(LifeSiteNews) — Over the past few years, I’ve often noted that as the West becomes increasingly anti-Christian, seemingly small acts of defiance will become necessary if we are to follow Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s admonition to “live not by lies.” Many of the lies our culture demands may seem small, at first—use someone’s “preferred pronouns,” assent to a “Pride” proclamation, put a tiny LGBT symbol in the shop window—but they are not.
To refuse these small lies can take great courage this culture, and I think we should note examples of this courage when they surface. Let me offer just a few examples from this year to inspire you as we enter the Advent Season.
In Australia, the former national president of the Shop Distributive and Allies Employee’s Association Joe de Bruyn triggered a mass walkout at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in October when he gave a speech condemning abortion and same-sex “marriage.” De Bruyn was receiving an honorary doctorate by the Australian Catholic University and asked to give a graduation speech.
“I have for several decades been involved in opposing abortion, the deliberate killing of unborn human beings,” he told the graduates. “Today, over 80,000 unborn children are killed by abortion in Australia; each year worldwide – the estimated number is 42 million each year. Abortion is the single biggest killer of human beings in the world, greater than the human toll of World War II. It is a tragedy that must be ended.”
De Bruyn also defended natural marriage, stating that marriage was founded in the Garden of Eden by God and that the redefinition of marriage went against “every society on earth.” The backlash was swift, with the head of the ACU’s National Tertiary Education Union branch claiming that the speech brought “shame on the union movement” that de Bruyn was a member of. Student demands that someone be fired over the speech were fortunately ignored. De Bruyn, a member of the Order of Australia, was appropriately unapologetic
Marc Guéhi, a soccer player with the English Football Association and captain of the Crystal Palace team, was issued a warning by the FA in December after he wrote “I Love Jesus” over the LGBT rainbow-flag armband that the league had mandated. Despite the mandatory inclusion armband, religious symbolism is prohibited by the association—which did not stop Guéhi from making a public declaration of his faith and risking his career to do so. (The fact that professional athletes are expected to wear the symbolism of a radical ideology is, in itself, evidence of how thoroughly that ideology has conquered the culture.)
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In October, 1.1 million Christians in South Korea participated in a massive rally in the capital city of Seoul to voice their opposition to both same-sex “marriage” and the LGBT agenda. The rally, which took the form of a church service, was organized by a coalition of Christian denominations who passed out lists of 100 prayer suggestions to the attendees. One read: “Let the people discern how dangerous and totalitarian the fantasy of achieving equality by everyone being the same – instead of all being equal before God – is. So that such antihuman law that depresses freedom of the most people would not be passed.” Pastors and speakers expressed similar sentiments in their speeches; the rally was one of the largest in recent political history.
In Canada, I’d like to once again emphasize the example of Harold McQuaker, the mayor of the small town of Emo, Ontario. McQuaker, as I’ve reported on several times in this space, is a 77-year-old great-grandfather who found himself the target of LGBT activists after the town council voted not to issue a “Pride” proclamation in 2020. LGBT activists sued him and the town, and the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal levied a $5,000 fine on McQuaker personally. Despite that, he has refused to back down—even after the LGBT group obtained a court order and had the money taken out of his bank account without his knowledge or consent. LGBT activists are used to politicians bending the knee; we need more examples like McQuaker who refuse to live by lies.
There are other examples, as well. Comfort Sakoma-Fadugba was the vice-chair of the Vancouver Police Board before being fired for defending Canada’s Christian heritage. At cenotaphs across Canada, military chaplains carried on offering prayers and singing hymns on Remembrance Day despite a government directive forbidding it. As country after country adopts the values of the sexual revolution, country after country forces Christians to make difficult choices. We will be in need of courage in the years ahead, and we should be in the habit of recognizing it and celebrating it when we see it.
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