Thank you very much.
Thanks to the committee for the opportunity to appear this morning.
Recent events in New Zealand and Sri Lanka show how hate is not confined to the electronic world but very much that online hate can and does translate into [Technical difficulty—Editor] and real-world consequences. Sometimes the electronic world and the virtual world are not separate.
I'm a tenured member of the religious studies department at the University of Prince Edward Island, where I teach courses on the Catholic intellectual tradition, and I have, specifically, a specialization in Catholic social teaching.
I want to talk to you for a few moments about online hate as faced by Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, and give you some sense of the discord between Catholic social teaching and the liberal [Technical difficulty—Editor].
Most research shows that the majority of Canadians who identify themselves as Catholic do so as what we would call a limited identity, meaning it is one identity of many that can be other identities and the values of other identities. In short, the lion's share of Roman Catholics—Canadian Catholics—are cultural Catholics and are, otherwise, as secular as most other Canadians holding [Technical difficulty—Editor], as has been the Canadian tradition since the 1840s.
Catholics who are most affected by online hate, I would suggest, are the much smaller segment of Canadian Roman Catholics who take their faith—and I mean here, the knowledge and the tenets of Catholic social teaching—very seriously. These Catholics tend to be pro-life. They tend to hold traditional understandings of marriage, of the family, of gender identity, etc.
There are some people who may look upon these positions as, themselves, being incompatible with liberal values in Canadian society. What's overlooked in moments is that the right to conscience is a foundational value of the liberal and democratic tradition, and sometimes it's these values that come into conflict.
Let me show you, just for a moment, how this conflict can play out in the online world, whether it be through online platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, etc., or simply using electronic media. I'm going to draw an example from the U.S. context to show how this analysis relates to Catholics experiencing online hate.
In recent months, Brian Sims, a Democratic member of Pennsylvania's House of Representatives in the 182nd district, has been doxing Catholics. In many cases these tend to be people who are elderly, who tend to be teenagers, who were quietly praying the rosary outside of Planned Parenthood clinics in Philadelphia. The representative offered cash in exchange for the identities and the coordinates of these individuals who, in the U.S. context, were expressing their constitutionally protected right to assembly.
Moreover, the representative was filming these encounters and broadcasting them live on Twitter, with [Technical difficulty—Editor] threats such as “Bring it, Bible Bullies”, “You are bigots”, “You are sexist”, “You are misogynists”.
What we see in many cases is a conflict about what are deemed to be the essential values of particular systems. The liberal tradition, as you well know, is dedicated to a form of possessive individualism that privileges one's ability to control their body, their own individuality in a conceptual sense, whereas Catholic social teaching is dedicated to the family, the family being the smallest unit in society. Therefore, that brings into question questions of life, of marriage and of the family.
I would like to underscore that the health of a liberal democracy is predicated upon the ability of people of goodwill to disagree about fundamental questions. I submit here that questions of life are the most fundamental. People—in this case I'm talking about the small segment of Catholics described in my introduction—expressing opposition to dominant value systems need protection. It's healthy for a political system to have these conversations without the fear of repercussions, reprisals, online—