Moral hot buttons

The best campaign homework I did this week was to phone a seasoned Liberal and ask what to make of the wild goose let loose on the campaign trail of moral hot buttons. Abortion, gay marriage, freedom of expression in the hate crimes legislation of Bill C250 and a condemning Bishop all made for interesting electioneering in the past week. There is fear in the voting public that any influences from a faith-based ethic need to be kept far clear of politics. If such was the case, it would be an enormous loss of freedom, and we had better soon come to understand how faith does work in politics because what we have operating now is enormous misunderstanding and misinformation on the role of faith in this election.

So I thought it best to talk to a long time Christian activist in the Liberal party, Dr. John Redekopp, a retired political science professor from Wilfred Laurier University. I caught him on his cellphone at the Vancouver airport as he was en route to the Congo, where government officials there were asking him to come help negotiate how people of faith should serve within a government that is desperate to clean up corruption. How timely, I thought.

The controversy I wanted to talk to sought-after-sage Dr. Redekopp about was Paul Martin's clear statements that his Catholic beliefs were not influencing his politics, and the controversy that ensued from his church hierarchy that said such actions were "moral incoherence."

I was surprised to find Dr. Redekopp had abandoned the Liberal party after a steady 11 years of campaigning for them and he was curt and to the point, he'd lost faith in their ethics. He felt the spending scandals, the lack of an effective ethics commissioner, the gun registry, were just the tip of the iceberg for a Liberal government that he felt was untrustworthy. The Catholic belief issue was just another illustration for him of a credibility problem facing his old party.

"I cannot give high marks for integrity to a Prime Minister who says that his religious values are very important to him but they do not affect the most important decisions he makes. I would have to describe such a person as ethically schizophrenic," said Dr. Redekopp.

No one wants another person's views forced on themselves, but everyone makes decisions out of their personal values, and in a democracy, freedom means we can and should vote on the values that shape us. For example, said Dr. Redekopp, when the Nuremberg war-crime trials was under way, many charged with horrific crimes argued that they were not acting out of their own ethic, but rather as agents of the state, they had separated their own ethics from their actions -- it resulted in disaster, an ethic had to be chosen for the actions of the day, how tragic they surrendered their freedom to choose the ethic they personally held.

As a Christian, I will never advocate that my faith becomes the arm of the law, or the church platform and policy becomes legislation, but rather I will always look for politicians who make the decisions for a free society based on an ethic compatible with my Christianity.