Establishing a new state religion

By Paul Schratz

Iain Benson has a term that aptly describes what's going on in the B.C. public school system. He calls it "a collision of dignities."

That's how he describes what often gets called "colliding freedoms." In cases like the "same-sex marriage" debate, the rights of one group (homosexuals who want to "marry" each other) are pitted against the rights of another (believers in traditional marriage.)

Benson, who addressed the Canadian Church Press in Toronto this month, is alarmed at how courts and human rights tribunals around the world are using a hammer on a problem better suited to a wrench: resolving the question of competing beliefs.

For Benson, the reason debates such as the present Corren dispute in B.C. become antagonistic conflicts so often is that they get treated as constitutional quarrels. He says it's time we started to "frame these disputes as belief disputes," not constitutional clashes, or in the words of Alan Borovoy, author of When Freedoms Collide: "We should renounce ... the attempt to create heaven on earth and focus instead on reducing the hell."

Benson makes an important observation that everyone, not just religious believers, operates under a particular belief system. Unfortunately, as religion-based belief systems are removed from political discourse, the remaining faiths are left unexamined. Religious beliefs, says Benson, are no longer in conversation with other popular beliefs.

Benson wasn't specifically referring to B.C.'s Corren dispute, which, depending on whom you listen to, gives a homosexual couple a privileged place at the table as a new pro-homosexual curriculum is drafted, or merely gives them the first kick at the can.

However, Benson, formerly of B.C. and now an international advisor and lawyer on constitutional law and head of the Centre for Cultural Renewal, has been involved in enough judicial disputes around the world, from Canada to South Africa, to know when a dispute is being reduced to a zero sum game where one side walks away with all the marbles.

Unfortunately, says Benson, litigation is not the way to further nation-building, and it's time Canadians and others take note of where the country is headed and try to learn to live together rather than ram newly discovered rights down the throats of those who disagree with them. Among the many examples he cites is the case of the Ontario printer who was fined by the Ontario Human Rights Commission for refusing to print blank letterhead and envelopes for a homosexual organization.

The irony, Benson pointed out, is that the theocracies of the past, which today's secularists so deride, are in danger of becoming replaced by theocracies of the present, but stripped of religion.

In these worldly theocracies, however, there is less and less room for the disagreement that is necessary in civil society, where people of good will must be free to disagree with each other, argues Benson.

In issues like "same-sex marriage" there will never be unanimity of opinion, says Benson, which makes it all the more unjust to select one position as the new dogma of the day.

That's also why the Corren deal, and perhaps as important, the public school boards' responses to it, poses such a problem. The Catholic Civil Rights League has been trying to obtain assurances from school districts that students won't be compelled to attend classes over the objections of their parents. Nine districts, including Vancouver, have provided such assurances, but others have not been so open-minded.

For Benson, a man who sees with clarity how we need to structure our religious and moral debates in the future, the important thing is for us to start framing these debates as differences in beliefs, rather than striving for constitutional victories.

Otherwise a new state religion is being established that is every bit a belief system as the theocracies of the past.