Sunday, June 6, 2010

Duceppe - Blatant Discrimination in the House

Gilles Duceppe, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois, slanders three completely innocent practicing Roman Catholics in the Canadian House of Parliament;  he names them as being complicit in some sort of conspiracy in what Barbara Kay calls a "political drive-by shooting."

That's a good phrase for it; a "political drive-by shooting." Here's his statement during question period on May 27, 2010: 
“Mr. Speaker, Ottawa’s bishop stated yesterday that a sizeable pro-life caucus is working behind the scenes within the government. The Prime Minister, who controls everything, must know about this caucus.”
Barbara Kay reports in her piece: Gilles Duceppe owes an apology to Catholics
With McCarthyite melodrama, M. Duceppe then intoned the names and positions in the Conservative Party of three practicing Catholics, as if that were proof of the ominous “caucus.”
Duceppe has probably been reading Dan Brown, because these three poeple's crime (beyond being Christians) is that they are members of a society called "Opus Dei." How sinister! Kay goes on to say:
These Catholics are all members of Opus Dei, a prelature of the Catholic Church, a group I am very familiar with, and amongst whom I count some of my closest friends. Opus Dei means in Latin “God’s Work.” Members of “the Work” believe that holiness is something to be strived for in one’s daily life: in one’s job, however important or however humble, in one’s friendships, one’s family life and civic obligations.
Opus Dei does good works all over the planet (I have seen documentaries on their projects in the hellholes of the world, bringing aid, comfort and social assistance to the poorest and most forgotten, without fanfare or publicity-seeking or missionary profit), punching far above their demographic weight. Few in number – about 85,000 world-wide and only a few thousand in all of Canada – they are immersed in public life in the most positive and benign ways. And of the more than 100,000 members of the Conservative Party, why yes, there are probably two or three members of Opus Dei.
But Christians are fair game it seems; Christian opposition to abortion is somehow seen as  undemocratic to the minds of totalitarian liberals; it is painted as a conspiracy. When it comes to any discussion about abortion, then not only do the gloves come off, but the knives and baseball bats come out.

And where is the press in this?


Quebec's liberal media seems on-board:
Look at the reaction to Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s call for public debate on the morality of abortion. Note: he did not call for legislative change. He called abortion a “moral crime.” In response the francophone media went ballistic. Would Patrick LagacĂ© of La Presse have dared to curse any non-Catholic religious leaders? It is unthinkable that any Canadian pundit would say of an imam, as LagacĂ© did of Cardinal Ouellet: 

We must all die. We are all going to die. Cardinal Ouellet is going to die one day. I hope he will die of a long and painful sickness…Yes, the paragraph I have just written is vicious. But [Cardinal] Marc Ouellet is an extremist. And in this debate, all blows are permitted against religious extremists…the Cardinal is a fundamentalist. This is a known fact. From there on, whoever agrees to share a political podium with him should be treated like an accomplice to the fanaticism of Kazem Ouellet… “ 
It's clear that Christians are fair-game in the liberal-leftist ideology of Canada. I hold to the Canadian Charter of Freedoms and Rights; a Christian has the same right to express their views on abortion or other moral issues, as does a member of the liberal-left. But what we see is that liberal-leftist ideologies claim they know what is best for public, and therefore they have the moral right to take away the voice of Christians, and to attack them as conspirators. Seems like the media may even support them; that is until it is one of their own.

Gurth Whitaker
Calgary, Alberta