Human rights go beyond religion

Re: Canada funds projects to help heal sectarian divides, March 21

Dylan C. Robertson writes the Canadian government may close its Office of Religious Freedom owing to its “disconnect (ion) from other human rights.” This is an essential point, for the promotion of religion is part of the problem.

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, an emperor passes an edict, after his son cuts his finger eating an egg, “commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account.” Rebels in the imaginary country of Blefuscu argue the right to “break their eggs at the convenient end.”

Any injury toward a religious person is rightly condemned by law, but so too should injury to a non-religious person or infidel or apostate or homosexual or unmarried lover or anyone else with the right to break an egg in a convenient way.

- JIM McMURTRY Surrey