In defence of KreeftFrom several rather alarmist reports now circulating in the U of T press, one would think Peter Kreeft was, not an internationally renowned philosopher and one of the most widely read Christian authors of our time, but the mad preacher on Dundas with his ravings about hellfire. Nothing could be further from the truth.What really surprised me were the open letters to the U of T and SMC presidents accusing Kreeft of calling homosexuals “cancer cells” and of comparing homosexual sex to bestiality with a dog.This is either incomparably bad note-taking, or glib and tasteless partisanship. Kreeft said just the opposite. He said that all sin, whether fleshly or spiritual, heterosexual or homosexual, is like cancer to the soul. Just as the job of a doctor is to fight a cancer to save the life, the calling of a Christian is to fight the sin but love the sinner unconditionally. What he said was: “You are not that cancer cell. You have infinite dignity. God loves us all just the way we are, but He loves us too much to let us stay that way. In fact, he calls us to be saints.” He also explicitly said that he did not mean to compare homosexual sex to sex with dogs, just to show that some forms of potentially consensual sex (eg: incest, polygamy, bestiality etc.) are intrinsically wrong. I invite members of LGBTOUT and Q@SMC to continue their investigation, and seek to have Catholic teaching censored on Catholic campuses, but with one proviso: that everyone who uses the same natural and divine law arguments about sexuality also be censored. That would include, among others, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and all others so wantonly guilty of “hate speech,” so adept at masquerading “anti-diversity” as holiness. Let them also tear out the pages of the Bible and the Koran, as well as the Scriptures of Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. They too require a good drumming. Unless, of course, we realize that the term “hate” as it is currently being used (as “the act of disagreeing with my position”) is simply vacuous. David ElliotSt. Mike’s Students for Life executive,Organizer of the Peter Kreeft lecturere: Racism is not the issue (Nov. 18)I doubt the outrage over President Birgeneau’s statements would have taken a different form had he spoken them pre-9/11; Erica Simpson implies a relationship that doesn’t exist between this event and the Canada/US border issue. She goes on to argue that Canadians are “playing the race card” because they are fearful of terrorist attacks. Let me get this straight: because people are afraid of “nameless, faceless” foreign terrorists, they speak out against racism? Huh?Treating people crossing the border according to ethnic origin and not present citizenship or landed status is nothing other than racist. If we are to sit back and accept that, then we have accepted that ethnicity is keyed to a sliding scale of human rights. What Simpson argues for is itself the most pernicious form of overreaction, which jettisons social fabric that (unlike paranoid border policy) helps dissipate the hatred that generates acts of terrorism.Ryan Whyte
