Owens placed the advertisement in the StarPhoenix of June 30, 1997, on the occasion of the city of Saskatoon’s Gay Pride Week. It listed in column 4 Bible references (Romans 1:21-32, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and 1 Corinthians 6:1-10), followed by a mathematical equals sign, followed by the universal prohibition sign (circle with slash) containing two stickmen holding hands. Three homosexual activists complained to the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission. The provincial and federal human rights codes now include “sexual orientation” as a protected category. In the subsequent human rights hearing, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish representatives testified about the biblical perspective on homosexuality.
However, a witness for the complainants, Rev. Brent Hawkes of Toronto’s Metropolitan Community church (who recently tried to circumvent Canadian law by “marrying” two homosexual couples) testified that the Bible does not in fact condemn homosexuality. Hawkes also called faiths such as Catholicism and Judaism “extreme,” and branded fundamentalist Christians as “satanic.”
In its ruling, the HRC conceded that Owens, an evangelical Christian, was “publicly expressing his honestly held religious belief.” However, it ruled, the Human Rights Code can issue a “reasonable restriction” on his free expression, since the advertisement exposed the complainants “to hatred, ridicule, and their dignity was affronted on the basis of their sexual orientation.”
Gay litigant Gens Hellquist says he’s “certainly pleased” with the tribunal’s decision. “There are standards for what’s fair comment regarding Jews and racial minorities, and now the commission has set standards on fair comment regarding homosexuals,” Hellquist said. The appeal to religious freedom is “a common ploy with the right wing,” but religious freedom is “not a real issue here,” he says, since “not everyone interprets those verses the same way.”
“People are free to interpret the Bible any way they want in their own lives, but (they cannot use) that interpretation to create a climate of hate and intolerance. Owens’ agenda is really scary. He didn’t say it in so many words, but he really believes that judges (following Leviticus) should put gays to death,” continued Hellquist.
For his part, Owens, 50, single and a career corrections officer, denies that, as a Christian, he wants homosexuals put to death. But he does believe that “eternal salvation is at stake,” both for those engaging in homosexual acts and for himself, if he fails to inform them about “what God says about their behavior.” He dismisses the possibility of “alternative interpretations” of the Bible as “simply the old secular-humanist standby” argument.
Owens says he placed the advertisement in the newspaper as “a Christian response” to Gay Pride Week. “I put the biblical references, but not the actual verses, so the ad would become interactive. I figured somebody’d have to look them up in the Bible first, or if they didn’t have a Bible, they’d have to find one.”
Owens believes his case is clearly a collision between religious freedom and sexual orientation rights. The HRC judged that “while the stick-figures are more neutral,” it is precisely the “combination of the prohibition symbol with the Bible passages that exposes homosexuals to hatred.”
Owens is planning to appeal the decision, and thinks his case may end up before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Paul Donlevy, vicar general for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon, was called to testify before the HRC on behalf of Catholicism. He testified that the church understands sexual orientation may not be chosen, but nevertheless “every person is called to holiness . . . and homosexuals are called to the same sexual morality as any other unmarried people.”
“All I said was a variation on hate the sin but love the sinner,” Donlevy recounts. But for his pains, he was berated by both the gay litigants and later by a conservative lobby group, who called him “a lackey of the HRC.”
“I certainly hope this decision is appealed,” Donlevy says. “It’s a great concern that simply referring to biblical scriptures can be called hate speech. Soon we’ll be so politically correct, we won’t be able to preach.”
Conservative gay activist John McKellar, president of Toronto-based Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism (HOPE), calls the Saskatchewan HRC ruling a “five-star bloodbath” for both Canadian families and, ultimately, Canadian homosexuals themselves. McKellar thinks gay militants are now “pots calling kettles black” in suppressing supposed religious intolerance, and their own intolerance will eventually rebound on them.
“The major media are all nonstop advertisements for the gay lifestyle, so how far are they prepared to go in denying free speech to Christians, Muslims, and Jews?” McKellar asked. “No major world religion has ever accepted homosexual behavior. And if [gay] activists had any sense of history, they’d realize their own lifestyle is a symptom of an overurbanized, relativized culture heading into decadence.”
The Owens case is only one instance of a continuing trend in Canada of human rights tribunals imposing the public affirmation of homosexuality upon reluctant Christians. During the past five years the mayors and city councils of more than a half dozen cities have been ordered to declare “Gay Pride” days, often contrary to their expressed religious commitments.
And meanwhile, in Ontario, Toronto printer Scott Brockie is preparing to go to trial at the superior court level, after losing two hearings before human rights tribunals.
Brockie’s crime was refusing to print stationery for the local Gay and Lesbian Archives. He had previously done printing jobs for homosexuals, but he judged that printing stationery for an advocacy group would constitute a personal endorsement of their lifestyle, contrary to his Christian faith. If he loses his appeals and faces a judicial order to serve gay activism, he says, he will surrender his business rather than comply.
Unfortunately neither the Owens nor the Brockie cases have been settled by what Christian and pro-family activists are taking to be at least a partial victory in the Canadian Supreme Court. Still, Canadian Christian educators and social activists were cheered, May 17, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 8-1 in favor of Trinity Western University of Langley, British Columbia, in its battle with the British Columbia College of Teachers (BCCT).
Trinity Western is a full degree-granting university of 2,850 students, affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of Canada. For five years TWU has been fighting a BCCT ruling barring it from accrediting its education graduates for public school teaching. TWU’s Christian code of student conduct forbids “practices that are biblically condemned,” such as homosexual activity (or indeed, any premarital sex), drinking or gambling. And this, the College of Teachers argued, must encourage TWU education graduates to be discriminatory or “homophobic” in their public school classrooms.
For more than a decade, however, TWU’s four-year Bachelor of Education graduates have taken their fifth-year accreditation practicum at a neighboring public university. And TWU argued successfully that the College of Teachers had no concrete evidence that its existing alumni have ever discriminated against homosexual public school students.
The case was the first real test of the boundary between religious freedom and “sexual orientation” rights, since sexual orientation was “read into” the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the Supreme Court some four years ago. So as the issue moved from trial court to the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, it attracted intervenors such as the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the Seventh-day Adventists, and even the Canadian Civil Liberties Association on the side of TWU. And the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation and EGALE (Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere) waded in on the side of the BCCT.
In the end the Supreme Court ruled that students from a sectarian education could qualify for public employment. The court upheld the right of the BCCT to question whether any university’s practices did indeed uphold the social objectives of public education. But it also ruled that the question could be answered only by reference to concrete evidence of bigotry or discrimination. “Neither freedom of religion nor the guarantee against discrimination based on sexual orientation is absolute,” the court’s majority ruled.
“The proper place to draw the line is generally between belief and conduct. The freedom to hold beliefs is generally broader than the freedom to act on them. Absent concrete evidence that the training teachers at TWU fosters discrimination in the public schools of British Columbia, the freedom of certain individuals to adhere to religious beliefs while at TWU should be respected. Acting on those beliefs, however, is a different matter. If a teacher in the public school system engages in discriminatory conduct, that teacher can be subject to disciplinary proceedings before the BCCT.”
TWU’s executive vice president Guy Saffold, in charge of the school’s legal campaign, said the court’s decision was “critical for democracy,” because it affirmed that “in our multicultural and multifaith society, people cannot be arbitrarily penalized or barred from participating in public life simply because they hold religious views . . . . The BCCT was only able to cite vague suspicions and stereotypes to justify its position. Such stereotypes are anathema to our laws and themselves amount to discrimination.”
There is some disagreement, however, on the question of whether the Supreme Court decision really entails the free public expression of religious beliefs. And the outcome of cases such as Owens’ and Brockie’s depends on whether the court itself will interpret the TWU decision as doing so.
Giving the optimistic interpretation, Iain Benson, director of the Ottawa-based Center for Cultural Renewal, said that the TWU ruling was far more significant than the homosexual activists let on.
“Big sigh of relief,” Benson said. “With an 8-1 majority this is a very significant decision and a very important victory for freedom of religion in Canada.”
Canada’s homosexual activists have been engaged in a legal campaign, funded by the federal government’s Court Challenges program, to “deny the right to affirm publicly . . . the traditional family,” Benson said. And in a series of legal challenges to parental authority over school curriculum, the freedom of commercial transactions, inheritance rights, and the legal definition of marriage, they have made a great deal of progress. But now, Benson suggested, the court has affirmed that religious freedom includes not merely the right to believe privately, but also—in the words of its 1985 Big-M Drug Mart decision—the right to “manifest, disseminate, and teach” those beliefs.
However, the conservative group REAL Women of Canada sounded a much more pessimistic note. REAL Women national vice president and counsel Gwen Landolt found the Supreme Court’s distinction between “broader freedom of belief” and “narrower freedom of action” a troubling one. And it saw a veiled threat in the court’s statement that if TWU teachers later discriminate against gay students, they “can be subject to disciplinary proceedings before the BCCT.”
So even though the court affirmed the right of a religious institution to its “private” religious beliefs, Landolt sees no reason to assume that it will extend that right to the public expression of those beliefs. And in Owens’ case (publishing an ad critical of homosexuality) or in Brockie’s (refusing a commercial contract implicitly affirming homosexuality), it is conduct that is at stake. The court would have to allow not merely freedom of religious belief critical of homosexuality, but freedom of public conduct equally critical. And with the exception of its 16-year-old Big-M Drug Mart decision, the court has given no indication that it intends to go that far in disappointing its favorite “oppressed minority,” those with alternative “sexual orientations,” and permit genuine public pluralism, secular, and religious.
Joe Woodard is the religion writer for the Calgary Herald in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
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