This evangelical group has been receiving hundreds of thousands of Canadian tax dollars for aid projects in Uganda, a country currently considering killing its homosexuals. The Canadian group has reportedly been providing water to Ugandan citizens. This kind of work is admirable, even in a place as backwards as Uganda.
But Crossroads is an evangelical group that believes some abhorrent things about people who are born LGBT, including myself. Reportedly this group used to advertise on its website that "homosexuality and transvestism" are perversions along the lines of pedophilia and bestiality. This is hateful and completely wrong.
The federal government froze funding for the group for one day after this week's media controversy, but then re-affirmed it as the group's position on homosexuality didn't factor into its work in Uganda. I tend to agree.
Being Catholic (or any other form of moderate Christianity) is not the same thing as being Evangelical. Especially in Canada. Full stop.
Evangelicals take every word that was written by bigoted men centuries ago in both the Old and New Testaments as the unquestionable word of God, Herself. Doing so means that Evangelicals are forced to believe some very strange things, as we know. I won't get into all of them. But of course, these include supporting violence against women, murder, slavery and many other forms of crimes against humanity.
Evangelicals cling to every single word in their Bibles out of fear of eternal damnation. And they condemn the rest of us to hell for not joining them.
Other moderate Christians like most Canadian Catholics take a different approach. They don't believe every word in the Bible. They also don't believe every utterance from church leadership including in the Catholic catechism. Catholics like most religious people form their own conclusions and think for themselves. They can reference the church's beliefs or statements, but they are not beholden to them. They are not forced to believe every single word written by old bigots centuries ago simply because someone in power in their church told them to do so.
The vast majority of Canadian Catholics have beliefs that contradict the beliefs of outgoing Pope Benedict. The core of their beliefs are to be found in their interpretations of the Gospels and the loving, inclusive, socialist messages of Christ.
This feeble attempt by Lilley and others to equate Evangelicals with other reasonable, thoughtful Christians simply won't wash.
Mulcair can call himself a Catholic, go to church as often as he wants and still call the hateful comments of Evangelicals "un-Canadian". Because they are.
1 comment:
Their accompanying 'Tolerance battle taints the well' editorial was also full of it, both for minimizing Crossroad's actual views (it doesn't just "encourage" heterosexual marriage, it labeled homosexuality as a sexual sin & perversion of a piece with bestiality) & also misstated that the project brought clean water to 11,000 who'd never had it before, whereas it was actually mostly latrines, for *displaced* people who *used* to have it.
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