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 | In 1986, Senator Jessie Helms (R, NC) introduced a bill in Congress to remove tax exempt
status from existing Wiccan groups and prevent any new groups
from being recognized. It never made it out of committee. |
| Family court judges in the U.S. and Canada occasionally discriminate in custody matters
against the parent of minority, high demand faith groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses. |
| Various attempts have been made to modify the constitution in order to permit prayer in the public schools. This would have students recite prayers of the dominant religion. Students who follow minority religions would be given the options of either violating their own beliefs or risk later harassment and violence from other students. |
Significant progress has been made in the U.S. and Canada over the past few decades:
| With the repeal of oppressive laws, Native Americans are now
able to conduct their traditional ceremonies. |
| The exclusion of Jews from membership in golf clubs and
similar organizations is much less common than in the past. |
| A person no longer has to believe in the existence of a personal deity in order to be a
conscientious objector to military service. (However, the Canadian government only extends
charitable status to religious groups if they teach a belief in a God.) |
| Some local ministerial organizations now include non-Christians. |
| J.F. Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic President of the US. The religious faith of
the Prime Ministers of Canada seemed to be of little interest to anyone prior to
2006. The Evangelical Christian faith of the present Prime Minister, Stephen
Harper, is of considerably greater interest to the media. |
| Ritual consumption of peyote during some Native American rituals is permitted. |
| Native Elders are now generally given the same rights as Christian and Jewish clergy
during prison visits. |
| Roman Catholic children are no longer taught that Protestants will go to eternal punishment in hell when they die; most Protestant children are no longer told that all Roman Catholics will automatically go to hell. |
The constitutions of the US and Canada guarantee religious freedom to all citizens, yet many hurdles remain to be overcome:
|
Atheists were denied certain fundamental rights
by the constitutions of some States. They were
restricted from holding office, or serving as a witness or juror at a trial.
Fortunately, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in
1961 made such bigoted restrictions null and void. |
|
No Atheist who is
open about their beliefs can reasonably expect to be elected to any political office
because of religious prejudice. Until 2011, Atheists were regarded as the least suitable candidates for election to public office. In 2011, Tea Party members displaced the Atheists. |
| Children are occasionally seized from homes because of some social workers'
misunderstanding of their parents' religion. |
| Parents are denied access to their children because of some judges' beliefs about the
parents' faith. |
|
Leaders of some faith groups (e.g. Neopagan) are not
recognized as clergy during prison visitation. |
| Some faith groups are not allowed to perform marriages. A common method of exclusion is
for state or provincial governments to require the group to have been in existence for
long periods before their clergy can marry people. |
|
The socialist premier of the province of British Columbia in Canada refused on religious
grounds to authorize election papers for a candidate of a minority faith who was nominated for the Provincial
Legislature. Threatened with a lawsuit that he could not possibly win, he apologized for
his act of bigotry. |
| Followers of certain faiths are only able to celebrate their rituals safely in certain
areas of North America. They fear persecution and attacks by Christians who misunderstand
their benign, Earth-based faith. These include
Wiccans,
Druids, and other
Neopagans. Much of this
hatred is based upon a beliefs held over from the Middle Ages. |
|
Representative Barr and a coalition of about a dozen conservative Christian agencies promoted a boycott of the U.S. army in an effort to terminate the religious freedoms of Neopagans in the armed services. |
Religious tolerance does not seem to be heavily promoted in North America. Although there are untold numbers of:
| anti-racism Web sites devoted to racial harmony and tolerance, |
| anti-sexism Web sites devoted to equal rights for women, |
| anti-homophobia Web sites devoted to equal rights for gays, lesbians and bisexuals, |
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Some random examples of intolerance:
A few more detailed examples might be useful. The following are a few examples that we have stumbled across:
| Radio and Television: These are a major source of intolerance. Vision TV's
"Mosaic"
service in Canada features "paid time programs from a variety of faith groups and
broadcast ministries". Because Vision broadcasts programs from all types of
religions and faith groups, one can differentiate between those groups which are
relatively free from hatred and misinformation from those which often exhibit intolerance.
We have been given access to data collected by the Wiccan Information Network's
Ontario Coordinator. He found that of approximately 35 episodes in the mid 1990's that
included vicious religious intolerance:
Some of this intolerance is quite repulsive, and included:
We find this result to be curious and self-defeating for conservative Christians. On one hand, they are committed to fulfilling the Great Commission which is to preach the Gospel to all the world. At the same time, they are broadcasting so much hatred and misinformation against other groups that many "non-believers" are becoming resistant to their message. A government regulatory body renewed Vision's license in the 1990s with the expectation that they
would reduce the amount of religious bigotry on its network. They seem to have cleaned up
their act since. | ||||||||||||||||
| Ritual Abuse Seminars We attended a ritual abuse seminar in 1995-MAY and
have analyzed the messages delivered at two others. Groups named by the seminar leaders as
ritual abusers and murderers of children include:
None of this was true. Ritual abuse of the type described during the seminar simply did not exist. By the mid 1990's public opinion began to reject these beliefs due to the complete absence of hard evidence by police investigators in spite of 15 years of thorough investigations. Still, one form of ritual abuse, and even manslaughter,
does exist in North America. It occasionally happens during Christian exorcisms and typically results
in one death per year. However, all of the ritual abuse seminars that we tracked during the 1990s do
not mention it; they only describe the non-existent varieties of ritual abuse. | ||||||||||||||||
| Religious Books: Again, we have consulted the records of the
Wiccan
Information Network's Ontario Coordinator. He found that:
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|
Desecration of cultural and religious heritage A photographer was traveling
through the four corners region in the US where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona join. He came across a troop of Mormon Boy Scouts with hammers and chisels who
were defacing centuries-old native petroglyphs (rock carvings) on a rock face. The
horrified photographer asked the troop leader why they were destroying priceless native
history. The leader replied that the Mormon church taught that the petroglyphs were Pagan
symbols of Satanic origin. They felt that it was their religious duty to eliminate them
for all time.
Note: This action was a violation of the behavioral rules of the
Boy
Scouts Association rules and of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The
example is not meant to criticize either organization, but was intended to show how
members of groups misinterpret the rules of their own groups. | ||||||||||||||||
| Attacks on Religious Leaders Singer Sinead O'Connor appeared on "Saturday Night Live" on 1992-OCT-3, and sang a protest song which implied that victims of racism, child abuse and other forms of victimization have a legitimate right to fight back by any means, including war. At the end of the song, she held up a photograph of Pope John II. She tore it into pieces, saying "Fight the real enemy." |
Copyright © 1997 to 2011 by Ontario Consultants on
Religious Tolerance
Last update: 2011-OCT-03
Author: B.A. Robinson
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