One waits with keen anticipation what Wednesday will bring.

By Montreal Simon

Until about 10 days ago I clung to the hope that all I ever needed to know about Danielle Smith was that she was the new Evita of the Alberta Teabaggers, and Big Oil’s Bubbah Barbie doll. The one with the big wheels.

That she had vowed to make it easier to drink and drive. That she had been cruelly accused of not breeding enough . . . like a good Alberta cow. And that Tom “Strangelove” Flanagan was her campaign manager.

Because that’s enough eh?

But of course now that polls suggest she could be the next Premier of the right-wing petro province, I’ve been forced to pay more attention to the Wildhog campaign and the stench is overwhelming.

Not only because her redneck party is full of some of the worst cranks and crazies this country has ever seen.

Including this grotesque anti-gay bigot.

“If you “were born this way” are you going to “die this way?” Well if that is true, and it is, then you have fallen right into the trap that is as old as time. That trap is what satan wants for you, but is that what you want? You see, you can live the way you were born and if you die they way you were born then you will suffer the rest of eternity in a lake of fire, hell, a place of eternal suffering. Now at this point I’m not judging, I am just stating a fact!”

But also because she’s shameless.

“On Monday, Smith declined to critique Hunsperger’s writings, saying she’ll work to protect Albertans with strong religious views from state persecution.

“‘I’m not going to be the sort of politician who engages in discrimination against religious candidates,’ she said.”

Let’s be clear. The issue isn’t Hunsperger’s constitutional right to his sacred beliefs. The issue is his public position that Edmonton schoolkids shouldn’t be protected from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that public schools are wicked for trying to create safe, equal classrooms. He’s not the victim here. The victims are our community’s children, who deserve to go to school without fear, without being told by their aspiring MLA that they’re damned to eternal torment because of who they are.

I mean really, how many rodeo klowns does it take to ride a burro back to the 1950s?

A leader who can’t tell the difference between free speech and hate speech doesn’t deserve to be elected dog catcher. And a party so full of depraved wingnuts shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near power.

And I mean ANYWHERE.

Oh well. I’ll never understand why there are so many homophobic bigots and other drooling crazies in Alberta. Or why those firewall fanatics hate Canada so much.

But I think I found the Lake of Fire eh?

Somewhere between Sodom and Calgary.

And Hunny’s right, it’s HORRIBLE….

Alberta, the shiny oily new heart of Canada. The New Jerusalem of the West.

Hee Haw. Hee Haw.

Don’t make me laugh . . .

A passel of Michael Coren supporters have arrived at backofthebook to defend his “interview” with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the SUN “News” Network. (I always keep a small pile of ironic quotation marks handy when I write about SUN TV.) You’ll find them milling in the comments section following Rabbi Boteach’s account of the hostilities, which we published as soon as it landed in our inbox. That was on Thursday, a few hours before the program had even aired. Rabbi Boteach has a very good PR apparatus.

One of the commenters takes us to task for not publishing “the response article by Michael Coren.” Presumably he means Coren’s blog in The Huffington Post, which we didn’t publish because HE WROTE IT FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST. See how that works? Our correspondent might better have taken us to task for publishing the Rabbi’s rebuttal before we’d even seen the buttal. But now that the program has aired, it seems obvious to me he was entirely right to call Coren on his obnoxious remarks and behaviour.

You can decide for yourself . . .

. . . but what I see is Coren tipping headlong into the old Jews control Hollywood thing, while adding a twist new to me: And hence, they use their power to make movies that parody Christians. One wonders what movies he means (and so does the Rabbi, who tries fruitlessly to get an example out of him). And then, like that Italian cruise ship captain, Coren looks up from his lifeboat and realizes it’s not where he’s supposed to be. The cruise ship captain’s response was to claim he fell in accidentally; Coren’s is to explain that he doesn’t mean that Jews actually control Hollywood, just that they’re very influential, and goodness, that’s all to their credit!

Oh please. If he wasn’t implying that they control the place, then how is it he figures they can get their malicious portrayals of good-hearted Jesus-lovers onto the screen? By talking others into slandering Christians for them?

Next day, Coren appeared fearlessly on another SUN News Network show to defend himself.

Hilariously, he makes two claims. One is that Boteach is only trying to sell his book. (By appearing on SUN TV in Canada? That’ll be good for two copies.) The other is that he “doesn’t realize my place in Canada. This will probably backfire.”

His place in Canada. Now, I expect Coren isn’t an anti-semite, but he’s obviously a big self-kidder. Outside of cities where the SUN Newspapers are sold, his profile is roughly that of, say, Adam and Morgan. (Who are Adam and Morgan? Exactly.) Or perhaps he means his place as a defender of Israel, but he isn’t exactly alone in that portfolio either. We’re looking at you, National Post.

Of course, being a defender of Israel doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re philo-semitic. It could just mean that you like heavily militarized, legs akimbo, right-wing governments. One wonders if these friends of Israel would be quite so friendly if a less belligerent administration, like the one Yitzhak Rabin led, and got assassinated for, was in power.

But let’s take Michael Coren’s word for it: he loves the Jews, and they, in turn, all over Canada, hold him in high esteem. Now, could he treat the ones who come on his show as guests, rather than test audiences for his truly strange notions of what they do and do not think?

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Today I had what was probably the most unpleasant TV interview of my life on Canada’s Sun News Network (national). Interviewed by host Michael Coren about my book Kosher Jesus, I expected to be asked about the book’s content. The interview started that way. But then Coren quickly got to a question that seemed to be bursting from within. You’ll have to see the exact show, airing tonight at 7pm, for complete accuracy, and I am writing this about an hour after.

Coren essentially asked me why Jews depict Christians so negatively. He went on about how much the Catholic Church and Christians in general have done for the Jews of late. Yet the Jews continue to be so unappreciative, always questioning Christian motivation, always finding fault with Christians no matter what.

I asked him to justify his claim that Jews depict Christians negatively. He said something like, “What do you mean? Just look at Hollywood.”

Hollywood? I was confused. Weren’t we just talking about Jewish-Christian relations? Where did Hollywood come in, unless, for Coren, Jews and Hollywood were synonymous.

What was the connection between Hollywood’s depiction of Christians and the Jews, I asked. The show went downhill from there, with the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jews controlling and influencing Hollywood dominating the interview. I defended my people against this disgusting slur, a tributary of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that the Jews control whole segments of society, in this case the motion picture industry, which they use to negatively depict Christians as a bunch of illiterate and primitive bumpkins.

From there Coren went on to speak about the negative Jewish depiction of Pope Pius XII, which I battled him on further. This was amazing. The Jews were defaming the saintly Pope Pius? For the record, I have written a great deal on Pius XII, the man John Cornwell, a non-Jewish British journalist, famously called Hitler’s Pope in his best-selling 1999 biography of the same name. Pius was the wartime Pope who never once condemned the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews through all the years of the Holocaust and who, after the war, allowed the mass kidnapping of Jewish children who had originally been given by their families to Christians in order to save their lives. Pius advised, in the form of a typewritten directive discovered in a French church archive and dated Oct. 23, 1946, that church authorities not return to their relatives Jewish children who had been baptized. They must remain Christian and should not be returned to Jewish families.

He was the Pope who famously refused, amid unmistakable evidence of thousands of Jews being shipped to slaughter in Nazi concentration camps, to ever speak out against the Holocaust. This followed Pius’ successful efforts to prevent the publication of an encyclical commissioned by his dying predecessor to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism. This is also the Pope who sent Hitler birthday greetings every single year and who refused to excommunicate Hitler or any other top Nazis who were on official Catholic rolls (to give this context, the singer Sinead O’Connor was excommunicated). He ignored the pleas of President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to denounce the Nazis. He later refused to endorse a joint declaration by Britain, U.S and Russia condemning mass murder of Europe’s Jews, claiming that he simply could not condemn “particular” atrocities. The most he ever did was a single pronouncement during the war on the murder “of hundredsof thousands.” By then, of course, there were millions, and he did not mention Hitler, Nazi Germany, or the Jews in the statement. Most infamously, he was silent when the Germans rounded up Rome’s Jews in October 1944 for slaughter. They were being processed for extermination in a military school a few hundred yards from his window in St. Peter’s. An Italian princess, Enza Pignatelli, forced her way into the Pope’s study and warned him about the imminent assault on the city’s Jewish citizens. “You must act immediately,” she cried. “The Germans are arresting the Jews and taking them away. Only you can stop them.” The Pope assured her, “I will do all I can.” He made no protest and nearly all were later gassed in Auschwitz. Curiously, amid the Pope’s inability to find his voice to condemn the extermination of European Jewry, when the Catholic archbishop of Berlin issued a statement mourning Hitler’s death, the Pope did not reprimand him.

Those who have read my writings, and especially those who have read Kosher Jesus, will know that I have unbridled love for my Christian brothers and sisters, a deep respect and affection I have written and spoken about on countless occasions. They will also know that I was given the great pleasure and honor of being greeted by Pope Benedict in Rome in 2010. They will further know that I am invited to address Christian audiences the world over, including in Israel. And I wrote Kosher Jesus in response to the great Christian yearning to discover the Jewishness of Jesus.

But people like Coren who perpetuate the anti-Semitic canard that Jews both control Hollywood and have contempt for Christians are a serious obstruction to the new era of Jewish-Christian brotherhood and rapprochement. It is an absolute lie that Jews have contempt for Christians. It is likewise a lie that Christians are victims of Jewish hostility, as Coren implies. The truth, of course, is that Jews have suffered mightily at the hands of Christianity for nearly two millennium. But thankfully a succession of great Christian men and women in modern times, led by Pope John XXIII, the greatest of all popes, and then by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both outstanding friends of world Jewry, and joined especially by the 80 million born-again Christians in the United States, the vast majority of whom are phenomenal friends of Israel, have reversed this trend and made Catholicism and Christianity stalwart allies and friends of G-d’s chosenpeople.

Denying the past is not going to increase our friendship just as being limited by it will not either. This is a new time for Jews and Christians. Let’s forgo the old animosities, the old prejudices, and especially the old and ugly stereotypes. Michael Coren owes Jewry an apology. If he’s man enough to give it I will overlook his foul treatment of me, both during the interview and after it was over.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whom Newsweek calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” was the host of TLC’s Shalomin the Home (which won the National Fatherhood Award), was the London Times Preacher of the Year at the Millennium, and received the American Jewish Press Association’s Highest Award for Excellence in Commentary. The international best-selling author of 27 books, he has just published Kosher Jesus. He is currently mulling a run for Congress from New Jersey’s Ninth Congressional District, running as a Republican. www.shmuleyforcongress.com

Well I have to hand it to the Cons at Sun News, because if it wasn’t for them I’d never know that a brutal War on Christmas was raging.

Although so far most of the reports flowing in from the front seem depressingly familiar.

Mostly more scary Lezra and the endless War on David Suzuki.

Although the hairy hoary windbag Charles Adler has done his best to escalate the situation:

But I’m not worried about Santa.

Because I understand he’s ready for ANYTHING…

Even though the gun nutz at the National Rifle Association have betrayed him cruelly.

Now I have to be brutally honest eh? I’m willing to celebrate ANY religious festival, as long as it doesn’t involve shopping, as long as the religious don’t try to kill me, and most importantly as long as there is FOOD.

So I’m quite happy to wish my Jewish friends Happy Hannukah, because quite frankly when I’ve got the munchies, I sometimes fear I might kill for a latke.

And as for my Muslim friends, I feed them pizza during the hungry month of Ramadan, and then they bring me delicious stuff their mums make during the feast of Eid. So I figure I’m the big winner eh?

However, I have to admit that, at this time of year, I’m just a tiny bit biased. On two counts. First, although I’m an atheist, I was raised to be a good Christian boy by my most excellent parents. I like the whole “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men” thing. Plus, I’m gay. So when I hear the right-wing version of this seasonal classic:

I kind of prefer this one…

Hey, hug the ones you love. Be kind to strangers, especially the poor and the lonely. Enjoy all that good food. (Don’t forget to save me some eh?)

And Happy Holidays everyone!!!!

CBC Power & Politics on the Oslo massacre, at noon Friday, edited:

Evan Solomon: This raises again the spectre of international terrorism.

Stockwell Day: As recently as July 8th in Norway there was a dragnet for al-Qaeda suspects related to the Manchester bombing. Whether this group is tied to them we don’t know . . .

Solomon: A suspect has now been arrested. This looks like a multiple series of attacks that are going on. Now remember Norway did have a small number of troops in Afghanistan.

It’s a very very fluid situation but it does raise all sorts of security issues about — this is a hackneyed phrase but on a day like this it suddenly has new poignancy — the war on terror.

We don’t know who’s taken credit for this, or responsibility for this attack, but if indeed it is al Qaeda, if indeed it is an extremist act that has any connection to what’s happened in Afghanistan, how do we square that with what the PM said at the end of our mission there that Afghanistan and what’s going on there is no longer a threat to global security?

Stockwell Day: Well the level of training that was going on in Afghanistan was extreme in exporting terror.

[Stock goes on about our accomplishments in Afghanistan] In Canada we’ve had the Toronto 18. Security has to be #1.

Solomon: The profile of these extremists . . . Somalia — these are the places where extremists take root.

Stockwell Day: The single reason for this type of terrorism . . . this type of terrorism will continue . . . and we hope to be able to limit it through the 21st century . . .  is the result of extreme lunatic insane ideological teaching and it happens whether the people involved are from poor areas or wealthy areas. Don’t forget Osama bin Laden himself was a multi-millionaire growing up in Saudi Arabia in a very, very wealthy family. The Toronto 18 were all in good financial shape. Many of this extremist al Qaeda type extremist lunatic ideology that is even being bred in the US — these are coming from people who are not disaffected by poverty. This is the result of an insane extreme religious teaching and I encourage those within the broader community to reach out to extremists within their own community and they’ve got to get the message out to the young people that they are being told lies — that the afterlife for them is not what they’re being promised.

Thank you, Doris.

BBC: Scores killed in Norway attacks

A massive bomb blast shattered buildings in the capital Oslo, killing at least seven people. Then a gunman rampaged through a youth camp run by the ruling Labour Party, killing 84 people. On Saturday police continued combing the island as a number of teenagers were still missing, feared dead.

Norwegian media identified the man as Anders Behring Breivik, 32. Police charged him for the island massacre and the Oslo bomb blast.

Police said the man was answering questions and they described him as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist.

Kevin Annett lives in a small white house facing onto a ramshackle street in downtown Nanaimo, BC. The local RCMP detachment, with its lot full of solid, square cop cars, is just around the corner. Inside, on a watery day in mid-January, the living room is lit only by the gray light spilling in through the front picture window. An unlit Christmas tree still occupies the centre of the room.

Annett is as stripped down for efficiency as his home. Brisk but genial, he flicks on a light and sits, looking a bit mournful, for an interview. I ask him about the evidence for unmarked mass graves at the sites of former residential schools in Canada – as many as 28, according to Annett and others.

This is the sort of question that fills his days now.

“At this point, there’s three kinds of evidence,” he says. “There’s a lot of eyewitness accounts which I’ve documented over about 15 years, pointing to graves on the grounds of the former school or an Indian Hospital nearby. Second is documentation where we’ve found letters referring to these gravesites, from Indian Agents, school officials, other people.

“And finally, in a place like Port Alberni, we’ve actually gone out with a forensic team and done a survey of the ground, and they found, some of the people three years ago who did this survey, terrain very similar to what you find in mass grave sites in other parts of the world, like sinkholes and the vegetation and that.

“So there’s pretty conclusive evidence that these kids are buried somewhere around there.”

Those are the sorts of answers that have made Annett a lightning rod for controversy, opprobrium, and admiration across Canada and, increasingly, in Europe. But they pale beside some of his more recent charges. Last year, on his Vancouver Co-op Radio program “Hidden from History,” Annett claimed that Mounties had actually assisted notorious Vancouver serial killer Robert Pickton, not just by neglecting to properly investigate his crimes but by delivering women to his pig farm. His show has since been yanked from the air. More recently, his supporters and he have “summoned” The Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper “to answer charges of conspiring in Crimes against Humanity before an International Tribunal this September in London, England.”

To Annett’s detractors, of course, this is all bad theatre and fabulation. “For years,” wrote BC journalist Terry Glavin in a splenetic 2008 attack in thetyee.ca, “RCMP investigators have been chasing down these stories and they always come up with nothing. But they persist, like the alligators in New York’s sewers.” Others point to Ottawa’s establishment of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to deal with the legacy of Canada’s residential school system. The $60 million, five-year TRC is currently holding a series of “national events” across the country, while also gathering and recording the stories of survivors and their families.

To Annett, the Commission is a whitewash. “The way it’s established according to its mandate, and the way it’s operated in practise over the last number of months in different forums, the whole purpose seems to be to protect the perpetrators and to silence the witnesses. People are not allowed to speak freely, their testimonies aren’t allowed to be used in court, they can’t even name names. There’s all these restrictions put on people, and at the same time there’s all these indemnifications granted to the churches responsible.

“In fact, they’re not going to be held responsible and they’re not going to be prosecuted, even though thousands of children died in these schools.”

 
Kevin Annett’s long campaign for what he regards as real justice for residential school survivors has been well-documented, by no one more so than Annett himself in his books Love and Death in the Valley and, most recently, Unrepentant. As a young United Church minister in the early ‘90s, he was hired by a small parish in Port Alberni, BC, an isolated logging town 193 km north-west of Victoria on Vancouver Island. Within three years he’d been fired. His employers said it was because he “failed to maintain the peace and welfare of the church”; Annett says it was because he welcomed natives into the congregation, and let them speak freely from the pulpit about murders that had occurred at the local Indian residential school, which the United Church operated for five decades until finally shuttering it in 1973.

Annett, along with his wife and two young daughters, moved to Vancouver, where he enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia and began digging into the microfilm. “I discovered that the entire record of Indian residential schools in British Columbia had been acquired by the UBC library system that very year,” he writes in Unrepentant. In it, he found “verified evidence that the residential schools had been an exercise in deliberate genocide – that over half of all the children in residential schools had died every year from their deliberate exposure to communicable diseases, with the full knowledge and sanction of church and state in Canada.”

But his tenure at UBC ended badly too. His wife left him, taking the kids. The faculty member responsible for handing out graduate funding and teaching assistantships turned out also to be on the executive of the United Church in BC. There would be no money for Annett. Broke, he was forced to abandon his degree — though not his research.

Eventually, the United Church “delisted” him as a minister altogether. Undaunted, he gathered his findings into a cerlox-ringed, self-published book, Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust (recently republished online as Hidden No Longer). Reading it, with its pages upon pages of primary documents, government and church correspondence, and first-person testimonies, it’s hard to discount Annett as a loon, if only because to do so is to discount those testimonies as well.

Witness: “The girls who got pregnant were expelled immediately. Some of them were even found dead on the grounds of the Alberni school. None of us could ever leave the school grounds, and we couldn’t mix with the boys – we couldn’t even hold hands with them – so the staff had to be the ones who fathered those kids.”

Witness: “We were playing soccer in the back field behind the school, where it was really covered in weeds. The ball got kicked among the weeds, and in those weeds I came across the remains of a body, maybe three feet long. It was decomposed and you could see a lot of skeleton . . . . After that, the RCMP came to us and told us not to say anything about what we discovered in the field.”

Witness: “One day in 1946, I was 11, and I went to the place under the stairs where I would go and sit and cry. I heard Mr. Caldwell at the top of the stairs with another little girl, a few years younger than me . . . . Mr. Caldwell was screaming at her, and then I heard this sound, like a kick, and I heard her falling down the stairs. I looked out and saw her facing me, with her eyes open, not moving or breathing. I never saw her again after that.”

Witness: “My sister Maggie was thrown from a three-story window by a nun at the school, and she died.”

Witness: “Kids had TB there and they weren’t sent away for treatment or any help. They just left them in there with us. And I remember one girl, she was just so sick, we didn’t even want to get close to her. But then the nuns told us, you know, ‘You guys get over there and play with her. You’ve got to be around her; you can’t let her be over there by herself.’”

Witness:“I think they were trying to deliberately infect us with tuberculosis, because they always made me sleep in the same bed with girls who had TB. One on each side of me.”

Witness: “Whenever we got sick in that school we were completely ignored. My mother was even forced to sleep in the same bed with kids who were dying of tuberculosis. This was common.”

Either all these people are lying, or Kevin Annett is right.

Next page: “Eventually, the station’s ‘investigation’ resulted in Annett’s program being taken off the air and his being permanently banned from the premises.”

On August 9^th, 2010, Annett took a phone call on his long-running radio show, “Hidden from History.” The caller wanted to discuss rumours of police complicity in the murders committed by Robert Pickton. “I have specific evidence of what you’re talking about,” Annett replied. “There’s a man, Les Guerin, he’s a maintenance worker down at the Musqueam Reserve, and he gave me documents about five years ago which showed that, as far back as 1989, Dave Pickton [Robert Pickton’s brother] was bringing bags out to the Musqueam Indian Reserve. And Les Guerin and another guy went in and dug up this stuff. They had it analyzed at Simon Fraser University and, sure enough, there was human remains mixed with pig bones.” He went on to explain that, though the evidence was taken to the RCMP, they never investigated.

After his show, Annett stepped from the booth and was handed a letter by Vancouver Co-op Radio staffer Daniel van Tijn, signed by all four of the station’s staff, telling him that he would be banned from the premises while an investigation was undertaken into events nearly three weeks prior. According to the staffers, they had video from a security camera showing Annett and an unidentified woman in the station’s broadcast studio during the wee hours of July 20^th, eating, drinking, and engaging in “sexual activity.” The woman was also said to have smoked what appeared to be crack cocaine. Eventually, the account went, a guard who had been watching all this on a security monitor intervened, and the visitors left at 4:22 a.m.

The station says all this was contained in the letter handed to Annett. Annett says the letter referred only to “activities that compromised station policy.” It wasn’t until two months later, he insists, that he learned exactly what might be on the video.

Which is when the story really gets strange.

“The whole thing is ridiculous because I have a solid alibi, I was sleeping at somebody else’s house that night and I have a letter from her confirming that. But this was at the tail end of a number of things that have happened, because when I was in Europe last April, after I got back, a number of the native people on the street were referring to conversations they claim I had with them during April, which couldn’t have happened because I was over in Europe. And there were suggestions like that which indicated that there was somebody impersonating me.

“Which wasn’t the first time this has happened. After our tribunal in 1998, one of our head native judges, a guy called Royce White Calf, claims that someone was impersonating him in the downtown eastside, to gather information and that. So I mean, it isn’t kind of far-fetched to suggest this.”

Well, maybe. When I ask Annett what he’d say to those who might think otherwise, he tells me they should “read more about the history of what they call ‘blackops,’ or the activities of the RCMP or the FBI. There was a program that’s still in place, actually, in America called COINTELPRO which the FBI set up in the 1960s . . . . one of the techniques they used is called ‘badjacketing.’ There’s a good book about this written by Ward Churchill.” I had a look at Churchill’s book, Agents of Repression, which refers mostly to the use of rumour-mongering and manufactured evidence to discredit radicals, rather than, say, body doubles. But then again, many unusual things happen on the downtown eastside.

Annett says that in October he ran into an acquaintance who told him that a certain woman was “flashing a lot of money around and was claiming that she made it after doing some ‘play-acting.’ And that kind of struck me as odd, so I asked him more about it, and he said, ‘Yeah, she said she was down at the radio station one night and she got payment for doing something there.’”  Annett later issued a statement in which he recounted tracking down “a sex trade worker, whom I’ll call ‘Candy,’” who gave him a notarized affidavit describing “how she was approached by men she recognized as undercover Mounties and offered $200 to engage in sex with an unknown man made up to impersonate me . . . . ‘Candy’ states that a white male let her and her accomplice into the station around midnight, where she smoked drugs and had ‘mild’ sex with him for nearly four hours, in front of closed circuit TV cameras in the central studio. Unexplainably, Portland Hotel security did not intervene until almost 4 am. She says the impersonator looked like me but had a heavy accent, and was told that no-one would interfere with them for hours, and that she would not get into trouble.

“The station staff subsequently used this video to ban me from Co-op radio, without ever allowing me to view the video or confront my accusers. Clearly, if I was allowed to view it, I would instantly recognize ‘Candy’ and the frame up would be obvious.”

I phoned Leela Chinniah, program co-ordinator for Co-op Radio, who declined to be interviewed for this article. She did say, though, before hanging up on me when I persisted in asking questions anyway (on the principle that journalistic organizations ought to be willing to talk to journalists), that Annett had been given the opportunity to view the video. He denies it.

Eventually, the station’s “investigation” resulted in Annett’s program being taken off the air and his being permanently banned from the premises. He says the real reason is that guests on “Hidden from History” had been implicating the RCMP in the murders at Robert Pickton’s pig farm. “Between July and August on a number of shows we were speaking on the air, including with an eyewitness who was out at the Pickton farm, who described seeing RCMP officers taking women out there. This one woman believed that she knows the identity of one of the serial killers, him being a retired Mountie. We were talking about all of that, and about the apparent complicity of the police in concealing that.

“In fact, only 10 days after I was banned, the Vancouver Sun had an article about how the Vancouver police admitted that they knew about the Picktons for two years and did nothing to investigate. And they’ve never explained very well why they did that – why they refused to investigate.”

A media liaison for the RCMP’s “E” Division in Vancouver called the accusations “pretty crazy” and said someone would get back to me. No one did. An e-mail to the Vancouver Police went unanswered.

 
I could probably get closer to the truth behind these conflicting stories. I could ask to speak to the friend at whose home Annett says he was sleeping on July 20^th. I could try to track down “Candy.” I could talk to the maintenance worker who says he took evidence of Pickton’s crimes to the RCMP, and place another call to “E” Division, and pursue the Vancouver Police for a response, too. But I’m not sure any of that really matters.

We can be pretty certain the RCMP and Vancouver Police would deny the claims of Annett and his colleagues, just as the United Church continues to vociferously reject many of his other charges (although not the fact of Indian residential school abuses). And whatever happened in the Vancouver Co-op Radio studio last summer is finally just a sideshow – one that has more to do with the dissension currently roiling that station than the lives, past and present, of Canada’s aboriginal people.

I expect they could care less about where Kevin Annett was that night. What they do care about is the way that they, or their parents and grandparents, were systematically abused in residential schools, whether by being forcibly separated from their family and culture, or by being neglected, beaten, raped, or killed. They care, they continue to tell us, about the fact that the majority of women who have disappeared from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, and along northern BC’s sinister Highway of Tears, have been native, and that that may account for law enforcement’s otherwise unaccountable languor in investigating their whereabouts.

And those on the front lines tell us little has changed: “An increasing number of women who are forced to live and work in conditions of extreme poverty and marginalization continue to be murdered or have gone missing,” says Carol Martin, a victim services worker at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre.

By continuing to draw attention to all this, however clamorously – indeed, because of the holy racket he makes, in his calm, relentless way – Kevin Annett has extended his ministry well beyond anything he could have imagined when he was in theology school, debating whether or not Jesus was a revolutionary. “As important as it has been that the deaths and crimes are finally being acknowledged,” he writes in Unrepentant, “nowhere in all the growing rhetoric and mainstream coverage of the residential schools, nor in any government or church release, or in the subsequent ‘apology’ by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, do the words ‘blame’, ‘murder’, ‘trial’, ‘churches’ or ‘genocide’ ever occur . . . . No ‘M’ word: it is not in our lexicon. It never happened. We have experienced the greatest crime in our history, yet one officially devoid of criminals.”

But not without its own chief prosecutor.

Yet another study of homosexuality has been released, this one suggesting that a neurotransmitter is the remote control for sexual preference in mammals. Yi Rao, a neuroscientist at Peking University, and his collaborators engineered male mice unable to produce serotonin, who then demonstrated a preference for other male mice. The mice with normal serotonin levels, in contrast, chased the female tails.

Injected with serotonin, the deficient males then became more interested in female mice. The results of the study were published in the March 24th issue of the journal Nature.

The scientists warn against reading too much into their findings, but I can’t help but cringe a little when I read of yet another study geared at finding empirical proof that homosexuals are born that way. Instead, given that millions and millions of homosexuals tell us that very thing, maybe we should just believe them.

Can I prove that I was born heterosexual? No. Yet I have yet to hear of a study attempting to demonstrate that I have no other choice.

I understand the difference: Homosexuals are still discriminated against, their sexuality scrutinized and judged. This past year, as in other years, a lot of gay youths ended their lives as a result of the bullying and tormenting they received because of their orientation. Finding irrefutable, scientific evidence that homosexuality is biologically and genetically who they are, rather than a choice, might help.

But would it really stop the abuse they receive? And should they really need a permission slip?

The study’s focus on male mice is interesting. What, no lesbian mice? I expect that has to do with the fact that female homosexuality is generally considered more acceptable — but that, of course, is its own kind of prejudice. And, while the study acknowledges that serotonin alone likely does not determine sexual orientation, its findings are wide open to misuse. Instead of Christian camps that “cure” homosexuality, will we now see attempts at serotonin “therapy” instead?

Say one day that science confirms what homosexuals have been saying all along, that they were born gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered. I honestly don’t think much will change. Those hurling hatred, the people quoting the Bible and making claims on God’s behalf, will simply ignore the evidence and continue to say what they’ve been saying all along: “The Bible says . . .”

I think it’s time for everyone to turn up the acceptance — not to mention the Lady Gaga.

Last week, Angela Campbell, a professor of law at McGill University, testified at a constitutional reference case examining Canada’s current polygamy law that the practice ought to be decriminalized. I wasn’t sure if I should gasp or applaud.

Campbell visited Bountiful, B.C. in 2008 and 2009, interviewing 22 women over a total of approximately 11 days. The small polygamist community near Creston has been the centre of much criticism, after questions were raised regarding child brides and forced marriages.

The women, who volunteered to be interviewed, told Campbell they were happy, healthy, and had control over their body and reproductive decisions. So where’s the harm, right?

Polygamy has been illegal in Canada since 1890 and not without just cause. Historically, polygamy has often ignored the rights of women, treating them instead as voiceless, husband-pleasing baby-makers. And most women will not argue with a law that attempts to save them from oppression.

By contrast, the women of Bountiful, in Campbell’s opinion, are not oppressed by their husbands but by the law. The anti-polygamy statute renders them silent and fearful to reach out for services or speak out against other crimes, for fear of exposing themselves as members of a polygamist family and put them at risk of having their children taken away.

It is a fear shared by other polygamists, including acquaintances of mine, who live a normal life, in a normal house, far from any polygamist community.

They live a life of secrets, Steve* told me. In order to feel safe and accepted in their community, they disguise their relationship and discuss it with few people. Not that they like it that way.

Steve and Laura* have been together for over 15 years, and have a child. Almost four years ago, Megan joined the family. While one of the women is more outgoing than the other, they are far from submissive, and Steve is not remotely sexist or domineering. All three entered the relationship respectfully and willingly.

I can’t personally imagine myself sharing my husband with another woman, but Laura and Megan seem comfortable and happy in their lives. When on their own with Steve, they are affectionate, jovial, and immersed in each other’s company. As a family, they go on bike rides and do yard work together, though they have to refrain from affection or anything else that would reveal their dynamic.

Since Steve and Laura are more established as a couple, have been together longer, and are parents to the child, Megan often has to take a back seat when they are in public or around people who recognize Steve and Laura as a couple, but are unaware of Megan’s role. It’s a step back that leaves her feeling somewhat ostracized and alone. That’s where the real oppression occurs, according to Steve.

They worry that if they are open about their relationship, the child will be taken from the home — from the happy, healthy home in which they all live. So they hide.

All three entered the relationship as individuals and consenting adults, and all three report that, while they may sometimes deal with issues and struggles that do not exist in monogamous relationships, they feel content and loved. The secrecy is taxing, but they do not complain. They acknowledge, though, that many of the complications and stresses in their lives would be resolved if polygamy were legal.

So a part of me would like to see the law changed, for their sake. However, there’s a big difference between three adults down the street choosing to live in a multi-member relationship, and religious fundamentalists living in polygamous communities like Bountiful.

Grilled by lawyers for the attorneys-general of Canada and B.C., as well as the organization Stop Polygamy in Canada, Campbell admitted that she had not determined whether the women she interviewed had been told what to say by their husbands or their religious leader, Winston Blackmore. (In 2009, Blackmore and another Bountiful leader were charged with polygamy; after the charges were quashed, the Province of B.C. asked for the current examination of the law.) Campbell said she was concerned about insulting the women, but the history of fundamentalist polygamy suggests that hard questions need to be asked.

Before we sanction polygamy we need to know a lot more about allegations that girls as young as 13 have been brought to Bountiful to become brides (Blackmore denies the charge), about the teenage girls who become pregnant at the settlement, about tales told by Debbie Palmer and other apostates’ of sexual molestation and forced marriage. Until we do, decriminalizing polygamy across the board, while it would make life happier for my acquaintances, is not the solution. Not yet.

* Not their real names

There’s a knock at the door. You answer it and find a stranger standing on your doorstep. You say hello. They ask you if you think world peace is a good thing. Of course, you reply. From there, it’s a smooth transition to “Your belief system is misguided and incorrect. My religion is the true religion, and I am here, answering a call from God, to save you by selling, I mean, sharing my religion with you.”

Missionaries: A member or a religious group or organization on a mission to convert those who do not share the missionary’s faith. Most of us have met one; they’re on-task and going to show up at our doors whether we like it or not.

But what about when the missionaries travel to second and third world countries offering aid — materials and labour to build houses, schools, churches; clothing, toothbrushes, and toys; and a little Christianity on the side? A co-worker of mine went off to Africa recently with a group of people from his church to meet the families they’ve been sending money to for years. Oh, and to do some missionary work.

I had to bite my tongue. Africa needs help, I won’t argue. Poverty and disease have left too many people in a state of despair. Those that can help, should. However, I don’t think what Africa needs is a Christian God sugar daddy.

Missionaries, as we know them today, have been showing up on Africa’s doorstep since 1859. Hand-in-hand with the European desire to set up new colonies and establish trade, the London Missionary Society opened its first missionary station in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and began its work. Indigenous beliefs were interpreted by the missionaries as evil, immoral, inferior, and in need of “correction.” The missionaries knew “correction” would not be easy — and so instead of simply trying to replace traditional religion, they sought to wipe the slate clean. Of culture.

Met with resistance, the missionaries did not give up. To this day they continue to travel to Africa and spread the word. Currently, of a total population of 922 million, an estimated 325 million Africans are Christians, 123 million of those Catholic. On the other hand, traditional African religion is practiced by approximately 15 per cent of the population, or 138 million, often in smaller communities.

By homogenizing populations, by devaluing local culture, missionaries deliver more than just new creeds — they rob Africans of their history, traditions, and values, and the right and ability to pass them on. Holding clothes, food, and Bibles in one hand, they pick Africans’ pockets with the other.

And while I’m sure many missionaries are genuinely concerned about the well-being of the people they “help,” their good intentions can have disastrous consequences. Take Pope Benedict XVI, who recently addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa, saying “You can’t resolve it with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.”

AIDS has killed more than 25 million Africans since the 1980s. In the sub-Sahara, where the epidemic is centred, approximately 22 million are infected with HIV, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. Meantime, condoms have been scientifically proven to significantly reduce the transmission of HIV/AIDS, and a recent study by the Human Sciences Research Council indicates that South African teenagers have been heeding advice to use them. While many still have multiple sexual partners, the number of new infections reported each year is falling.

And yet the Pope and Catholic missionaries preach abstinence and discourage the use of condoms. This is a clear demonstration of religious doctrine taking priority over the lives of the Africans. These are good works?

I thank anyone and everyone who travels to second and third world countries offering aid. Those who actually do good are wonderful. But their assistance shouldn’t be an excuse to slip religion in through the back door. Africans don’t need our religion — they need our help. And the two aren’t, and never have been, synonymous.