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Intolerant Secularism Canada's New State Religion says Senate Committee Witness

OTTAWA, July 15, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Yesterday, Dr. John Patrick, Director of Public Policy for the Canadian Christian Medical and Dental Society, Professor of History of Science and Medicine at Augustine College spoke to the Senate hearing on the imposition of gay 'marriage,' and its potential impact on Canadian society. His organization represents approximately 1500 Canadian physicians.

Canada, he says, is facing demographic collapse. "We are, of course, only just managing to stay afloat. Our abortion rate more or less exactly matches our immigration rate."

He said that the discussion on same-sex "marriage' and the invention of marriage as a right, is a product of emotionalism and not reasoned thought. "One cannot but feel sympathy for anyone who feels alienated from public acceptance, as is the case with homosexuals, but creating a right to call their relationships 'marriage' requires rigorous thought rather than warm feelings."

Dr. Patrick, a lecturer in ethics, culture, faith and public policy, said that Canada is on its way to establishing a radically secularized state intolerant of any public expressions of religion. He pointed out, in fact, that Secularism, which is lauded as neutral, non-religious and tolerant, is in fact, becoming the established state religion in Canada and many other countries of the formerly Christian west.

He characterizes the fight over marriage as a clash of rights where the rights of Christians and other religious groups are being overridden because of secularist bias in government. "It is a very strange irony," he said, "that what is proposed to ease the pain of perhaps a million homosexuals - of whom no more than 10,000 will marry, if we take the Scandinavian experience as an example - if we extend that right, we will alienate about half of the population, 15 million or so, by taking away their perceived rights."

In a culture that holds perception higher than objective truth, he said that no matter what is intended, people with traditional morals will see the change as a violation of their rights. "After all," he says, "that is the way the homosexuals have argued their case."

Dr. Patrick, who has lectured on abortion to some of the world's most pro-abortion audiences, says that there is one fundamental question to be asked in all the issues now facing the culture, "Because law is founded in belief, what belief system would you need to have to logically arrive at this endpoint?"

One witness to the exchange said the Senators, who have pat answers to most common arguments against same-sex unions, were caught "flat footed" and were enraged at Dr. Patrick's forthright and authoritative presentation.

Perhaps the most telling exchange came during the question period when the Senators gave full vent to their hostility at the idea of immutable truth.

Dr. Patrick: "There are all sorts of things that you have a duty to be intolerant of. Any attack on truth, any attack on children, any attack on life ought not to be tolerated.

"The problem, it seems to me, is that around the world at the moment it is the ordering of the virtues that is in trouble. I think, in this bill, it is the ordering of the virtues that is in trouble - which ones come first."

Senator Ringuette: "There is no hierarchy of rights in Canada."

Dr. Patrick: "There ought to be."

Some Hon. Senators: "Oh, oh. There ought to be."

Dr. Patrick: "Nobody tolerates the right of someone else to kill someone else."

The Chairman: "You are all entitled to your own thinking."

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