Here’s your Canadian Atheist Weekly Update for to .
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[] An astrologer’s recycled predictions
This story is so hilarious, I can’t even add anything to it. Seriously, just read the article. It’ll make your day.
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[] Former Burlington doctor, church leader charged with sexual assault
Not a Catholic this time, so that’s something new. Still, take note of the timeline in the story. Musson was stripped of his medical licence twenty years ago, as soon as the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario learned he was a rapist. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the other hand? Well, apparently they were told about the abuse even before the cops were… and they, quite predictably, did nothing.
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[] Vancouver police report finds West End preachers didn’t violate hate speech laws
The Vancouver Police have been, in my opinion, very justly criticized for not doing nearly enough to deal with the disruptive street preachers that routinely come to the city’s gay village to preach their homophobic bullshit. This article is their defence for their inaction: that what the preachers were screaming into megaphones that blared their message across the city was technically not hate speech. While that’s true, it’s also incredibly bullshit defence. It’s like telling someone who’s just been mugged and beaten by a gang of neo-Nazis that technically what just happened wasn’t a hate crime… it was just a robbery. Well, yeah, okay, fine… but robbery is also a crime, so why aren’t you doing anything about that!? In the case of the street preachers, yes, okay, technically what they were blaring across multiple city blocks at ear-throbbing noise levels didn’t rise to the legal level required to be hate speech… but they were breaking at least a half-dozen other laws at the same time, and the cops did nothing about them. It’s not just noise by-laws, either (although, yes, they very much were violating those, but were not charged for it). Just read the article. Even before the case that really brought things to a head—when resident Justin Morrissette tried to get Love to stop blasting his bullshit across the neighbourhood and Love and his co-thug responded by breaking Morrissette’s leg—the street preachers were already charged once for breaching the peace. Why couldn’t they be charged with that every time they went to the city’s gay village to broadcast homophobic bullshit? Why couldn’t they be charged with harassment for all the times they singled out passersby and harangued or threatened them? Frankly, this response by the VPD that because the street preachers weren’t committing a literal hate crime there was nothing at all the cops could do to help the community is rank bullshit. You just know that if the situation were slightly different, and rather than itinerant Christians screaming homophobia at the gay village, instead it were a case of a poor (or, worse, homeless) person raising a ruckus in a wealthy suburb, you just know the cops would have found some way to do something other than shrugging and saying, “well, technically, that poor person isn’t committing a literal murder, so, welp, nothin’ we can do!”
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I think every Canadian atheist understands that if there is a party of religious nuttery at the federal level, it’s the Conservative Party. But what I don’t think we all appreciate enough is just how much of that is intentional. On some level, the Conservative Party of Canada is a victim, too. They are being manipulated by a very well-organized whackjob movement; a coalition of regressive bigots. Now, it’s hard to believe the Conservative Party is unaware of what’s going, or that if they really wanted to, they couldn’t do something about this bigot bloc. So let’s not fall into the trap of believing the party is an innocent pawn here.
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This guy is amazing, but not in a good way. He is an example of a fairly recent phenomenon: a person so freakishly terrible, that all the safety measures put in place to protect the legitimacy of public office simply weren’t prepared to handle them. Barry Neufeld has a string of controversies under his belt, mostly stemming from wildly misogynistic, homophobic, or transphobic things he’s said. But if that were all there was to it, he would just be terrible, not freakishly terrible. Dig this: First he makes some horrifying anti-LGBTQ comments that were so bad, the local school support worker union filed a complaint against the school board with the Human Rights Tribunal. The school board lost… and then Neufeld goes public again to complain that the settlement might include a payment to a LGBTQ advocacy group, which was a conflict of interest violation… so now he’s right back in court again! And at the same time, he’s still facing human rights complaints from the teacher’s association, and fighting a dismissal of a defamation lawsuit he filed against the (former) teacher’s federation president, AND ALSO dealing with a lawsuit that’s trying to get him booted from office. And while all this is going on, the dude falls asleep on camera in a Zoom meeting of the board. And now this. I get that we don’t want to make it easy for a person who has been elected into office by the public to be stripped of that office without a damn good reason. But damn. I mean, damn. The Neufelds and the Trumps of this age are really testing out commitment to democracy.
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It’s actually amazing, and a little worrying, how well-organized the idiot community is.
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Sparked a cigarette while drinking on zoom then procedeed to pass out. Was he trying to rehabilitate his image? Sabbotaging the public system from the inside he’ll be the darling of the Fraser Institute. The Chilliwack school board is a story to watch. Good thing Pam Bondar succeeded in maintaining the balance of power.
Correction. Not Pam that’s American. Carin Bondar.