This rabble is a waste of time - Michael Coren
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Sat, June 4, 2005
 You'd probably never heard of the website rabble.ca before last week -- and most people still have no idea what it is Fear not, there's little to know. The usual safe and smug columns and opinions from the lugubrious left. The site is enjoying a brief infamy because it featured a cartoon of Pope Benedict giving a Nazi salute to a statue of the Virgin Mary while chanting "Heil Mary." Just not funny. No, I don't mean that it's not funny because it's offensive. I mean that it's just not funny. Humour is often offensive and satire frequently so. But this isn't satire. It's a sort of socialist Benny Hill on a bad day. As for the website itself, the spelling and wit of some of the contributors say a great deal about the overall tone. "Take your hypocracy to some Christofascist site where it will be believed" and "You don't like Pope Rat being made fun of? Tough sh--." Enough of the irrelevant. Nobody cares about rabble or babble or dabble and nor should they. They should, however, care about truth and justice and freedom of speech. Pope Benedict was an anti-Nazi who risked arrest during the war and was forced into the Hitler Youth. His father lost his job and very nearly his life by working against Hitlerism as a police officer in Bavaria. Benedict XVI now leads the most radical organization in the world. A body that, for example, calls for the forgiving of all Third World debt, opposed the Iraq war and forced the international pharmaceutical companies to reverse their policies on various AIDS drugs to make them affordable in Africa. A little more revolutionary than a group of old Marxists in downtown Toronto congratulating one another on a fatuous cartoon insulting Canadian Catholics. But it's so very easy to attack Christianity these days. It requires no thought and involves no risk. And as stale as they are, these attacks are part of the price we pay if we embrace genuine liberty. The question, though, is whether we really do. I ask this because one of the fundamental reasons that Christianity is under such attack at the moment is because of its opposition to same-sex marriage. This is painfully obvious from reading some of the anti-Christian comments by gay writers on the rabble.ca site. If more proof is needed we should look to the latest campaign in gay centres across Canada. "Tax The Churches" stickers are now to be found plastered on newspaper boxes and on street corners -- the argument being that churches opposing same-sex marriage should lose their charitable status and pay full taxation. The fact that the bulk of church money goes to feeding the poor, helping the homeless and aiding the mentally ill appears to be irrelevant. This is an attempt to restrict freedom of speech, the very quality the left claims to revere. We saw this last week in the increasingly hysterical Globe and Mail. A screaming front-page headline suggested the Conservatives were being taken over by Christian zealots. Goodness me, loving and honest people running a Canadian political party! Perish the thought. If one read the report carefully, however, it soon became clear that this was mere liberal fantasy. In a small number of ridings various Christian people have been working hard to win party nominations. Nothing sinister at all. Just as there is nothing sinister in Muslims, Jews, libertarians, gay people or anyone else using the democratic process to pursue their goals. Yet it's only Christians who are accused of being underhanded and malicious for being political. It's not about freedom of speech and hasn't been in a long time. It's about a new fetish of hatred towards evangelical Christians and faithful Catholics and about creating a climate of bias and false assumptions. It's about lack of tolerance in the name of tolerance. About oppression in the name of freedom. About bigotry in the name of the fight against the same. About silencing opponents and marginalizing millions of good, fine, honest Canadian men, women and children in the name of social engineering gone wild. What a rabble! |