Ghost of a flea: Respectful dissent

June 07, 2005

Respectful dissent

For reasons that I may be able to make clear in a couple weeks, I am taking a look at public statements made by Edmonton-Beaumont MP, David Kilgour. I am impressed by much of what he has to say about Darfur and plan to follow up on that thinking. His views on same-sex marriage, however, leave much to be desired. Take this, for example.

During 1963, in Selma, Alabama, following the US Supreme Court's decision to integrate schools, Martin Luther King Jr. disobeyed a restraining order issued by a federal judge barring him from demonstrating with others and was arrested. His subsequent famous letter from jail declared that ��a just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.�

Similarly, in the campaign a century earlier to end slavery, authors Colson and Pearcey comment; �(Lincoln) wrote passionately about �the duty of nations as well as of people to own their dependency upon the overruling power of God.� Only a deep conviction in our obligation to submit to a higher authority could have steeled this humble country lawyer to oppose slavery when it was a legally established institution.�

Invoking the names of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln in the cause of denying rights to our fellow citizens demonstrates a perverse understanding of the lives, careers and intentions of those men. It also shows how profoundly held is the assumption that what passes in rhetoric for religious conviction is all too often so much prejudice under a false flag. Prejudice, to start, against acknowledging the religious beliefs held by those of us who are in favour of same-sex marriage. For my friends on the right who think I have lost the plot and my friends on the left who think my religious beliefs mean, well, that I have lost the plot: God does not belong to a political party or any particular issue of public policy. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln were men of conviction and their religious beliefs were integral to the foundation and expression of those convictions. But the same could be said of Jefferson Davis. That does not mean Davis' views on public policy, or the rights of his fellow Americans, were just.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at June 7, 2005 08:07 AM

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Comments

you can't have religious views and be on the left?

Posted by: mainja at June 8, 2005 08:57 AM

Will you please read what I wrote. Your question repeats my entire point.

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at June 8, 2005 10:14 AM