WHY THE SUMMER JOBS DISPUTE ISN’T GOING AWAY QUIETLY.
TComment here are a few theories with respect to t he strange f racas over government- funded summer jobs and abortion rights. Some see it as a wedge play by the Liberals to chase womb- bothering conservatives into the sunlight, where they can be pelted with spoiled produce. Others see it as a sincere expression of a uniquely Canadian brand of fanaticism: that any legal limits on abortion rights are nondebatable, even unconstitutional. Either way, it is not clear to me that the government and its partisans understand why some religious groups object to attesting that the jobs being funded — and the organization’s “core mandate” — “respect reproductive rights.”
Let this atheist try to explain. Let’s say you want government money for a Bible camp. No problem, say the Liberals. Your “core mandate” is presumably canoe trips, swimming, rope courses, plus some religious programming. So long as you’re not actively working against abortion rights, you’re fine. Tick the box and hope for the best.
I can understand how this makes sense to a Liberal. The Chrétien- Martin glory years cemented this idea that religious people are welcome in Canadian politics so long as they leave their religious beliefs with House of Commons security.
Paul Martin was famously said to struggle enormously with abortion, we were told, but ultimately decided to support a woman’s right to choose: secular beat religious.
That’s all well and good for elected officials. Any politician successful enough that his religious beliefs are a matter of public interest will have sacrificed dozens of principles to get where he is. But it’s still a silly idea. How is anyone supposed to climb inside his worldview and sort the religiously informed policy preferences from the secularly informed ones?
Indeed, it’s easy to imagine certain religiously inspired elements of Martin’s worldview (compassion, mercy, all that good stuff ) informing his decision to go against Catholic dogma on both abortion and same-sex marriage. Mil- lions of Catholics all over the world have done the same.
Every individual has a different relationship with his faith. But a Baptist Bible camp or a Catholic homeless shelter or a Muslim soup kitchen will likely see its mission as the manifestation of the underlying belief system they all profess to share.
That s ummer camps, homeless shelters and soup kitchens are unlikely to have much interaction with the abortion debate does not make it any less offensive to ask them to forswear part of that underlying belief system. Every canoe trip, every bed, every bowl of soup is a manifestation of that belief system.
In cases like these, Canadian progressives often argue as if certain rights had at some point been promoted over religious freedom: the (supposed) right to abortion on demand and the ( undisputed) right to same-sex civil marriage are the ones we hear most about when they conflict with the views of religious institutions.
But the Supreme Court has been clear, not least in its reference case on the Civil Marriage Act, on what happens when rights collide: the courts don’t pick a winner and loser; rather, they try to balance them.
Liberals and many of their supporters, by contrast, seem to be happy to pick the losers: those who can’t and won’t tick the box. I find it quite odious, but more than that I find the summer jobs program a strange place for this debate to come to a head. Canadian taxpayers fund Catholic hospitals that won’t perform abortions or offer medical assistance in dying; they fund Catholic schools “rooted in the love of Christ” and in the Catechism, which is neither conspicuously pro-choice nor conspicuously pro-gay.
Recently, the surge demand for beds at homeless shelters in Toronto was (barely) met, inter alia, by St. Simon’s Shelter ( Anglican), The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (Catholic), the Salvation Army (Evangelical) and the Scott Mission ( non- denominationally Christian).
These are services churches have long provided with the help of public funding, and that makes sense to me: care for the sick and the vulnerable is one of the main things I expect from religiously devout people, and it makes sense to use diverse approaches in providing public services. But it’s unlikely they would all happily tick the box.
I don’t see how you can be OK with hospitals and public schools and homeless shelters, and not OK with some little backwoods Bible camp.
Lots of people have long argued to defund churches and their organizations, even to withdraw charitable status. That certainly has not been a mainstream Liberal position, however. In defending their side, many Liberals seem to be proposing something revolutionary without quite realizing it.