Hair thinning legislation introduced in Canada; critics compare Amendment C-367 to the laws of Communist China.
Some organs of the so-called progressive press try to ridicule or present the fact of the persecution of Christians in the West as non-existent - most recently they served up the statement of State Secretary Miklós Soltész, who spoke of dismissals and prisons for those who profess Christianity.
Of course, the persecution of Christians in the West cannot be compared to the rest of the world, where Open Doors reports that almost five thousand people have been killed for their Christian faith, mainly in Africa, and a total of 365 million people have been persecuted for the same reason. No,
the persecution of Christians in the West is rather a product of the restriction of freedom of religion and speech, of the basic ideals on which liberal democracies were once built.
In many ways, Canada is an example, sometimes even a pioneer, of this trend; just a few flavors:
In 2013, the Canadian Supreme Court classified the Bible-based criticism of homosexuality as a hate crime (in connection with an otherwise really homophobic leaflet).
In 2017, a law was passed here in Ontario that allows children to be separated from their families in the same way if they refuse to accept and encourage their child's rights related to their LGBTQ identity
In 2021, a divorced dad, Robert Hoogland, was jailed here after calling his biologically female minor child his daughter despite a court order
In 2022, we returned to the Christian aspect of things, as it was also banned, citing so-called conversion therapies, for anyone to give advice promoting a family model based on Christian teachings, or
"which reinforces the idea that human beings are created entirely male or female from birth."
And we have just arrived at the end of November last year, when the infamous bill C-367 of individual representative Yves-François Blanchet passed the first reading in the lower house of the Canadian legislature. In this regard, the conservative lobby organization Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) recently launched a campaign, urging everyone to call their district representatives and reject the proposal. The conservative news site Life Stite News directly compared the proposal to anti-religious Chinese Communist legislation.
For those who oppose the LGBTQ ideology on religious grounds, section 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code offered protection, the conservative organization points out. According to that
"no one shall be convicted of a [hate crime]... if that person has, in good faith, expressed an opinion, or attempted to express an opinion based on a religious subject or religious text".
This is how several Canadian pastors managed to avoid punishment for hate speech, who openly shared their opinion in public about the harmful moral and spiritual nature of LGBTQ movements.
In other words, if they read what the Bible said about sexuality, gender, marriage, family or anything else, no matter how unpopular, offensive or even hateful it seemed to others, the right of self-expression belonged to those who did so - that is, that they read from the Bible.
And the C-367 serves no other purpose than to eliminate this.
The largest public opinion polling company, Léger, surveyed Canadian public opinion on the issue in mid-February, but at the same time it is worth observing their narrative - which initially focused on hate speech and not on freedom of speech - that the bill would "remove the privilege currently granted to religions or religious authorities on hate speech in Canada”. When asked this way, 66 percent of Canadians agreed with the amendment.
As the CLC points out, if the amendment to the law is passed,
"expectedly, we will see a flood of accusations against pastors, churches, Christian organizations and ordinary believers who dare to speak the truth with love in the public space"
- in a more abstract sense
the victim of the whole story will be freedom of speech. Everyone's
“we can no longer publicly share God's plan for human sexuality and marriage. We will no longer be able to speak out in the name of God against shows that influence children, child abuse or encouraging a child to change their gender, because this will be hate speech against the LGBTQ community in the eyes of the law, even pro-life messages can be hate speech against women," the post lists. .
While, in principle, the representative who introduced it justified the proposal by taking action against anti-Semitic hate speech, which could easily be fought against based on the current hate speech laws.
By the way, in Western Europe (and especially in the United Kingdom), there are already plenty of examples of what it looks like to carry out a hate crime by reading the Bible, if clauses like the one in Canada do not protect religious beliefs and freedom of speech.
Such was the case of the preacher John Dunn, for example, who was arrested in November 2020 for alleged homophobia (he essentially did the same thing that the Canadian bill now opposes: he preached on Swindon High Street about the biblical definition of marriage and sexuality; two accused him, but did not participate at the trial, so the case was dropped; two preachers from Bristol were not so lucky, however, and they were fined for disturbing the public order.
According to a relevant report (presumably Soltész was also referring to this), the religion of priests and preachers suffered a total of 168 cases of abuse in Western countries between January 2020 and December 2023, including arrests and fines in a total of 16 countries - precisely because of what the Canadian legislation was designed for: public because of preaching and prayer or the preaching of biblical doctrines.
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