Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Truly defend freedom

It is practically an axiom of political thought that your rights and freedoms are jeopardized when the government formally attempts to protect those rights and freedoms. Admittedly, this is a cynical attitude, and, we hope, unwarranted when it comes to the Conservatives’ newly established Office of Religious Freedom.

Indeed, there are good reasons to regard this new agency as a necessity. “Religion” is resurgent in the world regardless of the preferences of the secular elites who dominate the upper echelons of the West’s cultural and political institutions. The modern West — the product of Enlightenment thinking and scientific rationalism — seems to be entering a new era of religious awareness, for good and ill.

In this regard, the appointment of Andrew Bennett, a 40-year-old former bureaucrat and academic — he holds a doctorate in political science and he’s the dean of Augustine College, a private liberal arts college in Ottawa — can be viewed as a response to the new zeitgeist. To be sure, politics was also at play in the announcement. Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised just such an office in the 2011 election. With its modest $5-million budget, the agency helps protect Harper’s support base with evangelical Christians. And the Conservatives have for years been expanding their appeal to conservatives of minority religions as well. To signal the scope of this initiative, Harper wisely laid out an agenda for Bennett’s three-year appointment at a mosque in Vaughan, Ont.

“Around the world, violations of religious freedom are widespread, and they are increasing,” Harper said, singling out countries such as Iran, and Pakistan. He even went to so far as to criticize China, one of Canada’s major trading partners. “In China, Christians who worship outside government-approved boundaries are driven underground, and their leaders are arrested and detained, while Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners are subject to repression and intimidation.”

Harper then provided Bennett with a strong mandate, implicitly at least: “In the face of these injustices and atrocities, Canada will not be silent.”

Will Bennett, who will apparently hold an ambassadorial rank, be able to live up to the prime minister’s rhetoric? His office’s formal mandate refers to advocating on behalf of threatened religious minorities, promoting values of pluralism and tolerance abroad, and speaking out against religious hatred and intolerance. Given this, the placement of the Office of Religious Freedom within the Department of Foreign Affairs suggests that Harper intends to make religious issues a key component of Canadian foreign policy. This might not sit well with the secularist mandarins who dominate the department. In the same way a respectful dinner guest doesn’t mention politics, sex or religion while enjoying a host’s fare, diplomats might be loath to publicly criticize the behaviour of other countries. You don’t get invited back.

Bennett’s challenge will be to stand up to efforts to hamstring him. According to news reports, two other candidates were considered for the office. According to some reports Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom, was supposedly rejected, in part at least, because of a book he edited entitled Radical Islam’s Rules: the World Wide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law. His appointment wouldn’t have pleased the Saudis. Former MP David Kilgour was also rejected because of his efforts on behalf of the Falun Gong movement. His appointment wouldn’t have pleased the Chinese, the thinking goes.

The government, naturally enough, wants to balance principle and pragmatics in its foreign affairs. But that may be increasingly difficult when it comes to religious matters. According to a recent Pew Forum study on Religion and Public Life, in 2010 some 75 per cent of the world’s people lived in states where government restrictions on religious practice were common and there was a high level of public hostility toward religious minorities. (Think, for example, of the persecution of the Copts in Egypt.) That was a significant jump from the 70-per-cent figure in a similar 2007 analysis.

Religion clearly assumes a greater and greater place on the international stage, whether the diplomats like it or not. And there are cases where religious persecution is so egregious that the observance of diplomatic niceties and the desire to protect trade amounts to collusion. Religious freedom is bound up with other freedoms — thought, movement, speech, etc. — and it behooves a country that seeks to maintain those freedoms, both at home and abroad, to be a voice for the persecuted. We can only hope Bennett is allowed to speak out regardless of which dictatorial regime is offended.

Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Ottawa Citizen

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