
Image: http://curr530fall09.wikispaces.com/Elements+of+Effective+Curriculum
