Freedom the victim

I hosted my old television program, The Michael Coren Show, for almost 13 years. During 3,000 episodes I had Dalton McGuinty as a guest dozens of times, both as leader of the opposition in the Ontario parliament and as the province’s Premier. I also had Lauren Broten, now Ontario’s Education Minister, on the show several times, and also former education minister Kathleen Wynne. The latter, an openly homosexual woman, always made her reservations about Catholic education and her support for the gay community entirely clear, and Broten never had very much to say about anything. But McGuinty has changed his mind on major issues more often than most people change their underwear.

I recall him sitting across the table from me and saying, with that contrived sincerity he has perfected: “Michael, I see no need to change the definition of marriage. It is one man and one woman.” I’m sure we can dig out the tape if he’d like. Okay, politicians do rethink their policies. But come on Dalton, this was never about ideology with you, any more than was your refusal to give special funding to autistic children, after you’d promised it in writing to their parents before the election. You didn’t do it because you were evil, just easily influenced by the activists and bureaucrats around you.

But that doesn’t entirely explain this latest measure to force Catholic schools in Ontario to accept gay-straight alliances. We surely know the fallacies by now. First, it’s not true that gay children are particularly targeted at school and all credible surveys reveal that it’s obesity and body image that are the major reasons for bullying, with sexuality hardly registering. Second, it’s not true that Catholic schools preach homophobia or that Catholic teachers would allow a gay child to be bullied. Third, being gay has become fashionable rather than dangerous in modern schools. Fourth, gay-straight alliances are not about protecting children, but about affirming homosexuality.

It would be at this point in a secular newspaper that people would start writing me abusive and threatening e-mails, and demanding I be fired; even in a Catholic paper there are probably a few cafeteria believers who might be rushing to their laptops right now. That doesn’t, however, make what I say untrue, but only proves that if anyone is playing the bully these days it is the gay lobby and not Roman Catholics.

The Church does not and cannot accept homosexual behaviour. It’s really pretty simple. As Catholics we believe that God made us with a plan, based on order and not chaos, which has at its epicentre the procreation of humanity. We are obliged to never consciously exclude God from the sexual act, which is supposed to be an extension of love, within marriage. This doesn’t mean that every time a married couple sleep together they have to conceive, but that to aggressively disallow such a result by contraceptives or by sexual behaviour that makes procreation impossible is to remove God from our lives. It reduces sex to an entirely selfish and self-loving exercise.

Homosexual sex has to be, by its nature, exclusive of God. Thus there can be no such thing as homosexual marriage, so Catholicism can never affirm homosexual behaviour. But that is entirely different from rejecting the gay person, in that we are far, far more than our sexuality. A child at school may not be sexual, but all of the evidence of gay-straight alliances is that they approve entirely of homosexual relationships, encourage young people to embrace their inclinations and reject Catholic teaching in strong, sometimes insulting, language.

Nobody has to accept any of this, unless they are Catholic. Then, I’m afraid, you have no choice. Which is why this new government extremism is not about tolerance of homosexuality but about intolerance of religious freedom. Catholic schools have not a right but a duty to be Catholic, and if they are not allowed to be they have no point in continuing to exist. No free society that genuinely believes in the rights of conscience should tell a religion what to do or what to teach, which is why this case is not trivial, but a watershed in modern Canadian history.

(Coren’s new book is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity. He can be reached at www.michaelcoren.com.)