Ours souls are OK when the state is OK

Both Canada and the U.S. were formed with the concept that people ought to be free to live according to the religious beliefs of their choosing. Our rights to free speech and to elect our own government, which is bound by a national constitution and set of laws, form the balance between our religious freedoms and our secular freedoms. They are the bedrock of our two nations. 

It’s when people confuse their religious freedoms with their secular duties that the balance breaks down. 

Two examples, taken from recent news headlines. 

In Rowan County, Kentucky, the people believe in participatory democracy. Even the county clerk’s office is an elected position. In their case, they elected a county clerk who follows a strain of evangelical Christianity that holds that she has God’s authority to decide who can or cannot get married. In her mind, the laws that uphold the freedom of everyone lay beneath that authority, at least as far as marriage is concerned. 

So, rather than obey a court order requiring her to issue marriage licences to gay couples, Kimberly Davis decided last June to not issue marriage licences at all. Her chosen faith tells her that same-sex marriage is part of the broad path that leads to damnation, and she will have no part of it. 

So, of course, to preserve the basic freedoms of Kimberly Davis and everyone else, Kimberly Davis was put in jail. She emerged a few days later to a hero’s welcome, flanked by a gravely misinformed presidential candidate, still defiant of the law any president would need to use the entire power of the state to uphold. 

Marriage licences for Rowan County were issued by her assistant while she was in jail (we can assume there was a rush of applications while she was gone). But it has been reported that Davis later confiscated and altered those licences, making their subsequent marriages legally suspect. 

This is obviously not what Davis was elected to do. But people continue to confuse the rights of religious practice with the ability to impose individual beliefs over and above the law of the land. So, encouraged by an eager media, Davis is enjoying a brief spell of fame as a living martyr of sorts. 

She is nothing of the kind. She is free to believe as she wishes, and free to speak of the values that bolster her beliefs; the nation’s constitution and laws have carved that in stone. 

But she is no more free to defy the laws that govern her public duties, than a person whose beliefs forbid contact with pork can refuse to licence a hog processing plant, if that happens to be their job. 

Here’s another example. Ranee Panjabi practices a unique form of Hinduism that is strongly concerned that “nothing must mar the soul’s identification with the person.” 

What might mar that mystical unity? Wearing a microphone, so that a hearing-impaired student in her class at Memorial University in St. John’s can follow her course on the history of espionage. 

She has complaints dating back 20 years on her refusal to do so, and has been officially reprimanded in the past for refusing to wear a microphone during class, when asked to do so by a student who needs some assistance to hear the lectures. How’s that for the power of academic tenure? 

She told a TV interviewer “the microphone would interfere with the harmony I must always feel between my inner self and my outer person.” More than one expert in Hinduism have called that baloney. 

One wonders how Panjabi feels about her soul while she’s talking on a cell phone. Merely temporal disunity? 

Amazingly, her employers at Memorial are both flummoxed and hamstrung by this. Deciding this is not rocket surgery. If your religious beliefs forbid you from fully completing your secular duties, you get another job. 

No religion “owns” marriage. No soul can decide that another soul should not be taught (especially if that soul has paid tuition). 

Our freedom to practice does not include the freedom to deny one’s own legal obligations in public service. 

If we cannot get our heads around that, we need only look at our own Western history of religious wars and persecution, and the current history of religious state-ism in the Middle East. 

A secular democracy, bound by laws and a constitution works far better than a society where clerics can decide your rights, or where individuals can decide their souls might be more important than yours.

Surprise surplus neither surprise nor real money

Suppose you are an average Canadian family with two wage-earners, making a total of $71,500, which is about the middle of the middle 20 per cent group of all Canadian families. You and your spouse had promised each other that once you turned a financial corner, and were no longer sliding into debt, you’d do something nice together. Maybe a weekend escape, just the two of you. 

You tally all of last year’s income versus expenses and discover — to your complete surprise — that you have $1,100 left over. Time to make a hotel reservation, and maybe a meal in some classy restaurant? Well, maybe, but would you do it if one of you had sold your Chevrolet Equinox for a loss, just to make the numbers look better? 

Granted, you’re not sliding worse into debt, and after all, the interest on your mortgage and credit cards put together is only $530 a month. For a family in the middle of the middle, you’re doing OK. But if you want to be honest with each other, you have to admit you’re just lucky to have broken even. 

A small indulgence for a family like this might actually be in order. But for a government, it’s nothing to crow about. 

Monday’s announcement that the last budget year ended with a $1.9 billion surplus certainly isn’t bad news. After all, when last year began, we were expecting a $2-billion deficit. But when you sell assets at a loss (the shares in General Motors the government bought during the recession), and short out spending on priorities that Parliament had previously approved, let’s not get too excited. 

The figure quoted in news releases Monday refer to about 1.5 per cent of budget spending. Our government will spend about $288 billion in the current budget year. What’s $1.9 billion inside of that? 

Well, it’s $1.9 billion, and as the American politician Everett Dirksen once said: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” 

Our current election seems to constantly circle back to who it is we trust best with their hands on the federal cashbox. No other consideration seems to have traction; not protecting our environment, not Canada’s place in the world as a trade partner or peacekeeper, not our obligations to the poor either at home or abroad, not whether the government and its agents even follow the law. Just how big our own personal tax bill is and whether this year’s budget balances within 1.5 per cent. 

Maybe in today’s world, that’s all most of us expect from government. Tax us if you have to, but please, no big pictures — and for God’s sake balance the budget. 

If that’s true, then Monday’s announcement is all the Conservatives need to win the election. Who’s Mike Duffy anyway? Health care is a provincial problem, isn’t it? We can bomb people in foreign countries, as long as none of our people get hurt. And as far as that goes, we don’t especially like their refugees. 

If government lies to us, hides noxious policies in omnibus bills and chivvies away at our international reputation on peacekeeping and the environment, all can be forgiven for a balanced budget. 

If the equivalent of $1,100 to a middle-income family one year in six is the bottom line in our expectations of government, we really have no expectations at all.  

Just don’t any of us try to call this leadership. 

Sometimes you just have to throw someone a rope

Prime minister Stephen Harper says Canada can’t simply open its doors to the the flood of refugees fleeing the violence and chaos of Syria. Not without screening them first.

And of course, screening them will seriously begin whenever he says it will seriously begin. This is after all, a rule-of-law democracy and Harper believes he is elected to run it on his own terms.

Canada has formally committed to taking 10,000 refugees from Syria over the next three years. So far, 2,300 have been settled here, and a great many of them will have their lives tangled in bureaucratic red tape for years, if not decades. Retired Canadian general Rick Hillier says that number should be boosted to 50,000, and they could all be safely in Canada by the end of December.

But we all know that’s not going to happen, no matter how guilty we all might feel right now after seeing the photo of the drowned boy lying face down in the surf.

Chris Friesen of the Immigration Services Society of B.C. told reporters this week that there are close to 400,000 people on the continent of Africa alone, who are refugees waiting to be processed. Some have been waiting in refugee camps for as long as 30 years. There are 21 countries in Africa alone who are churning out refugees like it’s their main national export.

According to the United Nations, one of every 122 people on Earth is either a refugee, or a person internally displaced in their home country with no place to go, or someone seeking asylum.

We can set targets for as many thousands of Syrian refugees as we want, and each one of them we process will push an existing refugee application to Canada from all these other countries that much further down the list.

Nancy Caron, of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, told CBC News that efforts are being made to streamline the application process, and that Syrian resettlement cases to Canada are all being processed within a year.

But private sponsors for refugees from other countries where the regimes are just as violent and just as brutal as either side fighting in Syria’s civil war have been waiting two and three years to see any evidence of progress in applications they themselves have put money and effort into moving forward.

I can tell you from personal experience that there is nothing as frustratingly slow as watching the bureaucracies of two countries handle one simple visa application for residence. For a person whose identity and history can easily be screened in minutes, if someone would just get off his bureaucratic butt and do it.

Now try it with someone who fled his home with nothing but spouse and children and the clothing on his back. From a country where nobody knows what tribal hatreds might be packed in his pockets.

My heart goes out to them. Some Syrian refugees who have gotten resettled in Europe are beginning to tell their stories. They are university-educated in some cases, multilingual, leaving cities that once had Western standard power and water services, civil infrastructure, a working market economy — but which are now bombed-out pockets of rubble, patrolled by heavily-armed insane people.

They have much to offer any country who would take them in.

Harper says Canada’s response must include adding to the rubble. That’s a far more expensive option than throwing some drowning people a lifeline. It may not help for the other 400,000 people are also looking for a lifeline, but it beats simply watching them drown and hoping that among them weren’t too many people who were not just, you know … Muslim terrorists.

Like that little boy in the photo.