Pulpits

Jesse:
A post that interested me by father-of-a-friend-of-the-blog, Dennis Gruending, went up today, and I had some thoughts (below the fold). You can find said post here.

The bit I found interesting in the post was this (sorry for the long quotation):

A story that the mainstream media both covered and missed was the Prime Minister’s promotion of two individuals to senior positions in the PMO in March 2009. Darrel Reid became chief of staff and Paul Wilson replaced him as PMO policy director. Reid and Wilson have deep roots in both religious and political organizations. Reid was chief of staff to Reform Party leader Preston Manning while he was leader of the opposition. Later he became the president of Focus on the Family Canada, a conservative Christian lobby group that has worked against public childcare, same-sex marriage, and against adding sexual orientation to a list of minorities protected from hate crimes.

Wilson has worked for Trinity Western University, which is based in Langley, B.C. and is one of the largest evangelical educational institutions in Canada. Trinity established an Ottawa “campus” in 2001 in an old mansion near Parliament Hill. It houses the Laurentian Leadership Centre, which places students as interns with Ottawa-based organizations, predominantly with MPs. Wilson co-ordinated that internship program but when the Conservatives won election in 2006, he left Trinity Western to become a senior policy advisor to Vic Toews, then the justice minister. Wilson later served in a similar policy role for Diane Finley, the minister of human resources.

There is nothing wrong with these individuals occupying senior positions but their combined political and religious connections are worthy of note and journalists reporting the promotions missed the religious side. [Emphasis added.]

Now, the question this initially raised for me was "is this really OK?". I made the following comment on Mr. Gruending's blog (and I'll be sure to post any response he might right here, for my loyal reader):

Just out of interest, do you think there would be anything wrong with outspoken, “professional” atheists occupying senior positions in a government, just like Wilson and Reid? Atheists who were as vehemently intolerant? Who believed that religion (instead of just every other religion) was wrong, and who thought that everyone should really just believe what they believe? Who were as interested in manipulating government policy to support their beliefs?

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether Wilson, Reid, and Harper would accept something like that in the PMO.

And, you read it here first, as much as I wouldn't want to get into a whole hullabaloo about this, I'm pretty serious.

Trinity Western University comes to one's attention in law school because it fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada demanding that it be certified as a school for accrediting teachers. The reason it was rejected was that the school banned practices that were "biblically prohibited" included homosexuality. The B.C. College of Teachers thought this was discriminatory; the Supreme Court disagreed, suggesting that there was no evidence that TWU teachers would actually discriminate.

Attending a school that excludes a segment of society because their religion tells them they're bad isn't, to my mind, that different from attending a school that excludes people based on race. I think we can also safely assume that I, for one, would not be particularly welcome at TWU based on my religion (hint: not evangelical Christianity).

Now, I haven't looked into what else TWU stands for. Nor have I poked around at these two gentlemen further (fortuitously, Mr. Gruending has already highlighted that Reid worked for Focus on the Family, which opposed homosexuality to the point of trying to ensure homosexuality wasn't on a list of possibly grounds for hate crimes. Opposing gay marriage is one (horribly wrongheaded) thing. Opposing the idea of protecting gays from being assaulted for being gay? All I can say is wow.

Let's play our game then, shall we?

Would it be OK if these guys had worked for organizations that wouldn't allow Blacks, Asians, Jews, or Muslims? Would we be sanguine about them having prominent jobs in the PMO? I really, really don't think so, and I think that, at the least, we'd want some really, really serious apologies and explanations.

Beyond the despicable gay-bashing... I think I'd be interested in having the conversation about religious beliefs that are just plain unacceptable on their face, when it comes to this point. As I (attempt to) illustrate in my comment on the original post... would it be hunky dory for an atheist who was going to push for anti-Christian policies to be in the PMO? What about a fundamentalist Muslim who thought government's role was to try to push everyone into Islam? Or, hell, a homosexual who didn't think that straights should have the right to marry?

I don't really think we'd be OK with that. So why are we OK with this?