Once upon a time (back in the Jurassic age, when I was in university), the most progressive forces in society believed passionately in free speech, tolerance, pluralism and diversity. They still claim to believe in those things – until someone says something they don’t like, at which point they fight to shut them down.

What poses a bigger threat to Canada: A small Christian university that endorses traditional ideas about marriage? Or a large group of liberal activists who want to stomp all over them?

That’s easy. It’s the Christians. Progressive people across the land have been waging war against Trinity Western University and its plan to start a law school. Now that the school has been approved in B.C., they want to make sure the graduates are shunned, ostracized and never allowed to practise law anywhere in Canada.

They lost a big one last week, when the B.C. Law Society reluctantly voted to recognize the law school and its graduates. The West Coast Women’s Legal Education Action Fund expressed its disappointment, saying that “TWU’s discriminatory policy effectively excludes LGBTQ students from access to the benefits of a legal education at the university.”

Well, not really. The problem is the university’s conservative views on sex, which apply to everyone. It asks all students to sign a pledge saying they won’t have sex outside of marriage. And Christian tradition doesn’t recognize gay marriage. That’s it – it’s a conduct issue, not an issue of belief or identity. It doesn’t mean gay students aren’t welcome. Yet this simple request has been blown up into a case of monstrous discrimination against gay students. Never mind that if they don’t like the rules, there are umpteen other law schools they can apply to. Meantime, graduates from a Christian law school will surely be homophobic, and spread their prejudices far and wide, right? And some will become judges, and then what?

The idea of a vast Christian conspiracy to roll back gay rights is as ludicrous as anything Joe McCarthy dreamed up. But times are different now. Righteous moral certainty and demands for censorship used to be vices of the right. Now they are most often vices of the left.

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