Juno News - August 26, 2019


Most Canadians are Christian. Why can't Andrew Scheer be？

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Andrew Scheer Ralph Goodale Christian Orthodox Justin Trudeau
Liberals are growing bolder with their ethics violations The carbon tax is going up (as expected)!

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

170.56

Word count

935

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Andrew Scheer's comments on gay marriage in the House of Commons 15 years ago have been taken as evidence that he is unfit to be prime minister. Why is a politician who has a religious or spiritual opinion on a controversial issue such as gay marriage not fit to be in politics?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I come with breaking news that will shock you to your very core and rattle the heart of the country.
00:00:07.640 Nearly 15 years ago, Andrew Scheer delivered a speech in the House of Commons in which
00:00:11.800 he defended a traditional definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman.
00:00:19.380 Okay, well, maybe it's not all that shocking that 15 years ago someone stood up and shared a belief
00:00:25.480 that millions of Canadians share. Regardless of what you think about marriage, regardless of what
00:00:31.160 Andrew Scheer thinks about marriage, it shouldn't be radical that in 2005 when Parliament voted on
00:00:37.820 this and that vote was very close that a Conservative MP at the time who voted against legalizing gay
00:00:44.420 marriage in Canada had a position that was against gay marriage in Canada. But the problem is that
00:00:50.820 this is now coming up as though it's revolutionary and more importantly coming up now as though it's
00:00:56.440 relevant. Liberal MP Ralph Goodale posted a video of this speech by Andrew Scheer, at the time a young
00:01:03.720 Conservative member of Parliament, and the media ran with this basically making the point that Andrew
00:01:09.240 Scheer is unfit to be Prime Minister because he made this proclamation in 2005. Now I'm not here to
00:01:16.260 litigate or legislate the idea of gay marriage. I support legalized marriage equality in Canada. I
00:01:22.780 don't think that a religious or spiritual definition of marriage should be the law of the land. But the
00:01:28.520 point is this was an issue that was vigorously debated in Canada and there were people that came
00:01:34.040 down on both sides of it. There were Conservatives that supported gay marriage, there were Liberals that
00:01:38.580 opposed gay marriage, and that's why that vote in 2005 was a close one. Moreover, Ralph Goodale,
00:01:46.260 himself, voted twice against legalizing gay marriage when it came up in 1999 and a few years
00:01:53.380 prior to that as well. Two votes where a Liberal dominated Parliament voted against legalizing gay
00:02:00.580 marriage. This is an issue in Canada that came up a number of times before it ultimately became
00:02:05.420 the law of the land. But let's look at the facts here. According to Statistics Canada and more recently
00:02:11.420 a Pew Research study, the number of people in this country who identify as Christian specifically
00:02:17.640 is the majority. According to census data, there are about 22 million people in Canada,
00:02:23.220 so just about two-thirds of the country who identify as Christian. And when you look at the
00:02:28.120 denominational breakdowns of that and you take out the Anglican Church, which has a mixed position
00:02:32.560 on gay marriage, and the United Church, which is pro-gay marriage, you're left with just shy of 20
00:02:38.740 million Christian Canadians that are part of denominations that oppose gay marriage. When you
00:02:44.920 look at other religions in Canada, Jews, Muslims, the Abrahamic faiths, by and large, oppose gay
00:02:52.280 marriage. You have to assume that not everyone who's in one of these faiths has the same position on
00:02:57.420 the issue, but regardless, you're left with at least half of the country that is part of a religion
00:03:02.920 that has the same view of marriage that Andrew Scheer expressed in 2005. So why is a politician who has
00:03:10.360 that view unworthy of being a politician? The problem is that the Liberal Party of Canada and
00:03:16.380 the mainstream media want to have 100% unanimity on their positions. They don't think there should
00:03:22.460 be any debate on any issue in this country that they view as being too contentious. Justin Trudeau not
00:03:29.240 just said that the Liberal Party is a pro-choice party, but said that no single person who is pro-life
00:03:35.580 is worthy or deserving or allowed to be a member of the Liberal Caucus, a Liberal candidate.
00:03:42.840 And what the Liberals are trying to do now is basically say that no one who believes in the
00:03:46.620 definition of marriage that Andrew Scheer espoused in 2005, despite his repeated claims that he is not
00:03:52.300 going to do anything about this issue, should be allowed to be in politics. This type of viewpoint is
00:03:58.760 not just insulting to Canadians of faith, but it should be to all Canadians because the Liberals
00:04:03.100 are saying that their belief is the only one that deserves to be in the public square. And the fact
00:04:09.860 that they're doing this to a devout Catholic is relevant because I don't think they would ever dare 1.00
00:04:15.160 to say this to a Muslim who most likely would adhere to the same position. The Liberals don't take aim at
00:04:22.040 pro-life or anti-gay marriage Muslims in the same way they do at white Christians espousing these views, 0.96
00:04:29.320 because it's politically saleable to attack Christians and Christian Orthodoxy in a way that
00:04:34.760 it isn't with other faiths. Religion may be on the decline in the West, and traditional religious
00:04:40.600 orthodoxy may well be under a new level of scrutiny that it hasn't before. But that doesn't mean that
00:04:46.520 people that have traditional religious views should be shoved out of the public sphere.
00:04:52.040 Remember, the Liberals are the party that says that government needs to reflect the diversity
00:04:56.440 of the country it represents. Why not the diversity of ideas?
00:05:01.480 This is precisely why True North is going to be aggressively covering this election, covering the
00:05:06.840 stories the mainstream media isn't, covering perspectives the mainstream media isn't. But we also
00:05:12.200 are doing this without the money the mainstream media has. If you can chip in to support our election
00:05:17.080 coverage fund, please do. There's a link in the description box. All donations are tax deductible.
00:05:22.920 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.