A rchive Date
[ 02-02-2001 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Religion as one man's poison
By ROSS MCLENNAN -- Winnipeg Sun
February 2, 2001
Henry Freitag, a 72-year-old Jew who survived the Holocaust, is taking legal action to stop the Lord's Prayer from being recited in Ontario's provincial legislature.
Freitag says the recitation of the Lord's Prayer each day before the legislature sits is religious indoctrination and violates the freedom of religion provision of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
There's good reason to believe Freitag's court action will be successful.
In September 1999, and after Freitag launched a similar action, the Ontario Court of Appeal ordered his home town of Penetanguishene to banish the Lord's Prayer from town council meetings. The decision resulted in the prayer being dropped from local town meetings throughout Ontario.
The fact Freitag cites the charter and wants the court to put the kibosh on any denominational prayer in the legislature appears to limit the case to the high ground of the purely legalistic and utterly rational, well above the messy, confusing swamps where religious frays are usually conducted.
But is Freitag's motivation that pure and immune to challenge? Does the cool, cut-and-dried argument that a legislative prayer is a logical absurdity in an officially secular society adequately deal with all the complexities of the problem?
In an affidavit accompanying his application to the court, Freitag says the reciting of the prayer in the legislature makes him feel "intimidated and uncomfortable."
How would Jews react if a Christian said he felt "intimidated and uncomfortable" by the recitation of Jewish prayers? They'd probably report him to the nearest Human Rights Commission as an anti-Semite and demand he be subjected to sensitivity training.
Yes, the offering up of the Lord's Prayer by a legislative body could be construed as imbuing it with the power of the state -- as maintaining the fiction that the only true-blue and certified Canadians are Christian and that everybody else is a Grade-B citizen.
It could be seen in that way. But it isn't. Except by the same kind of boneheads who maintain Israel is a state where a similar dynamic rules between Jews and Arabs.
Most Jews will rightly deny such boneheads constitute a majority in Israel. Freitag's court action is based on the premise they make up the majority of Canadians.
Ontario Conservative MPP Garfield Dunlop responded to Freitag's success in banishing the Lord's Prayer from his home town of Penetanguishene by pointing out its recitation in governing bodies had been a tradition in Ontario since 1792.
"People here feel strongly about this. It is a prayer that was very dear to their ancestors, the great pioneers, both French and English."
Are matters of sentiment and tradition de facto irrelevant in the face of the charter's provisions?
At any rate, it's strange to hear a Jew, who springs from a people rooted in tradition, denigrate other people's customs as intimidating and demand they be dispensed with.
"Although I am not forced to recite the Lord's Prayer," Freitag says, "I am forced to rise for the reading of the prayer and feel great pressure to join in its recitation."
I don't know if he is "forced" to stand. Or whether his feeling he's being pressured to join in its recitation mirrors reality.
In any event, God forbid he should show another religion the same respect he no doubt expects others to show for his. Or choose to regard standing during the offering of a prayer as a simple courtesy rather than an insult forced upon him.
Freitag could argue the religion of which the prayer is a part was in many ways responsible for promoting the hatred of Jews which culminated in the Holocaust. He'd get no argument from me.
But Christianity isn't the only religion with bad vibrations for people who subscribe to another. Including Judaism. Ask any Palestinian.
Whose religion is so without sin that it's members get to throw stones at others with impunity?
Judaism by virtue of the Holocaust?
Certainly that monstrous event lends the Jewish religion a dimension, a singularity no other faith can or would care to claim as its own.
But to use that terrible event as a kind of trump card in order to rationalize the same kind of anti-religious animus which gave rise to it surely constitutes a terrible irony.
E-mail Ross McLennan.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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