Bible verses regarded as hate literature: Court rules Scripture exposed homosexuals to ridicule

Certain passages of the Bible can be construed as hate literature if placed in a particular context, according to a Canadian provincial court.

The Court of Queen's Bench in Saskatchewan upheld a 2001 ruling by the province's human rights tribunal that fined a man for submitting a newspaper ad that included citations of four Bible verses that address homosexuality.

A columnist noted in the Edmonton Journal last week that the Dec. 11 ruling generated virtually no news stories and "not a single editorial."

Imagine "the hand-wringing if ever a federal court labeled the Quran hate literature and forced a devout Muslim to pay a fine for printing some of his book's more astringent passages in an ad in a daily newspaper," wrote Lorne Gunter in the Edmonton, Alberta, daily.

Under Saskatchewan's Human Rights Code, Hugh Owens of Regina, Saskatchewan, was found guilty along with the newspaper, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, of inciting hatred and was forced to pay damages of 1,500 Canadian dollars to each of the three homosexual men who filed the complaint.

The rights code allows for expression of honestly held beliefs, but the commission ruled that the code can place "reasonable restriction" on Owen's religious expression, because the ad exposed the complainants "to hatred, ridicule, and their dignity was affronted on the basis of their sexual orientation."

The ad's theme was that the Bible says no to homosexual behavior. It listed the references to four Bible passages, Romans 1, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13 and 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 on the left side. An equal sign was placed between the verse references and a drawing of two males holding hands overlaid with the universal nullification symbol - a red circle with a diagonal bar.

Owens, an evangelical Christian and corrections officer, said his ad was "a Christian response" to Homosexual Pride Week.

"I put the biblical references, but not the actual verses, so the ad would become interactive," he told the National Catholic Register after the 2001 ruling. "I figured somebody would have to look them up in the Bible first, or if they didn't have a Bible, they'd have to find one."

Leviticus 20:13, says, according to the New International Version, "If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

"Owens denies that, as a Christian, he wants homosexuals put to death, as some inferred from the biblical passages," the Catholic paper said. He believes, however, that "eternal salvation is at stake," both for those engaging in homosexual acts and for himself, if he fails to inform them about "what God says about their behavior."

Justice J. Barclay wrote in his opinion that the human-rights panel "was correct in concluding that the advertisement can objectively be seen as exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule."

"When the use of the circle and slash is combined with the passages of the Bible, it exposes homosexuals to detestation, vilification and disgrace," Barclay said. "In other words, the biblical passage which suggests that if a man lies with a man they must be put to death exposes homosexuals to hatred."

In the 2001 ruling, Saskatchewan Human Rights Board of Inquiry commissioner Valerie Watson emphasized that the panel was not banning parts of the Bible. She wrote that the offense was the combination of the symbol and the biblical references. Owens, in fact, published an ad in 2001, without complaint, that quoted the full text of the passages he cited in the offending 1997 ad.

That legislation would make criminals of people like Owens and others who have been charged under provincial human rights panels, they argue.

In 1998, an Ontario man was convicted of hate crimes for an incident in which he distributed pamphlets about Islam outside a high school. In one of the pamphlets, defendant Mark Harding listed atrocities committed in the name of Islam in foreign lands to back his assertion that Canadians should be wary of local Muslims.

Janet Epp Buckingham, legal counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, says cases like this are worrisome precedents that an expanded hate law could build upon, reported the Hamilton, Ontario, Spectator newspaper.

"Mark Harding really went overboard," Epp Buckingham said. "He said some quite nasty things about Muslims - that they are really violent overseas and that Muslims in Canada are the same and people need to be careful of them.

"But the court almost ignored the religious exemption," she said. "Harding himself said he wasn't trying to incite violence against Muslims. But the court said he did promote violence and hatred against Muslims and therefore the exemption doesn't apply, that it was not a good faith expression of religion."

She said that, at the very least, Bill C-250 could place a significant chill over the Christian community and, at worst, it could cause undue restrictions on religious expression.

The Pro-Family Law Center 6060 Sunrise Vista Dr., Ste. 3050 Citrus Heights, CA 95610
Phone 916.676.1057 E-mail: info@ abidingtruth. com

In Defense of Sodomy Laws
In early December of this year the U. S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Lawrence v.Texas, which once again challenges the right of states to criminalize consensual homosexual sodomy. I am the co-author, along with Richard Ackerman and Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation, of the sole amicus brief in opposition to the Lawrence petition for review. At issue in this case are two substantive legal questions and numerous political questions. The first legal question is whether the states have a right to regulate sexual conduct in the interest of public health, safety and morality. On this question, the "gay" movement hopes that the court will reconsider its decision in the 1986 case of Bowers v. Hardwick. In Bowers, the court declined to equate homosexual sodomy with marital sexual relations. Justice White wrote for the majority

Respondent would have us announce... a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.
This we are quite unwilling to do.... Proscriptions against this conduct have ancient
roots.... Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in this conduct is "deeply rooted
in this Nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best,
facetious.

I believe the court is unlikely to reverse Bowers for several reasons, not the least of which is that the underlying legal principles have not changed since the words above were written, even if public opinion has to some extent. An additional factor is this court's increasingly conservative
record on the matter of states rights, meaning that it respects state sovereignty. Another reason may be inferred from Justice White's warning that making "consent" of the parties the primary criteria in deciding sex laws could lead to the legalization of all sexual crimes (incest, polygamy and pedophilia are three that quickly come to mind). That danger looms much larger in today's more highly sexualized culture than it did in 1986, a fact not likely to have escaped the attention of the justices.

Petitioners stand a slightly better chance of prevailing on the second legal question. It is the question of whether Texas' sodomy statute banning same-sex but not opposite-sex sodomy violates the equal protection clause of the constitution. The principle of equal protection is that similarly situated parties may not be treated unequally by government. The court will therefore need to consider whether same-sex and opposite-sex "sodomites" truly are the same under the law or whether there is a valid difference which would justify criminalization of the conduct of one and not the other. This was the primary question addressed in our amicus brief (which may be read online at www. abidingtruth. com).

Here again, the court is unlikely to side with Lawrence. As detailed in our brief, public health records and scientific studies show same-sex sodomy to be dramatically more harmful to individuals and society than is opposite-sex sodomy. AIDS statistics alone satisfy this claim. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records show that as of June, 2001, same-sex relationships accounted for 362,000 (45.6%) of the 793,000 AIDS cases (another 50,000 of the AIDS victims were homosexual drug users). This is compared to just 86,000 or 10.8% of AIDS cases caused by opposite-sex relations. Our brief identifies numerous other costly diseases and dysfunctions that disproportionally afflict homosexuals.

This is not to say that opposite sex sodomy is not harmful (receptive anal intercourse is highly damaging to the human body), but same-sex sodomy carries a higher price tag for society.

In light of these facts, Lawrence's equal protection claim should fail for lack of equivalency between same-and opposite sex conduct. The fact that Lawrence may produce other studies and statistics more favorable to his position will not avail, since states are legally permitted to decide
for themselves which scientific evidence to prefer in drafting their own laws.

Public morality provides an entirely separate basis for defeating the equal protection argument. States may, according to their own communal standards, differentiate same-and opposite sex sodomy as morally distinct and dissimilar forms of conduct.

On the legal questions, then, Lawrence should fail and the states right to regulate harmful sexual conduct should again be affirmed by the court. However, this will throw the issue back to the states for discussion of the more difficult political questions raised by Lawrence.

Unfortunately, few people dare to defend the sodomy laws these days. The push-the-envelope morality of the 1960s sexual revolution has attained a status akin to religious dogma in this country, and people who question whether we've gone too far are the new heretics. Yet, at the risk of being burned at the stake, some of us need to speak up in favor of reasonable limitations on what is considered acceptable sexual conduct.

In generations past, regulating sexual conduct was much simpler. Americans recognized that a healthy society is rooted in the natural family (i. e. a man and a woman and their children by birth or adoption). Both church and state promoted the institution of marriage to protect families (and therefore society itself) from destructive influences, most especially promiscuity (meaning all sexual conduct outside of marriage). The marriage license was a license to enjoy sexual freedom without government interference or scrutiny, while promiscuity was discouraged by both law and public morals.

Then, in the late 1940s, the still-hidden homosexual movement, led by in-the-closet "gay" activist Alfred Kinsey, began attacking marriage-based sexual morality. Kinsey promoted sexual "freedom" for everyone, including children, limited only by the concept of mutual consent. By the mid-1960s, Kinsey's "gay" activism had sparked a sexual revolution. Subsequently, one by one, the barriers to sexual freedom were thrown down, and with them fell the security and stability of the natural family. Today, instead of a nation of intact healthy families, we are a fractured society, our culture dominated by sex-obsessed narcissists and awash in behavior-based social problems.
The sodomy laws are the next-to-last true barrier to Kinsey's forces. The last barrier to unrestricted sexual license, the age of consent laws, is all that will remain if Bowers is overturned and I'm afraid that barrier would not long stand. Already, adults can legally have sex with fourteen-year-olds in Canada and with sixteen-year-olds in some U. S. states.

Yet sodomy, especially anal sodomy, deserves to be criminalized. Although characterized by homosexuals as a loving act, sodomy is an act of sadism and violence against the receptive partner that often results in serious damage to the body, especially over time. That one partner consents to this abuse should not sanctify it in the eyes of the law, any more than wife-beating should be sanctioned if a wife consents to be beaten by her husband. Indeed, the health complications from sodomy can be more dangerous to one's health than a physical beating.

Perhaps the most important function of sodomy laws is to deter to the spread of homosexuality in society. As revered a constitutional figure as Thomas Jefferson cited this justification in his restatement of the law on sexual crimes. Labeling homosexual sodomy as "buggery," he noted that, classically, "Buggery is twofold. 1. With mankind. 2. With beasts," and noted that of the two, homosexuality was worse, because "Bestiality can never make any progress" (Thomas Jefferson, Library Classics of the United States, 1984, p. 355). "Gay" activists will drag out the old chestnut that no one can become "gay," but common sense is on the side of Jefferson; that any form of consensual sexual behavior will (and does) increase as it becomes more accepted in society.

It is hoped that the Supreme Court has taken review of the Lawrence case to reaffirm the constitutionality of sodomy laws. Otherwise, the excesses of the sexual revolution -and the power of the "gay" movement -will continue to expand to our collective detriment.

And my point is? Hey, I didn't make this stuff up. Allow me to post another perspective (which admittedly I have before) from someone you might recognize:

"Norway rats have been bred in scientific laboratories since the middle
nineteenth century. Artificial selection has elicited-partly
through unconscious choices by laboratory personnel-a strain of rats
that is calmer, tamer, less aggressive, more fertile, and with significantly
smaller brains than their wild ancestors. All this is a convenience
for those experimenting on rats.

In a now-classic experiment, the psychologist John B. Calhoun let
Norway rats reproduce in an enclosure of fixed size until the number
of occupants, and therefore the population density, was very high. He
made sure, however, to provide everyone with enough to eat. What
happened?

As the population increased, a range of unusual behavior was
noted. Nursing mothers became somehow distracted, rejecting and
abandoning their infants, who would wither away and die. Despite the
surplus of ordinary food, the bodies of the newborn would be greedily
eaten by passersby. An adult female in heat or estrus would be pursued
relentlessly, not by one, but by a pack of males. She had no hope
of escape, or even sanctuary. Obstetrical and gynecological disorders
proliferated, and many females died giving birth, or from complications
soon after. When crowded together, the rats lost their inclination
or ability to build nests for themselves and their young; their desultory
constructions were amateurish and ineffective.

Among the males Calhoun distinguished four types: the dominant,
highly aggressive ones who, although "the most normal," would occasionally
go "berserk"; the homosexuals who made sexual advances
to adults and juveniles of both sexes (but, significantly, only to non ovulating
females): their invitations were generally accepted, or at
least tolerated, but they were frequently attacked by the dominant
males; a wholly passive population that "moved through the community
like somnambulists" with nearly complete social disorientation;
and a subgroup Calhoun calls the "probers," uninvolved in the struggle
for status but hyperactive, hypersexual, bisexual, and cannibalistic.

If there were no differences between rats and people, we might
conclude that among the consequences of crowding humans into
cities-other things being equal-would be more outbreaks of street
fighting and domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, soaring infant
and maternal mortality, gang rape, psychosis, increased homosexuality
and hypersexuality, gay bashing, alienation, social disorientation
and rootlessness, and a decline in traditional domestic skills. "

(from Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan-Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors 1992 pages 184-185)

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