Last Updated on: 19th February 2014, 09:10 am
I was really disappointed to hear about the decision by Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals to
keep the Lord’s Prayer around as part of the day in the Ontario legislature.
But if that part disappointed me, what I read next downright made me want to flip my fucking lid.
Not only are they keeping the prayer, but there will also be time set aside for recognition of other faiths.
This is a horrible, horrible idea. Not only did the province miss out on a great opportunity to separate church and state, but now it’s opened itself up to the whining and lobbying (yes I’m aware those 2 things are essentially the same) of every fringe religion that gets left out. Knowing the way that religious groups and governments work, I won’t be at all surprised when the day comes that sees our elected officials spending more time haggling over who’s cool enough to pray for and less time actually tending to the business of running the place.
What should have happened is this. the prayer, gone. Simple as that. No question, no debate, no nothing. Just scrap it. It’s a leftover from a different era, and while I’m all for preserving history, sometimes there’s just no good reason for keeping something around. In its place would go a moment of silence that every person in the house could use to reflect as he or she saw fit. If they want to say the Lord’s Prayer quietly to themselves, fine. If they’d rather think about veterans and the people still serving in the military, that sounds good. If somebody wants to pray to a golden cheesecake that lives in a glass case in the basement of a planetarium, that person can be my guest. If the thing to do is text your wife to tell her to pick up milk on her way home from the office, go nuts. Do whatever you want, just be quiet about it. That way everybody’s included and nobody has to complain. They will anyway, but there won’t be any basis for it. And the more baseless the complaining, the quicker we as a society can put this behind us and move on with our lives.
