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OTTAWA, October 28, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Senator Anne Cools rose in the Senate yesterday to speak in opposition to Bill C-250, the private member’s bill by homosexual activist Svend Robinson which seeks to add the term ‘sexual orientation’ to hate crime law.

Cools told her colleagues that they should “grasp the enormity and danger of the proposal before us.”  She referred to the legislation as “pernicious and unprecedented,” a “menace” and “a cruel proposition intended to criminalize the verbal and written expression of moral opinion on human sexuality and on human sexual practices.”  Cools pointed out that “Bill C-250 will confer upon sexual activities and sexual preferences those immutable, morally neutral, physical, racial characteristics possessed by peoples of common origins,” noting further that “the term ‘sexual orientation’ is still undefined and unlimited in law.”  Cools drew a clear distinction between crimes which are already covered in the Criminal Code and those which would be covered under the hate crime legislation.  She noted that many activists have misconstrued the debate on hate crime legislation to suggest it addresses hateful acts such as violence and murder.  She clarified, “Honourable senators, ‘hate crime’ is a legal concept where the crime, the offence, is hate speech, hate propaganda and hate-mongering. It is not killing people. It is speech. It is expression.”  Cools cited examples of homosexual activists calling her own speeches in favour of the traditional definition of marriage as ‘hate’.  She thus warned that “Bill C-250 proposes to deploy the Criminal Code as an instrument to overturn the moral opinion and the moral order of millions of Canadians, therein to impose different moral orders based on different concepts of human sexuality.”  In perhaps the clearest and most succinct description of the legislation, Cools said, “Bill C-250 is directed at those Canadians whose moral opinions are unwanted by an elite group of homosexual rights activists, a group that is well connected to the government and who seek to overwhelm their opponents and to impose their moral views on them. This elite disagrees morally with millions of Canadians. Not content merely to disagree with them and to co-exist with them, this elite, by Bill C-250, seeks to persecute and to prosecute them criminally.”  The Bill now continues second reading debate and will be spoken to by Senator St. Germain.  See Senator Cool’s full speech from the Senate Hansard:  https://www.parl.gc.ca/37/2/parlbus/chambus/senate/deb-E/089db_2003-10-27-e.htm?Language=E&Parl=37&Ses=2#76