Monday, January 21, 2008

Interesting Subject Matter

The Catholic Scare: How Anti-Catholic Prejudice Shaped Brown v. Board

GLENNA GOLDIS
New York University School of Law

January 11, 2008

Abstract:

This essay examines supreme court justice Hugo L. Black and his times, focusing on the evolving relationship between the Catholic Church and the legal elite. Part II introduces the compulsory public school movement of the 1920s. Part III describes Black's career prior to the Supreme Court, including his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Contrary to what Black would later claim, politics did not require him to join the Ku Klux Klan. Part IV introduces the Roosevelt Court of the 1940s and the race and religion politics of that era. This section also analyzes Black's majority opinion in Everson, arguing that he voted with the pro-Catholic side in order to bait the dissenters into agreeing with anti-Catholic logic. Part V recounts education debates of the 1950s and shows that progressive elites routinely slurred parochial schooling as segregation. They professed the ideal of one school system for all children¿black and white, Protestant and Catholic. A textual analysis of three related school desegregation cases shows that Black tried to use them to advance the reincarnated compulsory public education movement. Part VI concludes that Black had a tremendous impact on law and none on society.

Suggested Citation

Goldis, Glenna, "The Catholic Scare: How Anti-Catholic Prejudice Shaped Brown v. Board" (January 11, 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084764

Saturday, January 19, 2008

How Old Were You Forty Years Ago?

By Michael Perry

Were you even born?

The Tablet
January 5, 2008

Humanae Vitae 40 years on
Elena Curti

The headline “Pope bans Pill” reverberated
around the world when Humanae
Vitae was published on 29 July
1968. Forty years on, Paul VI’s teaching against
contraception contained in his famous encyclical
is barely heeded by many Catholics
in the West.

Spain and Italy, for instance, have among
the lowest birth rates in Europe. Either the
form of natural family planning has improved
to a remarkable degree, or couples are disobeying
the Church’s edict on artificial birth
control. And it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that such wholesale disobedience has diminished
the Church’s authority.

The publication of Humanae Vitae was a
seminal moment in the modern history of the
Church. It caused a breach among Catholics
that survives to this day, and among outsiders
cemented an image of a Church out of touch
and lacking in compassion.

The latter point gained force when
HIV/Aids spread through the developing
world and the Church’s position on the use
of condoms, formally at least, remained unchanged.

The shock that greeted the encyclical was
the greater because many Catholics had expected
a reversal of the Church’s teaching. The
so-called “rhythm method” of natural family
planning had been sanctioned by Pius XII
in the 1950s. Later, many Catholics felt that
this signalled the green light for artificial birth
control, particularly the contraceptive pill,
which became available in Britain in 1962.
Hopes of reform had further been raised by
the pastoral constitution on the Church in the
modern world, Gaudium et Spes (1965), which
identified conjugal love and responsible parenthood
as the pillars of married life. But perhaps
the biggest cause for hope was the
findings of a pontifical commission on birth
control which concluded that the ban on artificial
contraception “could not be sustained
by reasoned argument”. The commission included
among its members bishops, moral
theologians and married couples. Its leaked
report was published in The Tablet in April
1967, much to the anger of Paul VI.

Paul VI deliberated for two years before publishing
Humanae Vitae. Among his principal
concerns were his fear that appearing to
reverse the teaching of previous popes would
be damaging to papal authority, a belief that
allowing the use of artificial birth control
would lead to even greater promiscuity in what
was becoming known as the “permissive society”
and that it would give encouragement
to countries that wanted to introduce controls
on population growth.

The latter two objections made their way
into the final draft of Humanae Vitae together
with a restatement of the Magisterium’s
teaching on the impossibility of separating
the unitive and procreative purposes of the
“conjugal act”. Pope Paul went on to express
his support for married couples who wished
to avoid pregnancy for “honest and serious”
reasons, though he stressed that this could
be done only using “the natural rhythms immanent
in the generative functions”. The
Church, he wrote, was absolutely certain that
“means directly contrary to fecundation”
were “always illicit”.

In what was a huge understatement, the
encyclical acknowledges that it “will perhaps
not easily be received by all”. The then editor
of The Tablet, Tom Burns, ended his leader,
headed “Crisis in the Church”, on a note of
defiance: “Loyalty to the faith and to the whole
principle of authority now consists in this:
to speak out about this disillusion of ours, not
to be silenced by fear. We who are of the household
and can think of no other have the right
to question, complain and protest, when conscience
impels,” he wrote.

Such was Paul VI’s dismay at the manner
in which his encyclical was received that he
never wrote another in the remaining 10 years
of his pontificate.

What Should a Faithful Catholic Have Done?

By Michael Perry

New York Times
January 19, 2008

Lawyer Reveals Secret, Toppling Death Sentence
By ADAM LIPTAK

For 10 years, Leslie P. Smith, a Virginia lawyer, reluctantly kept a secret because the authorities on legal ethics told him he had no choice, even though his information could save the life of a man on death row, one whose case had led to a landmark Supreme Court decision.

Mr. Smith believed that prosecutors had committed brazen misconduct by coaching a witness and hiding it from the defense, but the Virginia State Bar said he was bound by legal ethics rules not to bring up the matter. He shared his qualms and pangs of conscience with only one man, Timothy G. Clancy, who had worked on the case with him.

“Clancy and I, when we were alone together, would reminisce about this and more or less renew our vows of silence,” Mr. Smith told a judge last month. “We felt that there was nothing that could be done.”

But the situation changed last year, when Mr. Smith took one more run at the state bar’s ethics counsel. “I was upset by the conduct of the prosecutor,” Mr. Smith wrote in an anguished letter, “and the situation has bothered me ever since.”

Reversing course, the bar told Mr. Smith he could now talk, and he did. His testimony caused a state court judge in Yorktown, Va., to commute the death sentence of Daryl R. Atkins to life on Thursday, citing prosecutorial misconduct.

________________________________________________________________________________________

What would *you* have done, in the same or a similar situation, had the state ethics counsel not reversed course? Read the rest of this interesting, troubling article, here.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Fred Thompson, Christian

By Michael Perry

[From The Opinionator, New York Times online:]

January 18, 2008, 10:00 am

The Gospel of Fred

By Chris Suellentrop

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s: Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, in his Washington Post column, says that Fred Thompson lacks “moral seriousness” for his dismissal of President Bush’s global AIDS initiative. Gerson writes:

At a campaign stop attended by a CBS reporter in Lady’s Island, S.C., Thompson was asked if he, “as a Christian, as a conservative,” supported President Bush’s global AIDS initiative. “Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson responded. “The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”

Thompson went on: “I’m not going to go around the state and the country with regards to a serious problem and say that I’m going to prioritize that. With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you — we’ve got a lot of problems here … ”

“While he is not an isolationist, he clearly is playing to isolationist sentiments,” Gerson writes of Thompson. “His objection, it seems, is not to government spending on public health but to spending on foreigners.” Gerson also writes:

In this case, Thompson is limiting government to a half-full thimble. Its duties apparently do not extend to the treatment of sick people in extreme poverty, which should be “the role of us as individuals and as Christians.” One wonders, in his view, if responding to the 2004 tsunami should also have been a private responsibility. Religious groups are essential to fighting AIDS, but they cannot act on a sufficient scale.

Thompson also dives headfirst into the shallow pool of his own theological knowledge. In his interpretation, Jesus seems to be a libertarian activist who taught that compassion is an exclusively private virtue. This ignores centuries of reflection on the words of the Bible that have led to a nearly universal Christian conviction that government has obligations to help the weak and pursue social justice. Religious social reformers fought to end child labor and improve public health. It is hard to imagine they would have used the teachings of Christ to justify cutting off lifesaving drugs for tens of thousands of African children — an argument both novel and obscene.

In the lifeboat dilemma Thompson proposes, we are asked to throw overboard either an American child with leukemia or an African child with AIDS — and, by gum, it had better not be the American. The real issue is different: Should we increase the amount of money devoted to our generous cancer research efforts at the expense of African lives that can be saved for about $90 a year?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Limbaugh v. Glendon

By Michael Perry

Glendon: "Despite our attachment to the ideal of the free, self-determining individual, we humans are dependent, social beings. We still begin our lives in the longest period of dependency of any mammal. Almost all of us spend much of our lives either as dependents, or caring for dependents, or financially responsible for dependents."

Limbaugh: "I don't depend on anybody else for anything, and it was one of my objectives when I grew up. I didn't want to be obligated. I didn't want to be dependent. I didn't want to owe anybody."

It seems to me, Rick, that it doesn't get much clearer than that!

Monday, January 14, 2008

Romney and JFK, Revisited

By Michael Perry

The New York Review of Books

January 17, 2008

Romney and JFK: The Difference

By Garry Wills

The situations are superficially the same—presidential candidates trying to remove an obstacle to their election arising from their church membership. But the obstacles are quite different. The objections some have to Mitt Romney's religion are twofold, theological and cultural. Those against John F. Kennedy when he gave his 1960 speech in Houston about his Catholicism were more solidly political. The theological problems with Romney come from evangelicals, who know that his Jesus is not a member of the divine Trinity. Romney has assured them in his speech on religious liberty, also given in Texas, in early December, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind." That may not be enough for those insisting on their own orthodoxy, since Brigham Young wrote that "intelligent beings are organized to become Gods, even the Sons of God," and that these divinized believers may be the saviors of the worlds they dispose of. But Romney is right in claiming that such points of theology are irrelevant to the practical morality involved in politics. "Sons of God" is not a political slogan.
...
The only objection to Mormons on political grounds would be their record of polygamy and racism, both of which have been officially abjured. But Kennedy's problem was precisely political. Catholics were familiar enough to Americans—there was no weirdo factor. (People wearing white hoods over their heads had little right to call others weird.) And Kennedy's opponents were not interested in theological questions like transubstantiation. But there were solid grounds for political doubts about Catholics. The Vatican had not, in 1960, formally renounced its condemnation of American pluralism and democracy. In fact, one of Kennedy's advisers on his Houston speech, the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, had recently been silenced by the Vatican for defending religious pluralism.

There was a cogently argued case against papal politics. Paul Blanshard had maintained, in the best-selling American Freedom and Catholic Power (1948), that Catholics were just pretending to be democrats till they could get into power and imitate such Vatican-approved regimes as that of Francisco Franco in Spain. A strong lobby, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, had continued to argue the Blanshard position. It had successfully blocked the sending of a full ambassador to the Vatican. The Protestant ministers who organized against Kennedy's campaign, under Norman Vincent Peale, feared the Pope's power more than his doctrines—just as they had when Al Smith ran for president in 1928.

Kennedy could not openly do what the Catholic historian Lord Acton did when Pius IX attacked democracy. Acton told Gladstone that he did not know half the papal atrocities, but these did not matter, since British Catholics paid no attention to them. But Kennedy sidled up to such a statement. Not only had he, too, opposed the Vatican ambassador and financial aid to Catholic schools; he also declared that "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." This went beyond what Father Murray was advocating. It was as open an attack on Spanish "integralism" as anyone could wish. Kennedy said he would follow his own conscience, not allowing any church interferences with what his conscience dictated: "I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair." In his speech, he faced squarely points on which the Vatican might like to interfere:

Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected—on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject—I will make my decision...in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

If his conscience and his public duty were ever in conflict—which he thought impossible—he said, "I would resign the office."

...

Kennedy said that the democratic values of America are "the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe." Romney and his strapping sons never wore the uniform—they think running for president is their way of waging a war they support in Iraq. But Romney invoked the war service of George H.W. Bush, who introduced him in Texas. It was heroism by proxy.

Has Romney been able to "do a Kennedy," as his speech was billed in the press? Far from it. Kennedy was on the side of the future. He defied the Vatican's ban on American-style democracy, which was rescinded in the Second Vatican Council, convened after his election. Romney—looking to the past, and specifically to the current Bush administration's position—kowtowed to the religious right. Saying that he opposes religious tests, he passed that one.

[To read the whole essay--which, like all of Wills's work, is provocative--click here.]

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Unimaginable (Until Now) Depravity

By Michael Perry

Read this--and weep. Will someone please tell us what the Argentine bishops of the Catholic Church--my Church, our Church--were doing during this nightmare? And, what does it say that this "Christian" nation was capable--and that these "Christians" were capable- of such horror?

New York Times
January 13, 2008

Lost Children, Lost Truths
By Roger Cohen

BUENOS AIRES

As journalists, we like to think we do some good from time to time. For 20 years, I’ve believed I helped two Argentine children emerge from the savagery of dictatorship, find their true family and secure better lives. Now I wonder. Here’s a story of truth and justice — or neither.

When the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 seized pregnant women, it made a practice of waiting to kill them until their babies were born. The infants were then taken by childless military or police couples while the mothers were “disappeared.”

I was incensed in the aftermath of the dictatorship, finding myself often in rooms filled with the animal sobbing of the bereaved. But there was something about having a young woman give birth, only to slaughter her and steal her child, that took the Argentine state’s depravity — and my anger — to a new level.

It was too early back in the mid-1980s to know the extent of the generals’ crimes: the 30,000 disappeared and corpse-dumping flights out to sea. But new details were emerging. One, a suggestion that twin boys had been abducted from a murdered woman by an Argentine police officer named Samuel Miara, sent me in 1987 to the Paraguayan capital, Asunción.

Miara and his wife, Beatriz, had fled to Gen. Alfredo Stroessner’s little dominion after the Argentine junta fell. Tips questioning the twins’ parenthood had reached the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo human-rights group.

I was in touch with the family of Liliana Ross, a medical student abducted on Dec. 12, 1976, never to be seen again. Liliana had been pregnant and, through an appalled midwife (later murdered), word had reached her husband, Adalberto Rossetti, that twin boys named Gustavo and Martin were born to her on April 22, 1977, in Los Olmos prison, before being taken by the Miaras.

The scene in Asunción is still vivid to me: two blond boys playing soccer, the smell of mowed grass, a big German shepherd barking. And there was Miara, a swarthy man, smoking. Why would he talk to me, for my questions to him were in essence these:

“Are you the guy who’s stolen a couple of children after their mother was killed by the Argentine Army? Are these boys, whom you call Gonzalo and Matías Miara, really Gustavo and Martin Rossetti?”

Yet he invited me in. A troubled conscience can be a journalist’s friend. Miara railed against “leftists” and showed me photographs of his wife in early pregnancy. (But none in late.)

The Wall Street Journal published my story — and things started to move. The Miaras were extradited in 1989. DNA tests proved the children were not theirs. Argentine justice moves slowly, but Samuel Miara was convicted of the boys’ kidnapping in 1991 and again, on appeal, in 1995. He went to jail.

I heard echoes of this. But I’d moved on. Justice delivered, I thought, a good deed done. Until I returned here this week, seeking the 30-year-old twins, and found more acrimony than reconciliation.

The boys were not the children of Rossetti and Ross. DNA tests proved they were born to another “disappeared” student, María Tolosa. She was grabbed with her husband, Juan Reggiardo, in February 1977, and gave birth to twins at Los Olmos prison on May 16, 1977. She and her husband were later murdered.

Rosa Roisinblit, whose own pregnant daughter was abducted in 1978 and killed after giving birth, told me the twins — now called Gonzalo and Matías Reggiardo Tolosa — had sought in vain for a stable home in the 1990s. They clung to Beatriz Miara. A spell with an uncle, Eduardo Tolosa, proved disastrous. They were placed with a “substitute family.”

“These children were booty of war and, somehow, the kidnappers abetted the parents’ murder,” Roisinblit, the vice president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, told me. “Yet the boys clung to the monsters.”

I couldn’t find the twins. One is said to carry a photo of his biological mother, the other to be inseparable from the “mother” who raised him. By all accounts, they never talk to the press. The justice I’d helped deliver had consisted, for them, of one broken home after another.

But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime. We journalists are intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don’t know.

Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose. But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge. Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather than in absolutes.

Miara is facing new charges of crimes against humanity in various prison camps. His trial is expected this year. As for the other twins, those born to Liliana Ross, they, like hundreds of other children of the disappeared, have never been found.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Interesting Church-State Case Emerging

By Michael Perry

An MOJ reader sent this along, thinking--rightly--that other MOJ readers would be interested.

State Files to Join Episcopal Case
Attorney General Says Constitutional Issues Are at Stake

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 12, 2008

The attorney general of Virginia has filed a motion to intervene in the court battle between the Episcopal Church and 11 breakaway congregations, arguing that he is obliged to defend the constitutionality of a state statute at the center of the trial.

The case in Fairfax County Circuit Court is over whether the conservative congregations, which left the national church over disputes related to the interpretation of Scripture and the acceptance of homosexuality, can keep the land and buildings. After voting to leave in 2006 and 2007, the congregations filed court papers saying they had -- under a Civil War-era Virginia law -- legally "divided" from the national church and thus were keeping the property.

But the Episcopal Church and the Virginia Diocese, its local branch, argue that there has been no legal "division" -- rather that a minority of dissidents opted to leave, and therefore have no rights to the land or buildings. Church lawyers also say it would be unconstitutional for the state to determine when a hierarchical church -- such as the Episcopal Church -- has had a fundamental division, that such a judgment is a religious matter. Meddling would be a violation of church-state separation, diocesan lawyers say.

On Thursday, Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R) filed a motion to intervene in the case, which was heard in November. A decision is pending.

"The Constitution permits multiple methods of resolving church property disputes," McDonnell argues, and does not require the state to defer to denominational leaders.

Civil lawyers had mixed reaction to that, with some saying it was highly unusual for the state to get involved in a civil case when it was still at the circuit court level rather than waiting for a judge to rule.

McDonnell spokesman J. Tucker Martin cited several federal appeals-court-level cases -- also involving challenges to the constitutionality of Virginia statutes -- and said the attorney general was not taking sides in how the case should ultimately be decided.

"Certainly there is nothing improper about the attorney general weighing in, but it does strike me as a little out of the ordinary for them to get involved in a circuit-court-level case," said N. Thomas Connally, a McLean lawyer who specializes in real estate.

Patrick Getlein, spokesman for the Virginia Diocese, declined to comment, noting that Judge Randy Bellows asked both sides to reply next week on the state's request to become a party in the case.

Jim Oakes, a leader of the cluster of breakaway Virginia churches, said yesterday in a statement that the attorney general's brief "validates the position of our parishes and directly refutes arguments that were made by the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia."

McDonnell's office has another connection to this issue -- his deputy, former state senator William C. Mims (R), who has been a member of another Episcopal church that broke away from the national church over the same issues of how to understand Scripture as it pertains to homosexuality. Mims prompted controversy and much debate in 2005 when he -- as a senator -- proposed a bill that would have explicitly allowed congregants who leave their denominations to keep their land. The measure failed, and opponents said it was an inappropriate insertion of government into church affairs.

Mims did not return a message, and Martin said he was unavailable for comment.

Friday, January 11, 2008

More on "Conflict of Rights?"

By Michael Perry

In response to my post yesterday ("Conflict of Rights?"), MOJ reader Bruce Korol sent me his Calgary Herald piece from December:

Constitutional rights must be protected

Bruce Korol

For The Calgary Herald

Thursday, December 06, 2007

With an anticlimactic flourish last Friday, the Alberta Human Rights Commission delivered another blow to freedom of expression in this country by concluding that Stephen Boissoin faces penalties for having exposed gays to contempt and hatred.

This ruling stems from a letter written by Boissoin to the Red Deer Advocate in 2002 that took aim at homosexuality and gay activism. Boissoin claimed that gay activists were "spreading a psychological disease" and that homosexuals are "just as immoral as the pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps that plague our communities."

Darren Lund, who recently attacked the Operation Christmas Child project of Samaritan's Purse in the pages of the Calgary Herald, filed the human rights complaint against Boissoin, seeking financial compensation and a public apology that would reflect an understanding from Boissoin that his views were "inappropriate."

After his victory, Lund jubilantly said that "you can't hide behind saying something is my opinion or my belief and that somehow allows hate speech."

However, not even the litigation-happy EGALE (Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere) supported Lund's complaint, stating in 2005 that "It is far better that Boissoin expose his views than have them pushed underground . . . . Under the glaring light of public scrutiny, his ideas will most likely wither and die."

Hear, hear. We should be allowing all "hate speech," not limiting it by kowtowing to the whims of someone's agenda or hurt feelings before a kangaroo court that is all too eager to make an example out of some politically incorrect soul.

Unfortunately, the government of Alberta intervened in this case against freedom of expression.

Not content to let their Human Rights Commission carry out its prosecution, the government proactively sought to make an example out of Boissoin. The government parroted the line that the province has the right to limit all forms of "discriminatory" expression and that freedom of expression is subject to a limitation.

Our tax dollars paid to advance the argument that Boissoin crossed that arbitrary line by "creating an atmosphere that is conducive to discrimination" and "encouraging discrimination in employment tenancy and in goods and services."

The natural consequence of making forms of speech illegal is that those who put forth different or unpopular political or religious opinions will be subject to prosecution. Court cases across Canada make it clear that Christian opposition to homosexual sex is one of the surest ways of getting crucified.

In 2002, the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission ordered the Saskatoon Star Phoenix and Hugh Owens to each pay $1,500 to three gay activists because of the publication of an advertisement that quoted Bible verses on homosexuality. Four years later, this was overturned by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal after the court ruled that the message, though offensive, didn't reach the level of inciting hatred.

In 1999, Toronto print-shop owner Scott Brockie was ordered to pay a gay activist group $5,000 for refusing to print their letterhead. The human rights commission also made him print the material and apologize. Brockie subsequently lost in the Ontario Court of Appeal.

In British Columbia, Chris Kempling, a teacher at a high school, was guilty of "conduct unbecoming as a member" by the British Columbia College of Teachers for a series of editorials he wrote to a local newspaper defending traditional marriage while condemning the homosexual lifestyle.

The British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld the disciplinary action of the College in suspending the teacher for having participated in public debate.

Bishop Fred Henry was on the receiving end of a human rights complaint in 2005 for articulating his Church's teachings on same-sex marriage.

Lesson: Dare speak out, and the speech police will come after you.

It's important to let all people -- even hatemongers -- air their thoughts. If you disagree, then write a letter in response, as the intervening Canadian Civil Liberties Association argued in this case. Wouldn't you want to know precisely the full extent of someone's thoughts, like those of Boissoin?

Banning "hate speech" forces all people to retreat behind societally acceptable views of moderation, killing vigorous discussion and healthy debate.

Furthermore, this charade has dragged on for years, wasting the time and money of Boissoin and all Alberta taxpayers.

And pending almost certain appeal, this case could be dragged on for quite a while longer.

Had this been ignored, Boissoin's obscure letter would have been long forgotten instead of getting endlessly circulated on the internet.

This isn't about defending the content of Boissoin's letter. This is about defending Boissoin and all Canadians from the purveyors of political correctness and those who are vehemently opposed to free and open discourse.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Conflict of Rights?

By Michael Perry

Sightings 1/10/08

Protecting Freedoms in Alberta
-- Wayne A. Holst

Recent studies released by Statistics Canada and the Conference Board of Canada confirm what Calgarians and many Albertans have suspected for some time: The lure of an unprecedented, prolonged oil boom has made Alberta the most attractive Canadian destination of in-migration from other provinces and a large draw for new Canadians from other countries. Until 1947, the province of Alberta, which celebrated its centennial two years ago, was largely a "have-not province of farmers and ranchers" where the aboriginal peoples were met by pioneering and homesteading freedom-seekers from other parts of Canada and the world. But sixty years ago oil was discovered at Leduc, just south of Edmonton. In the subsequent six decades, Alberta has evolved into the richest, most dynamic province of Canada. Calgary, a small to mid-sized city for almost a century, recently entered the Canadian metropolitan big-leagues with Toronto, Montreal , Vancouver, Ottawa, and Edmonton when its population surpassed one million. In addition, it was reported in early December that Calgary topped a list of twenty-seven Canadian cities, and enjoyed a North American third-place standing (after Washington and Austin) for attracting "the best and brightest" because of the economy, innovation, environment, education, health, society and housing.

Social transformation of this nature and magnitude is bound to profoundly impact established residents and newcomers alike, as it strongly influences politics and public values. The venerable Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, in power for four decades, is in the midst of a scramble to come to grips with reality, as traditional Albertan values — conservative and strongly influenced by an underlying "bible belt" religiosity — are increasingly under scrutiny.

Enter from stage right Craig Chandler and Stephen Boisson. Chandler was selected to represent the riding of Calgary-Edgmont in the provincial election anticipated next spring. Early in December, however, the still-reigning party decided not to allow the controversial talk-show host to represent them. The official announcement was made a day after the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) ruled that a letter written by a former executive director of Concerned Christians Canada (CCC), a group Chandler founded, exposed gay people to "hatred and contempt."

Chandler says the media and the Conservatives have unfairly linked him to a letter published in a Red Deer Alberta newspaper, the Advocate, written in 2002 by CCC director Pastor Stephen Boisson. Boisson's article called gay activists "perverse, self-centred and morally depraved individuals" who are "just as immoral" as pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps. Two weeks after the letter appeared, a gay seventeen-year-old boy was assaulted in that community.

Darren Lund, education professor at the University of Calgary (a Lutheran, formerly from Red Deer) filed a complaint with the AHRC shortly thereafter, suggesting the Boisson missive fostered an atmosphere of violence and intimidation toward gays. The AHRC stated in its ruling that "the (Boisson) letter serves to dehumanize people who are homosexuals by referring to them in a degrading, insulting and offensive manner." It also stated that "there is a circumstantial connection between the hate speech of Mr. Boisson and the CCC" and the gay bashing of the Red Deer teen. Thus, within a matter of days, the pastor and the aspiring politician were both condemned by the AHRC: Boisson is no longer in the ministry and Chandler cannot represent the Conservatives in an election.

A satisfied Lund says the ruling sends a clear message: "It confirms we all have rights to free speech in Alberta, but there are also responsibilities that come with these privileges if we want to keep this a safe place for everyone. It reminds us that people in positions of authority have a special responsibility to protect the dignity of especially vulnerable people." For his part, Chandler was quoted as saying: "(The Conservative brass) told me my faith in Jesus Christ would interfere with how I could be a good member of the legislative assembly. Is that fair?"

The Chandler-Boisson episode suggests that Alberta 's human rights standards are evolving for the better. But Chandler's assertion that his religious rights are being curtailed illustrates how variously "for the better" can be understood, and suggests that such evolution cannot be taken for granted, as there will always be those who challenge it. Thus, freedoms require vigilance if our province is to mature as a safe place for everyone.

[Wayne A. Holst, formerly from Ontario but a proud Albertan for almost three decades, teaches at the University of Calgary and at St. David's United Church.]

----------
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Mirror of Justice

Interesting Subject Matter

How Old Were You Forty Years Ago?

What Should a Faithful Catholic Have Done?

Lawyer Reveals Secret, Toppling Death Sentence
By ADAM LIPTAK

Fred Thompson, Christian

The Gospel of Fred

Limbaugh v. Glendon

Romney and JFK, Revisited

The New York Review of Books

January 17, 2008

Romney and JFK: The Difference

By Garry Wills

Unimaginable (Until Now) Depravity

Interesting Church-State Case Emerging

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Lawyer Reveals Secret, Toppling Death Sentence
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