Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Bible declared hate literature

Human rights tribunal fines advertiser for quoting the Bible

Hugh Owens may well be the first Canadian ever fined for quoting the Bible. But unless Canadian Christians wake up from their apathetic slumbers and mount a counterattack against the persecutorial tyranny of kangaroo court human rights commissions, he won't be the last.

The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission has ordered both Owens and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix newspaper to pay $1,500 to three homosexualist activists for publishing an ad in the newspaper quoting, verbatim and without annotation, Bible verses pertaining to homosexuality.

The ruling issued by the sole adjudicator, lawyer Valerie Watson, also prohibits Owens, who purchased the ad, from "further publishing or displaying the bumper stickers submitted in evidence in a newspaper or any other medium," and prohibits The StarPhoenix from accepting the ad for future publication.

The ruling wasn't exactly a surprise. In a column about the case (which has dragged on for years) back in 1999 I wrote: "If recent history is any guide, the result of this hearing is a foregone conclusion, but one hopes that if the HRC does declare the Bible to be hateful, it will finally jolt Canadian Christians out of their somnolent torpor."

As American social scientist Thomas Sowell observes: "If you are free only when others think you are right, then you are not free at all."

It's not at all surprising that homosexualists are offended by the Bible's unequivocal condemnation of homosexual behaviour (although not, it must be emphasized, of persons who engage in it). Despite concerted efforts at liberal revisionism on this issue, for orthodox Christians and Jews who consider the Bible authoritative, homosexual acts are non-negotiably sinful and unacceptable. As Rabbi Steven Kaplan of the Saskatoon Jewish Centre testified at the Owens so-called hearing: "The Bible is the Bible is the Bible; it cannot be changed."

That infuriates the politically correct who seek to stifle any public contradiction of what they have decided is right. For example, noted theologian the Rev. Brent Hawkes of Toronto's Metropolitan Community Church who testified as an expert witness at the tribunal, allowed that the Bible means only to condemn pedophilia. I would be fascinated to hear Hawkes expand on his revisionist views regarding the "true meaning" of Genesis 19:5, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Judges 19:22, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, and 1 Timothy 1:10

Hawkes also declared that Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews will be punished by God for maintaining that the practice of homosexuality is wrong and characterized fundamentalist Biblical interpretations as "satanic." Predictably, the one-woman tribunal chose to accept Hawkes' Biblical exegesis over that of Kaplan.

The speech-chilling "human rights" agenda of course collides head-on with Canadians' supposedly constitutionally protected freedoms of speech, expression and religion.

As The Edgefield Journal's Lake High Jr. observes: "So, in Canada we see that even writing freedoms into law doesn't do any good when leftists hold power. . . . When leftists achieve absolute power they simply say a law means only what they want it to mean. . . . In other words, Political Correctness is the law in Canada."

Homosexuals certainly enjoy freedom of speech and expression in Canada. Gay advocacy journalism pours forth relentlessly from the pages of every major newspaper in the country. Many cities have declared "Gay Pride Days" complete with parades featuring X-rated displays of public lewdness and explicit anti-religious mockery that would have been a ticket to the slammer or the psychiatric ward even 20 years ago.

This sort of thing is profoundly, hurtfully offensive to Christians and to devout adherents of other religions as well, which is presumably its intent. But of course the human rights "hate-policing" doesn't extend to anti-Christian speech and expression.

What's next? Forced "re-education?"

Most churches, shamefully, have laid low and kept silent in these debates. However, at some point, Christians will be obliged to clearly choose which side they are on - that of the Bible and the 2,000 years of Christian tradition that founded and built Western culture, or the side of the revisionist moral relativism and secular humanism that are doing their utmost to destroy that culture.

Activist courts and human rights commissions are no longer the thin edge of the wedge in the persecution of Christians for their faith, and of anyone else who holds opinions unacceptable to the political correctness mafia. They are the battering ram crashing through the door.

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