If This Canadian Liberal MP Gets The Chance, He's Coming For Your Bibles

Liberal Member of Parliament Marc Miller made it as clear as a Liberal can: if he gets the opportunity, he is coming for your Bibles.

Miller is the chair of the House Justice Committee, and last Thursday he wondered whether Canada's Criminal Code allows too much space for people to defend "hate speech" when they refer to the Bible. As LSN reported previously, the context was a discussion about Bill C-9, the government's "Combatting Hate Act."

Miller, in responding to several witnesses on the committee, pushed back against the idea that "good faith" defenses of "hate speech" were defensible under Canadian law. In a revealing moment, his go-to example was passages from Scripture.

"In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans--there's other passages--there's clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals," Miller claimed. "I don't understand how the concept of good faith can be invoked if someone were literally invoking a passage from, in this case, the Bible--there are other religious texts that say the same thing--and somehow say that this is good faith."

"Clearly there are situations in these texts where these statements are hateful," he added, directing his question at Derek Ross of the Christian Legal Fellowship. "They should not be used to invoke, be a defense, and there should perhaps be discretion for prosecutors to press charges. I just want to understand what your notion of good faith is in this context where there are clearly passages in religious texts that are clearly hateful."

Miller was asking for context, but his own remarks are badly in need of context. He spent much of the weekend attempting to add context on X, asserting that he himself is a Christian; emphasizing that he is not referring to the quotation of Scripture itself as "hate speech," but using the Bible as a means of "publicly inciting hatred"; and responding to Conservative MP Jamil Jivani's statement that "Liberals want the power to decide which Bible verses you can read at church by stating that people "shouldn't be able to invoke them as a defense to the crime of public hate speech."

The Liberal government's view of what precisely constitutes "public hate speech" is very much in question here. Miller, in his remarks, stated quite unambiguously that "there are clearly passages in religious texts that are clearly hateful." His cited examples, although he delicately allowed that there are other religious texts that would fall into the same category, were all from the Bible. So would citing those texts publicly constitute "public hate speech"? What if a pastor or priest cited those texts in a sermon condemning LGBT ideology?

Even if we were to take Miller at his very murky word, neither he nor the government can be trusted on this file, as MP Andrew Lawton made crystal clear recently.

Consider the fact that the Liberal Party has presided over a country in which over 100 Christian churches have been vandalized or burned to the ground in the past five years, and has responded primarily by launching new initiatives to combat Islamophobia. In fact, the Liberal government funded a study recently titled the "Rainbow Faith and Freedom Report," which systematically made the case for targeting places of worship that are not LGBT-affirming, and recommended concrete action be taken against these churches.

Indeed, Jamil Jivani sounded the alarm last December about increasing discrimination against Christians in Canada. Garnett Genuis, an Edmonton MP, has also been drawing attention to a progressive campaign to remove charitable status from Christian institutions, including churches--a threat that, despite being included as a recommendation from the Standing Committee on Finance last fall, has gotten very little attention, despite the fact that studies like the "Rainbow Faith and Freedom Report" were conducted to build the government's case for doing so.

When someone makes claims about the Bible--especially that it contains "hate speech"--it is important to analyze not just what is being said, but who is saying it. Considering the Liberal track record, we should treat Miller's words like the threat that they are. It is also worth noting that the Liberal government is justifying the need for their "hate speech" bill in part because they wish to combat antisemitism--and yet, two of the three books of the Bible cited by Miller as constituting "hate speech" come from the Torah.

Miller rather gave the game away when he retweeted on X, as a defense and explanation of his words, a famous clip from the American political drama The West Wing in which the president mocks a Christian radio host for her condemnation of homosexuality by portraying the Old Testament as blatantly immoral. It is a clever and well-crafted piece of propaganda, and it reveals precisely what Miller's state of mind is and what he actually thinks of Christians who happen to believe what Christians have believed for 2,000 years. We should take Marc Miller at his word.

Originally published at The Bridgehead