Maybe George Orwell should have entitled his most famous book 1982 instead of 1984. It was in 1982 that Pierre Trudeau’s so-called Charter of Rights and Freedoms was adopted. That sounds rather harsh, you might think. Well, consider the direction of Canada’s laws and judicial decisions since we’ve had the Charter. Have we been gaining freedom or losing it?Back in December 1967, then-Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau famously said that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” to defend his proposal to decriminalize homosexual acts. Sounds good, right? Consenting adults should be free to do what they want in private.But then, in 1982, he gave us a Charter of Rights that — according to Drew Yewchuk, a staff lawyer with the University of Calgary’s Public Interest Law Clinic — empowers the state to dictate our religious beliefs about sexuality. How do you like that? The state can’t regulate sexual behaviour between consenting adults, but it can regulate what people believe about sexual behaviour between consenting adults!Yewchuk’s enthusiasm for restricting religious freedom on matters of sexual ethics appears in a July 2018 article he wrote for ABlawg, the official University of Calgary Faculty of Law Blog. His article is entitled A Religious Belief in Inequality: No Injunction Against Bill 24.This article is an analysis of a June 2018 court decision rejecting the request for an injunction against sections of the NDP government’s Bill 24. Bill 24 was a law making gay-straight alliances (GSAs) mandatory in any school where a student requested one. Among other things, those who sought the injunction wanted protection for the religious belief “that all sexual orientations are not equal.”.The most memorable part of Yewchuk’s analysis is where he argues that belief in the Christian view of sexual ethics is not protected by the Charter. He is not talking about discriminatory actions but belief. The “belief” itself, he wrote, “should be cut out from the scope of freedom of religion at the outset.” In his view, then, Canadians do not have a right to believe the Christian view of sexual morality.Here is what he wrote: “I suggest that the belief ‘that all sexual orientations are not equal’ is a clear example of a belief that the Charter is unable to ever protect without creating an internal inconsistency in the law, and should be subject to the ‘inherent limit’ approach from [the 1993 Supreme Court decision] P. (D.) v S. (C.). The Charter protection for freedom of religion should not extend to beliefs in the inferiority or inequality of any group protected by the Charter, because the equality rights of the protected group limit the scope of freedom of religion. The right to discriminate against, or believe in the inferiority of, any class protected by the Charter should be cut out from the scope of freedom of religion at the outset. This is basically a variant of Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance. The Charter, in the name of equality, should not protect beliefs in inequality.”In other words, the equality rights of the LGBTQ “protected group” limit “the scope of freedom of religion” to the point of limiting what Christians are allowed to believe about sexuality. Conservative Christians have always considered homosexual activity to be sinful. In this sense, homosexuality as a sexual orientation is not equal to heterosexuality because it is forbidden by God.Significantly, Yewchuk cites Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, which essentially asserts that an open and tolerant society cannot tolerate groups that will work to overthrow that society from within. In other words, a society has the right to self-preservation from domestic groups intent on subverting it. Yewchuk seems to consider conservative Christians as being part of this category, i.e., a social cancer to be removed, or at least suppressed.Section 2 of the Charter begins: “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.” This seems plain and easy to understand. But if Yewchuk is right, those words don’t mean what most people think they mean. In his view, you have the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion” only insofar as your thoughts, beliefs, and opinions align with progressive ideology, at least on matters of sexuality. As he puts it plainly, the Christian view that homosexual acts are sinful is “a belief that the Charter is unable to ever protect.” And then he invokes Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance to justify why conservative Christian views on sexuality cannot be tolerated within Canada.Make no mistake. If Yewchuk’s view prevails, conservative Christians will be persecuted in Canada. And the persecution will be justified under the so-called Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
