OTTAWA, February 7, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Conservative MP, Jason Kenney, a leading opponent of the dismantling of legal marriage in Canada, said in Parliament yesterday that the Liberal Party’s emphasis on ‘human rights’ in the same sex ‘marriage’ debate is a smokescreen.
Kenney, Member for Calgary Southeast, called the Liberal rhetoric “insufferable.”
“The Prime Minister,” Kenney said, “is absurdly wrapping himself and his party in the cloak of human rights, suggesting that the support of most Conservative MPs for traditional marriage reflects a hostility to basic rights.”
Canadian political history, Kenney said, tells a different story. He lists the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Liberal Party over the last hundred years starting with the head tax on Chinese immigrants coming to work on the trans-Canada railway; the internment of Japanese-Canadian citizens during the World War II and the confiscation of their property; the rejection of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust; and the imposition of martial law in the 1970’s during the FLQ crisis.
Kenney said the Party’s policy of ignoring human rights in their eagerness to implement liberal ideology is not merely a matter of ancient political history. He points to their elimination of constitutionally guaranteed rights for confessional education for Quebec and Newfoundland in 1997 and their preaching of “moral equivalence between communist totalitarianism and western democracy during the Cold War, and in China today.”
While Prime Minister Paul Martin was in China last month, promoting trade and same sex ‘marriage,’ to his communist trade partners, a Chinese Catholic bishop who had been in and out of prison and labour camps for decades died under police guard in a Bingzhou hospital.
Kenney said that it is the Conservatives who have traditionally championed human rights in Canada, giving women and aboriginals the vote, repealing the Liberals’ racist immigration laws, and appointing the first female cabinet ministers.
Kenney said, “Today it is conservatives who believe that the political currency of human rights is cheapened when the political demands of interest groups are inflated into fundamental rights claims.