An Interesting Case-Study in Religious Freedom From Canada

The Law Society of Upper Canada, an accreditation body in the province of Ontario, voted April 24 to refuse to accredit a private Christian university in British Columbia, because the school’s code of conduct forbids its students to engage in sexual activity outside of “the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.”

Representatives from the voting council called the covenant that Trinity Western University requires of all its students “discriminatory” and “abhorrent.”

Civil and religious rights issues are relevant to all humans, everywhere, particularly when it comes to issues that revolve around something as heated as the LBGQT discussion. I’d like to suggest that individuals who support gay rights have assumed the moral high ground and have seen fit to foist that assumption on others who do not believe as they do.

I’m not challenging the authority of the Law Society of Upper Canada. They’re perfectly within their rights to do what they did, technically.

My appeal is to reason. It doesn’t make any sense for any one group of humans with a common opinion to assume by default that all other humans of a dissenting opinion stand in need of correction. It makes even less sense for any human to assume that their opinion, no matter how strongly they may feel about it and how sure they may be that it is valid, represents an absolute truth that should rest like a gigantic adhesive blanket of conformity on the rest of humanity.

In our modern democratic societies, we can’t allow for absolutes—thinking like that invariably leads to tyranny and oppression of some sort.

We cannot as a human race allow any one majority to exert moral prejudice over another. Proponents of gay marriage have asked for their opinions and rights to be honored and respected—and they must also respect and honor the right of others to disagree with their opinions. The validity of someone’s law license, or religion, or place of business shouldn’t be put into question simply because they choose to disagree with the way many people choose to see the world.

I believe, as all Latter-day Saints do, that perhaps the most important gift humanity has been given is the right to choose what to believe. I believe that, just as I have a responsibility to protect the right of those who disagree with my opinions and religious views to do so openly and without restriction, they also have a responsibility to protect my own right to choose to believe as I feel serves me and those around me best.

So while this exact issue is not facing the United States, it does involve an unfortunate attitude and habit that I’ve seen across the spectrum of LBGQT issues. So, can we all agree to see reason here? Restricting the professional advancement of those who choose to believe and live differently than us doesn’t advance the cause of human freedom, it restricts it. If what we truly want is a world in which humans are free, we’ll stop discriminating against everyone—the religious, the gay, the black and white.

I trust humanity enough to start to apply an uncommon dose of common sense.