OTTAWA, May 30, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Real Menard, a Bloc Quebecois Member of Parliament on the committee hearing arguments against legalizing same-sex unions insulted and castigated Catholic and other Christian witnesses in hearings on Wednesday. Responding to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ statement that laws must be in accord with natural law and reason, Menard, a self-confessed active homosexual, accused Archbishop Marcel Gervais of Ottawa of adhering to “stone age” morality.
Menard said that the insistence that marriage be linked to the raising of children is an idea “from the time of the Flintstones.”
Gervais told the committee that laws must respect the “order inscribed in nature. Once laws contradict this natural order, they become unjust,” the Archbishop said. “They then risk creating division and dissension, and so breed social disorder.” Archbishop Gervais has been among the tiny number of Bishops in Canada to have publicly supported their colleague, Calgary’s Bishop Fred Henry, who is currently fighting a Human Rights Tribunal complaint over his comments supporting Catholic teaching on homosexuality.
Writing from Ottawa for the Canadian Catholic News, Deborah Gyapong said that Archbishop Gervais appeared shocked by the MPs’ open contempt for the Christian concept of a transcendent moral order.
The CCCB is often invited to make presentations to Parliamentary committees on such politically correct subjects as poverty, third-world development and the dangers of genetically modified seeds in agricultural development. Official Canadian government hostility to Christian morality may be surprising to CCCB representatives but is all too familiar to pro-life and pro-family activists.
Dominic Tse, a Chinese-Canadian representative of the Jubilee Centre for Christian Social Action, told the committee that for Oriental cultures, “marriage is not a social construct that can be deconstructed at will, but something sacred and timeless”.
He said that already pressure is being applied in public schools. “My son came to me one day saying that last year their class took a vote on same sex marriage,” Tse said. “I asked him being my son, what did you vote. He said he didn’t vote. Why not? ‘Because I’m scared for my life.’”
In light of the proven spuriousness of Liberal Party assurances that religious freedoms would not be curtailed by the bill, Gervais asked the committee how the federal government would ensure that Canadians, not just religious officials, would be protected from anti-religious discrimination. Gyapong writes that the MP’s “seemed deaf to repeated arguments that religious freedom was already under attack in Canada.”
“Will those who believe in the historical definition of marriage henceforth be victims of discrimination?” Gervais asked. “Should we anticipate lengthy, costly lawsuits in the courts to defend the freedom to teach, preach and educate in accordance with one’s faith and conscience?”
Contact Real Menard:
Phone: (613) 947-4576
Fax: (613) 947-4579
[email protected]
Constituency Office:
4036 Ontario Street East
Montreal, Quebec
H1W1T2
Bloc Quebecois Party Leader,
Gilles Duceppe:
(613) 992-6779
(613) 954-2121
[email protected]
Constituency Office:
1717 René Lévesque Blvd East Suite 305
Montréal, Quebec
H2L 4T3