Re: Brent Heit's letter to the editor (Gazette, April 14). So far as I know, Jordan Peterson has never been critical of any religion and has said nothing on the subject of contraceptives. I must make that clear as it seems Brent Heit is a fan, and has misread what I actually said. I mentioned Peterson because of his pretension to brave opposition to the establishment when he actually supports it completely. He finds world-shaking and a threat to free speech and the foundations of Western society a small, legally protected concession to non-gendered pronouns, or legally enforced male/female pay parity. He believes in biological determinism – does that promote the "human dignity" Heit references?
Brent Heit is also a reductionist and sees all of society's problems through the prism of contraceptives use. But it is a circular argument because the lack of contraceptives use is both a direct cause and result of women's inferior official status. Perpetual pregnancy is tied to marginalization, inferior or no education, dependence on men, poverty and ill-health.
The former low divorce rate Heit cites had more to do with women's enforced helplessness than piety or morality. The increased divorce rate is a function of women's emancipation and freedom to choose. It will be reduced again as marriage is entered into knowingly, and truly freely. Heit should know that there cannot be ethics and morality without choice but doesn't, because his religion is replete with moral/logical contradictions that are accepted as true on faith.
In that vein UCP leader Jason Kenney is relevant. He actually walked out of the legislature over a bill to keep antiabortionists a modest 50 meters away from abortion clinics. These "protesters" have been a hazard to vulnerable women, have shouted insults and on occasion even physically obstructed their clinic access. They must be taken seriously also, considering past extreme violence regarding a service that is lawful in Canada.
If Heit doesn't use contraceptives no one will force him to do so. No Catholic or anyone else is forced to have an abortion. But no religious organization has the right to foist its views on a secular society. And secular it must be for obvious reasons.
The idea of tradition is also obfuscating and both Heit and Peterson subscribe to it without reservation. The logic is that what is right and good has all been already revealed and exists in religious norms. These norms are already imprinted on the human consciousness and we wouldn't have survived as a species without them. But most organized religions have unsavoury pasts (and presents) that very few would want to see repeated. Religion takes unjustified and unacknowledged credit for the advances made by humanists and socialists, very often against religious practices, and while we plunge ahead into very dangerous, life-threatening waters, the religious are preoccupied with birth control and non-heterosexual sex.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
