I was reading the comments section of the Sudbury star the other day and I found an article by Michael Coren entitled "Christians take the brunt of Canada's Changing tolerance values". The Article made the Claim that Christians are becoming marginalized and persecuted by our culture, which simply is not the case. Michael mostly based this assessment on three different issues, none of these issues seems to be an exclusively Christian issue, and none of these issues has the intent or result, of persecuting Christians.
His first piece of evidence for this claim is a Quebec Judge who ruled against Catholic parents being able to home school their children, on the grounds that the children were not being “properly socialized”. Mr. Coren may be right that this was a bad judicial decision, but this depends on whether or not the children were taught properly and whether or not they were allowed to have contact with children outside of their family. Where I really disagree with Coren is in his assertion that this shows a bias against Christians simply because of the fact that the parents were Catholic. If there was a bias going on towards any group in said case, it was towards parents who home school their children in general, whether they be Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. The case had absolutely nothing to do with the religious beliefs of the parents; it has to do with the well being of the children.
Coren’s second claim is that the recent firing of a Sports caster for homophobic Tweets, was an attack on Christian beliefs. It may be the case that the sports caster has his stand on this issue because of the teaching of his specific branch of Christianity, but not all Branches of Christianity are homophobic, and it’s certainly not the case that Christianity is the only religion that has homophobic members. There are individuals from almost every religion, who have the same stance on marriage; there is absolutely no singling out of Christian religion in this case.
The reason the sports caster was fired was not because he was a Christian, but because he alienated a large group of the population, which includes individuals who watch the sports network. Every channel wants to appeal to the biggest demographic and if a sports casters views get in the way of this than he should be fired. That’s not discrimination, that’s capitalism.
Although he skims through it, and it’s not one of the main three examples he builds his article around, there is another similar example Croren uses to bolster his discrimination Claim, “Christian civil servants [are being] fired for refusing to affirm views contrary to their faith”. This seems to be referencing Individuals who have been fired for not serving LGBT individuals at their place of employment, and it seems astounding that Coren could call this act to increase equality “Christian Prosecution”. Civil servants are employed by the state, and the state needs to keep neutrality to best serve the needs of all of its citizens. Civil servants are representatives of the government, and if they can’t help all members of our society, they can’t do the job they were hired for. There were similar practices of discrimination towards black people well into the 60’s. How is not serving gay individuals any different or any more acceptable than not serving black customers?
Coren’s final major Claim is that the media is prejudiced towards Christians because one of Canada’s many news outlets, the CBC, under represented the number of people who attended an anti-abortion rally while it over represented the number of people who attend Toronto’s Gay pride parade. Even If his Claim were true, it wouldn’t be “anti-Christian”, because Christians themselves are split on both issues of reproductive rights and gay rights. And once again, Christianity isn’t the only cultural group that has individuals with the same views Coren. News networks all make mistakes especially regarding the number of people at events where attendance is not taken and giving two examples of mistaken information is hardly a definitive proof of bias. However, at least one of Coren’s statistics and possibly both do not seem to be correct.
Coren claims that as many as 18,000 people went to the anti-abortion rally and he claims that Experts say 15,000, who these experts are, and where the number 18,000 comes from Coren neglects to mention. The RCMP did however estimate 10,000. CBC’s Claim of 5,000 is a bit low, but not low enough to be unreasonable when compared to 10,000.
Coren was also misinformed about the pride festivities. He claims that 200,000 attend the parade, and also claims that the CBC reported over a million. The fact is that only 100,000 were at the parade, but from 500,000 to over a million would have attended events somewhere during the weeklong pride festival, which is the statistic the CBC was actually quoting.
Coren also believes that the resent growth of businesses that ask Christians not to evangelize at work is an example of prosecution. For well over a thousand years Christianity has been the dominant religion of the western world and as such in a world were tolerance hasn’t been an issue it has gotten certain privileges that no other religious group have gotten. The reason Christians are being told to leave their religious opinions outside of the work place is not some secret vendetta towards Christians, it’s simply revoking the get out of jail free card that members of the religion have been holding, over all other religions.
I’d like to ask Coren a question. Who do you think is “prosecuting” the Christians? The vast majority of our country is made up of Christian individuals. 77% of Canadians are Christians including our very own prime minster Steven Harper, and the leader of the opposition, Jack Layton. Layton being an individual who is directly opposed to many of the issues you consider “Christian issues”. I think Coren needs to do some research into what persecution means before he starts yelling from his soap box that he’s feeling it. Taking away privileges, the privileges that harm minorities, from Christians is not a discrimination against Christians, especially if Christians are the only ones ever to have these privileges in this country.
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