Late last year the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments in the case British Columbia College of Teachers v. Trinity Western University, one of many cases now piling up on Canadian court dockets, pitting religious liberty against “sexual orientation” rights.
This legal collision is entirely a creation of the Canadian courts themselves. When the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was debated in Parliament in the early 1980s, the government debated whether to include “sexual orientation” among the enumerated prohibited grounds for discrimination (such as race, sex, and religious belief). And it explicitly chose not to include that category for special public protection.
In a long series of cases through the 1990s, however, the Supreme Court of Canada and lower courts took “sexual orientation rights” and “read them into” the charter, thus preparing the ground for the suppression of any religious beliefs contrary to Canada’s judicial sexual revolution. And in pushing its view of “sexual orientation” rights, the court is now flirting with totalitarian thought control.
In the current case before the court, the British Columbia College of Teachers (BCCT), the professional licensing organization, is attempting to deny Trinity Western University the right to train and certify public school teachers on the grounds that TWU’s biblical code of student conduct forbids homosexual behavior on its campus. This, the BCCT argues, must create intolerant teachers who will spread their gender intolerance in British Columbia classrooms.
Though a Supreme Court decision in this case is not expected for several months, the early indications from the court suggest that homosexual rights will trump religious rights. And a loss on the part of TWU will simply sweep away the right of public religious institutions to determine their own sexual ethics.
“This is a very significant case,” says Dale Backlin, principal of Glenmore Christian Academy, a private Christian school in Calgary, Alberta. “An unfavorable decision by the court will have an impact on virtually all religious organizations. The issue here is religious liberty.”
The 30-year-old Trinity Western University, now boasting 2,800 students, was Canada’s first nonpublic university. And even today the provincial governments responsible for licensing universities have awarded degree-granting status to barely a half dozen private Christian institutions nationwide.
For 15 years TWU has been accredited to award four-year Bachelor of Education degrees. But in the province of British Columbia, public school teachers must complete an approved fifth-year practicum program before being certified by the BCCT.
In 1995 Trinity Western asked the BCCT to accredit its fifth-year practicum program so its students would not have to go elsewhere to receive their professional certification. Two BCCT evaluation teams recommended approval of TWU’s program. But the BCCT council then ruled that TWU graduates were not fit to teach in public schools because of the school’s biblical code of conduct.
The university’s Community Standards Statement, which all of its students are required to sign, says they’re “responsible to refrain from practices that are contrary to biblical teaching including premarital sex, adultery, homosexual behavior, and the viewing of pornography.” The code also forbids smoking, drinking, and gambling.
The BCCT council ruled that the private university’s behavior standards discriminate against gays and lesbians, and that its education graduates would therefore likely impose their discriminatory moral views on public school students once they began teaching in the public schools.
In 1997 the university appealed the BCCT ruling to the British Columbia Supreme Court and won. The College of Teachers was ordered to certify TWU’s program and its students. The BCCT appealed that decision, but lost again in the British Columbia Court of Appeal.
At both the trial and appeals court levels, judges were persuaded by TWU’s argument that hundreds of its education graduates have revealed no trace of discrimination.
TWU teaches that homosexual activity is a sin, its lawyers admitted; but it also teaches that all sinners—all human beings—must be given the same love and respect their Saviour, Jesus Christ, gave them. The BCCT keeps performance evaluations of all the province’s teachers, and were there evidence that TWU grads had shown any proclivity to “gay bashing,” the BCCT would have produced it. But it hasn’t, because they haven’t.
In a 2-1 decision, the court of appeal ruled that the BCCT had presented no concrete evidence that TWU students, many already teaching in public schools, were actively biased against homosexuals.
Yet, in a dissenting opinion, Madame Justice Ann Rowles said teachers are symbols of values who could send discriminatory messages to their students. So the BCCT decided to take the case one last step to the Supreme Court of Canada.
“It’s been our assessment all along that this would go to the Supreme Court,” says BCCT spokesman Doug Smart. “There’s no evidence that Trinity graduates discriminate, because they haven’t had any education graduates. Until now, all their students have gone to [nearby] Simon Fraser [University] for their fifth-year practicum.” Smart said the fifth year at Simon Fraser exposes TWU education students to “a broader range of issues” than they find at the Christian school.
However, TWU vice president Guy Saffold says that the fifth-year courses are in fact already being offered by Simon Fraser University instructors on the TWU campus. “We’ve trained teachers for 15 years, and the BCCT has all their records, including any record of discrimination,” he said. “But they’ve got no evidence. So they’re saying that our graduates might, maybe, someday discriminate against gays. They’re trying to suppress what they consider our wrong beliefs, rather than any proven, truly improper behavior.”
Saffold says that the “really frustrating” aspect of the College of Teachers’ opposition to the university’s program is that “we agree with the BCCT’s concern that every student in the public schools be treated fairly and without discrimination.
“According to our code of conduct our students are obliged to show love and respect for everybody. But the [BCCT] is convinced our graduates would discriminate against gay public school students. And they’ve reached this conclusion on the basis of [anti-Christian] stereotypes and prejudice.”
At the end of November the Supreme Court of Canada, the country’s final court, heard the BCCT’s appeal of their second loss in the provincial court. And the course of the judges questioning of the TWU lawyers suggests that they’re unsympathetic to the Christian university.
In fact, the reactions of the judges suggest that they’re considering imposing “thought control” upon Canadian society. In their intolerance of supposed intolerance, they’re flirting with totalitarianism.
TWU’s lawyers argued again that the BCCT could provide no evidence that their students had ever discriminated against homosexuals. But Supreme Court Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dube was unimpressed.
“Evidence of discrimination is in the program,” she replied to them. “What kind of other evidence do you want?”
Madame Justice L’Heureux-Dube was apparently unaware or unconcerned about the important distinction between action and belief. In ages past, the court was responsible for suppressing breaches of public peace. But citizens remained the sovereign lords of their own thoughts and speech. Their words became subject to the court only if they could be demonstrated to promote real breaches of the peace.
L’Heureux-Dube, however, apparently doesn’t care whether Trinity Western’s words lead to breaches of the peace. She simply doesn’t like the way they think. And she isn’t the only one.
During the arguments in the case, for example, Supreme Court Justice Ian Binnie informed TWU’s lawyers that Christian values of “love and respect” are often a disguise for intolerance.
“It’s all very well to say, ‘Love the sinner but hate the sin,’” he argued. “But is that not a contradiction in terms? While religion may preach tolerance, religion is often an engine of intolerance.”
Unfortunately, Mister Justice Binnie seems either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that over the past two centuries “tolerance” has been an even fiercer engine of intolerance.
The greatest bloodbaths of history have been perpetrated in the name of “liberation,” the elite political ambition to “free” people from the moral constraints of their traditional religious faith. In his zeal for tolerance, Binnie has apparently forgotten that the French Reign of Terror, the Marxist and Maoist butchery, and the Nazi nightmare were all perpetrated in the name of a tolerant future—a future that required goring traditional pieties and the real people who lived in obedience to them.
Admittedly, the postmodern world promotes a “kinder, gentler” totalitarianism. Toward the end of its tenure in the Soviet Union, even the KGB preferred using psychiatric wards for Soviet dissidents, rather than the more honest techniques of the Lubyanka and Gulag.
In Canada today legal sanctions rarely become fiercer than mandatory “sensitivity sessions”—even for judges—and the promotion of supposed “victims of intolerance” into positions of authority. But the goal is the same: reshaping the thinking of ordinary citizens.
How has the court begun to back itself into this sort of mind control and social engineering? Consider what Binnie finds a “contradiction in terms”: the Christian notion of “loving the sinner but hating the sin.”
Within the context of Christianity, this attitude makes perfect sense, because at the core of each human being is a soul of infinite value, made in the likeness of its Creator. So, for example, Christians were the ones who opened the first AIDS hospices in the 1980s, and who still run most of them. Is that a “contradiction in terms”?
Admittedly, Christians—being only human—have most often fallen short of what their faith requires of them; religion has been an engine of intolerance. But the point is, their faith has required better of them.
If Binnie sees “loving the sinner but hating the sin” only as a contradiction in terms, then implicitly he is asserting that human beings are no more than their actions—which means that his thinking is shaped by a soulless vision of humanity.
The court first committed itself to a soulless metaphysic in its 1996 EGAN decision, when it ruled that sexual behavior is a kind of immutable “identity,” equivalent to race or sex. And the net result of this tolerance is a metaphysic of humanity that ultimately denies free will and human rights as “inalienable.” If human beings are simply their behaviors, then rights are simply a creation of the court, and the court must then decide which behaviors (including spoken thoughts) it likes and which it doesn’t like.
From the bench, L’Heureux-Dube denigrated TWU’s defense as “all that love stuff.” So she assumes that she understands the beliefs—or at least the social consequences—of TWU’s Christian administrators, faculties, and staff, better than they do. This is an assumption common to social engineers. How did the Canadian court come to assume the mantle of the social engineer?
In 1988, six years after the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canadian Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the Big-M Drug Mart case, and in that case, it struck down the Province of Alberta’s Lord’s Day Sunday closing law.
Now, in that case, the court could have ruled that the charter’s protection of religious liberties obliged the government to be neutral with regard to all religious beliefs, and that it was therefore obliged to protect the Sabbaths of all religious believers. Under that sort of ruling, Muslims would have had their Fridays, Adventists and Jews their Saturdays, and other Christians their Sundays.
But in Big-M Drug Mart, the court didn’t rule that way. Instead it struck down the Sunday closing law on the grounds that Canada is now a “secular nation” (a ruling that contradicted the preamble of the charter, declaring Canada “a nation under God”). The court was apparently unaware that secular humanism itself is a sort of “religious faith.” For the Canadian judicial establishment, secularism is obviously simply true.
The Big-M Drug Mart ruling was a decisive step—if only one of many—in establishing secular humanism as Canada’s de facto established religion. So now all Canadian public institutions and their public beliefs are gradually becoming subject to assumptions of secular humanist psychology and the ambitions of secular public policy administrators.
Trinity Western University may yet win its case in the Supreme Court of Canada. But even if it does, that will not stem the tide of judicial social engineering. “Sexual orientation” rights pass muster within a secular humanist worldview, because they agree with the assumption that the purpose of life is simply the pursuit of unlimited physical gratification. Most genuinely religious beliefs and moral strictures—especially regarding human sexuality—do not share that assumption.
If the Canadian Supreme Court rules against Trinity Western University, that will greatly speed the ascendancy of “sexual orientation” rights over religious liberties. And that will affect everything from church hiring policies to the content of their public evangelization (where “hate crime” laws will then be applied with vengeance).
Yet, even if the court rules in favor of Trinity Western, it will most certainly not be on the grounds of the inviolability of religious liberties. And it will not appreciably slow the tightening of the grip of secular humanism as the judicially enforced, established religion of Canada.
Joe Woodard is the religion writer for the Calgary Herald in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
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