Your Religion Doesn’t Get Special Rights

Bill C-9 has some people up in arms because it removes a religious exemption from Canada’s hate speech law. To be honest, I don’t see the problem.

Religion should not get a pass on hate speech.

Freedom of religion is there to protect your right to believe, to worship, and to live according to your convictions. It is not there to give anyone a protected lane for promoting hatred under the cover of scripture.

And that’s really the issue here.

If your concern is that parts of your religion might be considered hate speech when quoted in public, then maybe the problem isn’t the law. Maybe the problem is that you feel entitled to say hateful things without consequence as long as they are old enough and written in a holy book.

That is not religious freedom. That is legal indulgence for discrimination.

In a country like Canada, freedom has never meant absolute freedom. It never can. Every freedom has to stop where it begins to crush someone else’s dignity, safety, or equal place in society. That’s not oppression. That’s the price of living together in a pluralistic country.

We are not one tribe here. We are all the tribes of the world.

That means the law cannot be written to protect only the sensitivities of the most rigid believers while everyone else is expected to absorb the damage. If a religion teaches that certain people are lesser, immoral, or worthy of condemnation, then those ideas do not deserve special treatment just because they are ancient.

They deserve the same scrutiny as any other hateful idea.

Now, people of faith will still have protections. Courts will still exist. The Charter will still exist. Genuine religious expression is not suddenly disappearing. No one is banning prayer, worship, belief, or theological disagreement.

But if what you want protected is the right to publicly weaponize religion against other people, then no, that should not be protected.

Not in a modern country.

Not in a democracy.

And not in a society that claims to care about human rights.

I’m an atheist, but this is not about me wanting to take religion down a peg. If I thought this law was being used to unfairly target peaceful believers, I’d say so. Gladly. But that’s not what this is.

This is about whether religion should be able to function as a shield for speech that would be unacceptable in any other context.

It shouldn’t.

I was raised in a religious household, and my mother always taught me that religion belongs in your home and in your place of worship. Once you step outside, you owe respect to the people around you.

Honestly, that seems wiser than a lot of what passes for religious freedom now.

If more people practiced their faith with humility instead of entitlement, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. And we definitely wouldn’t need religious exemptions to protect the ugliest parts of ancient traditions.