The Canadian Religious Right’s Obfuscation Fetish

If you donate to Lifesite.ca, LifeSiteNews or parent company Campaign Life Coalition, you might want to be aware of this.

Lifesite is condemning a United Nations resolution that is calling to have sexual orientation re-added to the list of classes on a declaration that was composed recently.  Most of the article is devoted to Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, who says that “What this is really all about is mainstreaming the homosexual agenda… It’s about putting the homosexual agenda on par, and actually above, freedom of religion.”

They neglect to mention that the resolution condemns execution and genocide simply because people belong to a particular class.  Apparently, it’s perfectly okay with Ruse, Patrick B. Craine and Lifesite to slaughter people if they’re gay.

Really?  Would they honestly leave that part out in order to encourage Canadians of faith to endorse the murder of LGBT people?

Of course they would.  The Canadian religious right (not to be confused with all Christians) has been actively adopting the policy of obfuscating fact in order to evangelize the world and marginalize all who don’t agree.  Don’t believe me?

The Guardian reports that a couple would rather close their hotel than to allow a gay couple to stay there.  This would, of course, be their decision, and not the ruling of the judge hearing the case.  As for the Canadian religious right media headline?  “Will Britain ban Christians from owning businesses?”  Just a wee bit of truth-stretching, eh?

Catholic Insight phrases Bill C-389 (which would extend legal protections in employment, housing and protection from violence to trans people) as “forcing all Canadians to pay further homage to the homosexual lifestyle.” (Homage?  I don’t remember asking for any homage….).  Elsewhere, they add, “It is really a declaration of war by certain MPs upon Canadian society, an invitation to violence, humiliation, and a trampling upon of Judeo-Christian morality, one shared by many Canadians of other religions.”

The publicly-funded Waterloo Region District School Board has given bibles to Grade 5 students every year for the past 64 years.  Naturally, people are upset that our schools are being used to proselytize, indoctrinating kids into a particular faith, and have set up a petition.  The phrasing at No Apologies?  “Ideologues still fighting Gideon Bible distribution in Waterloo.” (Waterloo Region Record’s defense of the practice, apparently, is that it’s okay because they don’t look like bibles.)

In reference to human rights in the US, where the Employment Non-Discrimination Act proposes to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people — probably to scare people about the possible granting of human rights here — Catholic Insight scares people into believing that the Boy Scouts and faith-based adoption agencies will be forced to close.

Vancouver Coastal Health Authority wants to offer HIV testing to all patients.  Timothy Bloedow objects to this, in “Professionals want responsible Canadians to pander to the corrupt.”

Catholic Insight had to scrape to find someone (they chose a Texas University) that would assert that screening methods were too unreliable to allow gay men to donate blood.

Lifesite also gives us the story of Abigail Seidman, a pro-life activist who claims that her pro-choice mother was seduced into a world of satanism and human sacrifice:

Seidman described her mother’s abortion clinic as “pervaded with occult imagery and practices.” The workers considered “abortion to be a form of sacrifice,” would perform the procedure as a sort of ritual, and worshipped deities embodying death, she said.

Of course, they don’t actually say that the reason all pro-choice people want abortion to be available is because embryos are a favorite delicacy of His Majesty the Goat, but….

A Toronto Star columnist asserted that:

No religion is an island. All are in need of dialogue with other cultural, spiritual and intellectual traditions to help them “awaken” to the “signs of the times,” including human rights abuses. And when religious voices are added to the growing chorus of human rights advocates, the results, in the words of Prejean, are “downright refreshing.”

Naturally, the headline the religious right ran made it sound like doing so, and granting human rights to any class (presumably excluding the special rights afforded to religion) would compromise the Christian faith (Human Rights gut the Church of its Moral and Spiritual Testimony)

Lifesite tries to sound more journalistic by not infusing blatant opinion (except the occasional insistence that homosexuality is mental illness and such), but tends to balance their reporting heavily toward their perspective through the selection of interviewees.  That has helped them perpetuate the “bathroom bill” terminology equating trans people with washroom predators.

Bloedow operates No Apologies and also christiangovernance.ca (although they’ve recently merged).  In his consultation to the 2011 federal budget, he recommends “shutting down the enslaving Indian Act and setting Aboriginal people free to be entrepreneurial and to abandon dependency” (voiding treaties with First Nations peoples and cutting off all reparations payments), defunding all Non-Governmental Organizations “so that only those with a real membership base” (i.e. religious institutions that have trained their dependent denominations to shell out wads of cash) will survive, eliminate Marxist graduated taxation (stop taxing wealthy businesses and individuals according to their earnings), “encouraging voluntary social supports and reducing expensive and destructive dependence on the state” (cut off all social programs), “sharply reduce red tape, and roll back the micro-managing, paternalistic developments of recent years with the increase in oppressive regulations under the guise of health and safety” (because deregulation works oh so well, such as when it was applied to banks in the US)

With Charles McVety’s recent reprimand from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, people may be waking up to the habitual use of bald-faced euphemisms, distortions and lies to terrorize their flock into fearing fictional menaces. Such as claiming that “homosexual propaganda” is behind why nobody thinks of Wikileaks as a gay conspiracy, or insisting that human rights legislation “panders to terrorism,” and using “science” by organizations that start from a point of bias like Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (which was seen distorting studies, omitting or obscuring data and more to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage) passed off as fact.

They’re almost as bad as American wingnut Brian Fischer crying that a recent Canadian policy is evidence that repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell will force military personnel to crossdress. Canadians have to wonder if people are coming down with Tea Party fever, when irrationality starts spreading, like the PEI transportation minister’s attribution of a minor fall in the Provincial Legislature to being “the hand of God”. Nearly all of these articles came out this month.

Something is wrong in the state of Canada.  And it is not that sex and gender diverse people are “allowed” to exist.

If you donate to Lifesite.ca, LifeSiteNews or parent company Campaign Life Coalition; No Apologies or parent ChristianGovernance; or Catholic Insight, you might want to consider what you’re financing.