Today on the Michael Coren Show: Israeli boycott, Wiccan expulsion + religious accommodations free f
August 13, 2009
Today on the Michael Coren Show: Israeli boycott, Wiccan expulsion + religious accommodations free for all
Posted to Justin Trottier's personal blog:
Thursday, August 13, 2009 17:27
Posted in category Justin Trottier Media Appearances
Michael Coren was very much back on this episode, which is airing tonight at 8pm on CTS TV. The show featured the usual christian evangelical Joe Boot (Senior Pastor, Westminster Chapel, Apologist and Author) and catholic priest Fr. Tom Lynch (Professor of Moral Theology, St. Augustine’s Seminary), but the muslim position on the panel was for the first time in a while filled instead by a Jewish speaker - Rabbi Jonathan Crane (a very young looking rabbi).
We opened with a discussion on the United Church of Canada’s recently defeated proposal to “boycott Israeli academic and cultural institutions in protest.”
Much of the discussion revolved around whether Israel really is an apartheid state, whether harping on Israel is just jumping on a bandwagon that makes little sense considering the tyrannical regimes the imperfect democracy is surrounded by, and whether those who attack Isreal the state are in fact anti-semitic. My general answers are: not exactly , yes and no , and absolutely not (one can attack a political institution - or a religion for that matter - without attacking an ethnic group). This I think is an unfair attempt to immunize oneself from any point of attack:
“It almost sends shivers down our spine that the United Church of Canada won’t speak out against documents which on their face are anti-Semitic,” Farber told CBC News ahead of Tuesday’s motion.
But to me the central issue is, as Oakville humanist leader Elka Enola put it:
No matter what those disputes are; no matter how right or wrong we feel Israel is when resolving these issues, the fact remains that freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas and information is a cornerstone of the democratic process.
To boycott academic institutions and call into question the loyalties of politicians who travel to israel to engage in dialogue is antithetical to our goal of finding a solution through open discourse.
A point Coren himself brought up that I admit I hadn’t thought of was the legitimacy of the UCC even passing a resolution condemning Israel. Aren’t they a tax-exempt charitable organization, and doesn’t that mean they can not engage in massive political lobbying, which this campaign they were proposing certainly would amount to?
We then moved on to discussing a story involving a Wiccan whose human right complaint that she was removed from her classes due to her religion was rejected. Again, much of the discussion focused on irrelevancies, namely whether Wiccans should be protected as a religion like any other. However, it’s clear that Wiccanism had nothing to do with the rejection. The human rights commissioners said as much. She was kicked out for secular reasons based on what she said and we can argue if those were good reasons but they certainly had nothing to do with being a wiccan.
The Wiccan told her teachers she would harm herself if her boyfriend left her and said she “had the mentality of a good sniper.” Interestingly, her lawyers also said she suffers from “extraordinary gifts of intuition and perception that require significant accommodation.” Looks like that entitlement complex means everyone thinks they deserve accommodation these days. First human rights commissions are inundated with spurious charges that free speech violated someone’s right to not be offended, and now its religious accommodations that is the new band wagon. Can anyone say “slippery slope”? How do you accommodate this and how is this anything like a disability? Maybe everyone else without such gifts need accommodating.
On the plus side, her course was an “ Integrative Energy Healing Program ” involving the study of things like “chakras” and “auric fields” so I’m not sure she’s missing out on much of anything.
The rest of the show focused on more religious accomodation cases, like Muslim couple file human rights beef over Superstore salami and French pool bans ‘burkini’ swim . The Canadian Secular Alliance is busy preparing a detailed and thorough policy position on religious accommodations, but the main point I tried to express was that the government has no duty to help create group cohesion through special religious exemptions. Refusing to grant exemptions is often cited as a problem because it is the government effectively reducing a group’s cohesion, but by granting exemptions the government is positively assisting a religion to recruit and steering it in a specific direction. Government should be out of the religion business all together, neither negatively nor positively effecting it’s power and internal authority.