‘Sin’ dangerous for politicians
SCHEER’S DODGY ANSWERS ON GAY MARRIAGE NOT DOING HIM, OTHERS ANY FAVOURS
At a Wednesday press conference in Ottawa, a Globe and Mail reporter asked Andrew Scheer if he believes homosexuality is a “sin.” He didn’t answer, as has become his trademark on this file; instead he pledged, for the umpteenth time, simply to stand up for gay rights in all their forms.
It has been maddening to watch: Despite literally dozens of opportunities, he could never bring himself to explicitly support equal marriage. Bringing “sin” into the question is a novelty, though, and it’s one of which we need to be exceedingly leery.
I am generally of the position that it matters far more what a politician does than what he believes, not least because leading politicians hardly ever stick to their beliefs. And I think Canadian politics and the media who cover it are far too focused on beliefs, sometimes even to the neglect of actions. Climate change might be the best example: For years the Liberals accused Stephen Harper and the Conservatives of not believing in it, even as they did hardly anything to combat it.
That said, as I wrote during the campaign, it was entirely reasonable that an electorate sizing up a potential prime minister would want some insight into how he evolved from a 25-year-old mounting an explicitly religious case against equal marriage rights in the House of Commons to a 40-year-old who says he’ll fight for gay rights at home and abroad.
In 2019, if you actually still have a problem with the state extending the same package of benefits and responsibilities to same-sex couples as opposite-sex couples, if you still haven’t got over the state using the M-word for both arrangements while leaving religious groups alone to define it as they see fit, then it’s more than fair for people to think you’re a bit of a weirdo. Maybe even a bit of a jerk.
Indeed, that’s the sort of thing I kept expecting Scheer to finally say: That he had been concerned about religious freedom but is now satisfied the feds aren’t out to meddle in Christian or Jewish or Islamic conceptions of marriage; that he realized over time the injustice of treating some committed couples differently, no matter what we called their unions. Instead we got the same evasive talking points, over and over and over again. It was a bizarre misplay, whatever the explanation, and he has done neither himself nor religiously observant politicians in general any favours.
More and more, progressive politicians and their supporters are willing to impugn observant Christians as inherently worthy of suspicion. “Evangelicals believe in X,” “conservative
Catholics believe in Y,” ergo that’s probably what Mr. Z is really up to, never mind if he swears that he’s not. It’s an ugly game that would rightly be deplored were it turned against politicians of other religions, and if we want people of faith — which is most Canadians — to have a place in public life, it’s a game no one should want to play.
But it is what it is. Progressives are willing to weaponize their opponents’ religious beliefs even when they have to be mostly inferred, as was the case with Stephen Harper. Someone like Scheer, who is much more openly religious, is all the more vulnerable — and he failed utterly to protect himself.
The question of “sin” takes us into new and dangerous territory, however. There is what politicians do, and then there is what they think, and then — buried way down under many layers of irrelevance — there is their personal relationship, if any, with higher powers and their associated scriptures; there is the question of what they think that higher power would make of other people’s behaviour; there is what they believe will happen to those people’s immortal souls.
These are not topics the secular media should be concerning themselves with, and nor should the average voter. No one would approve of someone they like being put through such an inquisition. Liberals would be aghast if their avowedly Catholic leader were asked if his faith played a role in his government not eliminating restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood, for example.
Liberals often speak glowingly of the days when politicians set aside religion and pursued the greater good — politicians like Pierre Trudeau, a devout Catholic who famously said “what goes on in private between two consulting adults is their own private business,” but who somewhat less famously spoke of “separating the idea of sin and the idea of crime.”
Trudeau Sr. was absolutely right that the state should have no dominion over sin, in any sense of the word. That should go for politics, too. Politicians of known faiths and devoutness have advanced many of progressive Canadians’ most cherished causes — public health care, most notably — and politicians of unknown faiths and devoutness have taken us down dark alleys. And vice versa. There is nothing we can do with information about a politician’s personal metaphysical views except raise new barriers to entry into a politics that needs fewer.