Anti-Religious Discrimination
Is Canada on the right track with its insistence on honouring the rights of all people to all manner of ideologies, creeds, religions, cultural, social and traditional beliefs, giving equal value to all? Sounds awfully decent. Of course, there's the salient fact that in a fair and just society no one individual's interpretation of their religion, their culture, their ideology or their gender orientation should actually deleteriously impinge on that of others' like rights. And that's a tough nut to crack.Good thing we have our valued, trusted and inspiring Human Rights Commissions. Who actually, in their inception, set out to right the wrongs that pluralism saw in the community, from people representing 'visible minorities' (there's that UN-abhorred phrase; pardon) not being able to access decent housing, and finding jobs scarce when they presented their exotic features to interviewers. That was the kind of societal problem that these commissions were good at solving.
Trouble is, on the way to becoming a well-balanced, less discriminatory society, many of the distasteful practises that made lives miserable for minority groups have dissolved in a society that now prides itself on its level of acceptance of others, of an expanded and extended social contract that represents modern Canada. Even Jews can attend university and be invited to private clubs in this glorious new Canada of the 21st Century, although dogs still aren't permitted.
Recent actions by human rights commissions in Canada, however, have threatened to turn this society inside out as it were, where traditional and conventional majority religions are now thwacked down at every opportunity for perceived insults and inaccommodation toward minorities. So perhaps we've gone a tad too far? Gone from the middling-moderate of the Golden Mean to topple over in the opposite direction, and in the final analysis society suffers.
Some may claim that this is an anticipated result when people become too entitled, feeling that their entitlements now give them cause to dis-entitle others, and that truly is a huge shame. Because, actually, on the international scale of balance for religious freedom, for example, Canada stands pretty high for tolerance. Wouldn't be nice to see us begin to topple from that tolerance-plinth of deserved pride of human-rights accomplishment.
Joining the ranks of other countries whose records on religious tolerance truly rankle. Of course within North and South America we're not all that special, since most countries on those continents are pretty open to religious differentiation, and hugely tolerant. As opposed, say, to China and to Iran and to Saudi Arabia. And it's also instructive that the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's release looks at both official and unofficial state views.
In other words, in some countries, like China, tolerance toward religious minorities, or 'the other' is high among the general population, but there is a low level of tolerance by the state apparatus, the ruling, governing elite. Not quite like Iran, Egypt and Pakistan, for example, where resentment of other religions runs rampant through the population, just as their states also strenuously oppose recognition or tolerance of other religions.
Roughly one-third of the world's countries (the study looked at 198 nations) have a high level of official and unofficial obstacles to freedom of worship. Unsurprisingly, given decades of disturbance emanating from Muslim countries thanks to a resurgence in religious fanaticism, Middle East and North African countries rank very high on repression of other religions. Where in fact, arrest and torture of clerics and their flock occur regularly.
Restrictions listed by the study include refusal of employment based on faith, church vandalization (including temples, mosques and synagogues) and beating or murdering worshippers of the disdained religion. Even where some countries have a provision in law to protect other religions, in practise it is ignored. The single country pointed out as repressive in the Americas was, surprisingly, Cuba. With Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia not far behind.
So we're doing all right, but why would we congratulate ourselves, since that's how we should be doing, as a tolerant, welcoming, multi-cultural society, embracing an enormous number of international immigrants yearly? There's clearly, on the record, however, room for improvement.
Labels: Canada, Social-Cultural Deviations, World News
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, December 19, 2009
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