Media agnostics attack religion.

On June 12, 1998, CBC TV aired, in the "National Magazine," a program called Faith and Media. Hana Gartner's opening remark set the stage:

"Whether it's violence in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, or escalating conflict between India and Pakistan, the common thread that ties so much of the trouble in our world today is religion."

The same "religion," Gartner implied a little further on in the show, was behind the bombings of abortion clinics. "Doctors are being shot at, some killed," she said.

In its March 1999 edition, Chatelaine magazine-newly renovated with younger glamour and tidbits of pornography in order to keep up with the competition-gave carte blanche to one Kim Pittaway, in a "broadside" column entitled "Holy hatred."

"Silence is golden, except in the face of religious terrorism," Pittaway writes, endorsing the thesis that objections to abortion and sodomy are raised primarily by "religion". Religion, therefore, begets "hate crime"; hate crimes beget murder, and murder the corpses of Barnett Slepian of Buffalo and young Matthew Shepard of Wyoming. "Call a doctor a murderer," she said, "and soon someone will impose the death penalty."

Terrorism, she concluded, is the direct result of "religious absolutes." Consequently, this "century's messiest and most valuable work has been to question those absolutes."

The above samples of blaming religion for violence are not new. Three years ago the Ontario Press Council, made up principally of media members, rejected a complaint by Ottawa Catholics against the Ottawa Citizen for printing a column which accused the Catholic Church of inciting hatred of homosexuals. The column's author, the Council ruled, was correct. By opposing homosexual activity as a sin, the Church causes society to hate homosexuals. The Church's theology of hating the sin but loving the sinner was dismissed as unreal.

With this kind of perspective, the entire moral order is distorted: virtue becomes vice, and vice becomes virtue. Witness the media coverage of pro-life events.

Human Life International

While Pittaway was writing her "broadside", feminists, "gay" agitators, and assorted revolutionaries were disseminating falsehoods about HLI on posters and the internet. This "freedom of choice" lobby included the Ontario Coalition of Abortion Clinics, Anti-Racist Action Toronto, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, the New Socialist Group, various union groups, and the San- Francisco-based Anti-Fascist Forum.

Some of these "lovers of freedom" have participated in earlier demonstrations, calling for the suppression of Campaign Life Coalition's Toronto conference "Save the Planet's People" in 1992, and HLI's conference in Montreal in 1995. In March 1999, they called for banning the "fascist, racist and homophobic right wingers", as the "gay" paper Xtra put it ("Nutbars target Toronto," March 11).

Clearly, these charges fit the "antiabortion" images of Gartner, Pittaway, and the like. No surprise therefore that some of their colleagues would seize this opportunity to express their own indignation.

On March 18, Michele Mandel of the Toronto Sun made the scurrilous attacks against HLI her own, repeating smears of anti-Semitism and trumped-up links with advocates of violence ("Bigots should just stay home"). Her editor gave her an accolade. A spokeswoman for the Canadian Jewish Congress was ready to "confirm" HLI's supposed anti-Semitism.

A week later, Michael Coren exploded the anti-Semitism smear (Sun, "Pro-life, but not anti-Semitic"), but this did not stop Michelle Landsberg of the Toronto Star from entering the fray on March 27.

Only three weeks earlier, Landsberg had denounced "cruel and hypocritical anti-abortion laws" imposed by "the religious right-wing" which before the nineteen-seventies made women all across Canada suffer. "They will just punish the women...with indignity, panic, humiliation, injury, and, perhaps, death," she wrote. Let no one dare "to think of meddling ever again with women's reproductive rights" (March 6).

In her March 27 column, she accused HLI of being "purveyors of hate and violence" ("Let's be allies in battle against hate-mongers"). "The preaching of the most abysmal kinds of prejudice against lesbians, gays, Muslims, and Jews are right up front in the pamphlets it distributes," she stated.

Landsberg picked on one short chapter among thirty others in Fr. Paul Marx's 1987 book, this one commenting on the role of pro-abortion Jews in the anti-life battle, just as he had discussed other groups. (Some Canadian Catholic bishops are none too happy with Fr. Marx, who has excoriated them several times.)

Mandel, unrepentant, repeated her false charges on Easter Sunday ("Fanning the flames of hatred," April 4), apparently because of having been threatened with libel. Libel requires "malice aforethought", and what was this but just that? Meanwhile, the National Post brought a defence of HLI by New York Rabbi Levin on April 5, which to its credit was also carried by the Sun (April 6).

Why the fury of this crowd? Because deep down they know they are fighting on the wrong side: the violence is theirs, not pro-life's.

By the way, in case you forgot, the mass killings of the last 100 years were carried Out not by Christians, but by the de-Christianized elite-as in the first World War-and even more so by the anti-religious, violently anti-Christian atheists and agnostics such as Hitler, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, and the entire Marxist-atheist network everywhere. Yes, that includes Serbia's Communist Slobodan Milosevic.

And, oh, did you know that since 1969 over two million newly conceived Canadian babies had their life snuffed out?