to Heather Clark

Submitted by Drew (Canada), Dec 15, 2005 at 15:53

You can count Drew, in Vancouver, as another Canadian who agrees with you, Heather.

I'm astounded at the knee-jerk hatred so many Canadians have towards GW Bush and US policy, and even more astounded at the number of people who are astounded that I don't share their opinion. I remind them that we'd be speaking Russian (if our country existed at all) were it not for the US. And while I did verbally dismember a Canadian sometime-US-resident at a dinner party 2 years ago for saying that "the Canadians and Brits couldn't do the job (in WW2) so the Americans had to fix things", the fact remains that, while my uncle and tens of thousands of other young men did lose their lives waiting for the US to decide that Hitler should be dealt with, the US forces were the "fresh legs off the bench" which helped turn the war around. People critical of the Iraq situation need to ask themselves how many more terrorist attacks in North America -- including Rogers Centre and the CN Tower -- would have occurred if someone hadn't said, "enough's enough".

But as for the continual erosion of Christian symbols, it's part of the continued perversion of the Word of God. Somehow, Jesus' commandment to "love thy neighbour as thyself" and Paul's writing that "there is neither Jew nor Greek" have been twisted into this warm-fuzzy doctrine called "tolerance", which now means that everyone has a right not just to be wrong, but to be destructively evil -- and to gainsay that is to be racist. You would be familiar, Heather, with the CRTC, Canada's broadcast regulator -- and for our American brethren, it makes the FCC look like an industry-sponsored milquetoast: that august body recently slapped a Victoria talk-show host and his station on the wrist for "espousing hatred". His crime: bringing on as a guest a gentleman who had written books describing Islam as a violent, hate-filled religion and for stating that terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere were not "radical insurgents" but simply following the Qu'ran. A caller -- who was not Muslim, himself -- attacked the guest, then admitted he hadn't read the Qu'ran himself ... but filed a complaint with the CRTC. The Commission's ruling was that the station and the host had violated the "anti-hatred" regulation, because the guest's comments tended to expose a certain group to ridicule. (The penalty was to develop "guidelines" and a method of implementation and report back by the time the station's licence came up for renewal.)

The ruling did not actually go into whether the guest's statements had any basis in fact (i.e. whether the Qu'ran does say such things): simply whether certain people might have their feelings hurt.

Of course, we Christians go through that on a daily basis -- but Jesus warned us there'd be days like this, so why kvetch?

Love ya, Heather! Merry Christmas!

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