Tuesday, May 6, 2014

How a lawyer argues freedom of religion v. gay rights

It's always interesting to see a church take its act outside the four walls of their building, digitally if not in bodily form. The public at large is always more varied, not to mention rowdier, than your typical congregation.

Abbotsford's largest church (and one of the biggest in the province) is presently posting on the TWU law school issue (see for yourself at http://northview.org/trinity-western-university-sexual-ethics/). Being traditionally evangelical in its doctrine, it supports TWU's contention that the only scripturally acceptable marriage is between a woman and a man. Needless to say, the church's blog has come under heavy (if sometimes emotional and poorly reasoned) fire from a handful of responders.

However, among the responses was one that I feel deserves a broader audience. It was written by a local lawyer who argued the merits of the TWU application for a law school on the same basis as I did in my previous post; i.e., not on personal beliefs about gay issues (pro in my case) but rather what the law would permit given Charter protection for freedom of religion. I know the gentleman and greatly admire his rather huge heart for the vulnerable. But I have no idea what his personal views are on the question of gay marriage.

At any rate, here is his post:

If you watched the deliberations of the Law Society of BC on this matter as I did, you will know that they most certainly DID NOT give “public endorsement to TWU’s practice of discriminating against members of the LGTBQ community and, further, granting legitimacy, in the public sphere, to TWU’s Christian view that homosexuality is wrong.” Member after member decried, condemned and dissociated from TWU’s covenant. 

However, because this was a decision about how to apply the LAW, the large majority of them (a) correctly considered themselves bound by the decision of Canada’s highest court directly on this point in TWU vs Teachers Federation, (b) noted that TWU is a private religious organization which is not publicly funded and is specifically exempt from human rights legislation on religious grounds, (c) noted that, as in the case of the Teachers Federation, there is zero evidence (you know, that stuff that legal decisions are supposed to be based upon) that a TWU law graduate would unlawfully discriminate. 

Some speakers noted that there are already numerous TWU graduates practicing law without a single complaint to the Law Society that any of them has violated the Law Society code of professional conduct in relation to discrimination. Then there is the fact that many lawyers in Canada were educated in foreign law schools (including those at Christian and Muslim universities) and no inquiries were made into the “gay-friendliness” of those schools. How about some equal treatment under the law for potential TWU grads?

I daresay that had the Law Societies of Ontario and Nova Scotia acted according to law instead of according to emotion, they might have come to the same conclusion as several other Law Societies.

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