The National Post Responds

I have been having some of the strangest interactions I have ever had, with both Charles Lewis, religion columnist of the National Post, and Stephen Meurice, the Post's editor-in-chief. They resulted from my blog post reacting to Lewis's column, entitled Dear atheists: most of us don't care what you think.

First, Meurice. I asked him why it was acceptable to have Lewis's headline, but not acceptable to have the analogous headline with (say) "Jews" replacing "atheists".

I found his reply rather surprising. He thinks the distinction is that most Jews are born into their faith, while atheism is just "an opinion".

One great feature of both American and Canadian democracies is that we find discrimination against people for irrelevant attributes to be unacceptable. This principle is behind laws against employment discrimination, and the recent repeal of DADT. (Canada, I'm glad to say, ended discrimination against gays in the military long ago.)

But it is quite strange to suggest that discrimination against irrelevant attributes becomes unacceptable only when those attributes arise from the circumstances of one's birth.

If Meurice's view is correct, then we should be free to discriminate against adult converts to any religion. After all, the Jew who converts to Christianity was not born into his faith; he chose it, presumably after some intellectual struggle, and therefore, pace Meurice, it is just "an opinion". Similarly, we should be free to discriminate against adherents of new religions, such as Scientology or Branch Davidianism, since many adherents were not born into those faiths. This is clearly ridiculous.

Meurice's view also implies that if atheism becomes more mainstream - to the point, let's say, where most adherents are born atheists - then suddenly it would become unacceptable to discriminate against it. But isn't this the opposite of what should be the case? Established viewpoints don't need much protection; it's the more unfamiliar that routinely gets discriminated against.

So I don't think Meurice's distinction makes much sense.

Charles Lewis has also been corresponding with me - but in the oddest, passive-aggressive sort of way. At one point he wrote "I will never think of you again", but a few days later he was badgering me to publish this response on my blog. At another point he said he would call me to discuss a misunderstanding; when he finally did, he wouldn't let me speak, called me "weak-minded", and hung up in a huff.

The misunderstanding came about when I wrote a long response to some of his points, and even offered to buy him a coffee if he were ever in town. But he apparently didn't see that response, because he wrote back "you could have answered and created a dialogue". I've tried to resolve that, but he doesn't seem to want to listen.

If this is representative of the state of journalism in Canada, we're in deep trouble.