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NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, September 9, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) — New Democrat federal leader Thomas Mulcair is defending his senior communications director after he hit the national spotlight yesterday when two-year-old tweets surfaced in which he viciously attacked the Catholic Church, the pope, and Catholic moral teachings.

In March 2013, Shawn Dearn — hired last February as Mulcair’s director of communications — posted nasty tweets about the Catholic Church just weeks after Pope Francis’ election: “Memo to CBC & All media: Stop calling the misogynist, homophobic, child-molesting Catholic church a ‘moral authority’. It’s not,” he wrote at that time.

A tweet from 2010 directed to Francis’ predecessor stated: “Dear Pope Benedict—go f— yourself.”

Dearn, who says he is gay and is “married” to another man, immediately made his Twitter account private yesterday after the tweets surfaced and has since apologized for the tweets, saying they “do not reflect my views.”

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Mulcair, who strongly supports abortion-on-demand and same-sex “marriage” but is also open about being Catholic, told reporters today that he has accepted the apology and is “willing to move on,” calling Dearn a “very strong, qualified individual.”

“I’ve had a chance to talk to him today. His apology was sincere. He felt very bad about it and I’m more than willing to move on from that. He’s a very strong, qualified individual. He’s made a mistake and he’s apologized for it and for me that’s enough,” he told reporters this morning at an automotive plant in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

LifeSiteNews contacted the NDP for comment asking: “Why is Mr. Mulcair defending the hire of a senior aide whose tweets have attacked a religious organization and insulted its respected leader? Does this mean that Mr. Mulcair believes it is acceptable for NDP staff to attack traditional Christian beliefs and the people who hold them?” No response was given by press time.

Mary Ellen Douglas, Ontario President of Campaign Life Coalition, called Mulcair a “hypocrite” for boasting about his Catholicism while defending the hire of a senior aide who openly trashes the Catholic Church and the pope.

“People like Mulcair wrap themselves in the Vatican flag when they think it’s beneficial for them. He talks-the-talk when it suits him, but he doesn’t want to walk-the-walk by getting rid of people around him who mock and deride a religious group. If Mulcair were serious about respecting Canadians, the vast majority of which are religious, he would not tolerate this person to continue working for him,” she told LifeSiteNews.

The news of Mulcair defending his top aide comes at a time when political candidates and aides from both the Liberal and Conservative parties have been dropped for comparable offenses.

  • Last month Liberal candidate Ala Buzreba dropped from the race after tweets from four years ago surfaced in which she stated that a person she disagreed with should have been aborted in a back alley with a “coat hanger.” She also told someone else on Twitter around the same time: “Go blow your brains out you waste of sperm.”
  • Jerry Bance, a service technician and now-former Conservative candidate, was dropped last weekend after footage from three years ago came to light in which he was caught urinating into a kitchen mug while working at a private residential job site.
  • Sue MacDonell, a former Conservative Riding Association Director, was asked to step down from her position earlier this week after posting on her own social media sites comments denouncing refugees and Canadian aboriginal people.
  • Tim Dutaud was dropped as a Conservative Party candidate earlier this week after online videos surfaced of him prank-calling about Viagra, while another shows him pretending to be a mentally challenged individual.

This is not the first occasion in which Mulcair has insulted Christians. In 2013 he said traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality go “completely against” Canadian values and the Canadian law. This happened after the Conservative government at that time decided to continue a grant to a Christian foreign-aid organization that had come under investigation for calling homosexuality a “sin” and a “perversion” on its website.