Canadian academic discusses rising anti-Catholicism

November 26, 2013

In an op-ed piece that appeared in Canada’s most popular newspaper, a Canadian academic wrote that her ideas are increasingly being dismissed simply because she is Catholic.

Margaret Somerville is founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law and the Samuel Gale Professor of Law at McGill University, one of Canada’s leading universities.

“I’ve been a participant in the public square for more than thirty years and have never argued from a religious base in presenting ethical and legal analyses of the issues with which I deal,” wrote Somerville. “So why was this seeming expansion of labelling me as Roman Catholic occurring now?”

“It’s a ‘label and dismiss’ strategy,” she added. “People, who cannot tolerate religion – indeed, they despise and are hostile to it – try to suppress the voices of people they perceive as religious, and their arguments and views with which they disagree, by using a ‘derogatorily label the person and dismiss them on the basis of that label’ approach. For them, calling a person religious is highly derogatory. This strategy allows them to eliminate their opponents’ arguments, without needing to deal with the substance of those arguments.”

“In light of such attacks, the decision of the editors of some of the world’s leading medical journals to require that authors reveal their religious affiliations in their conflict of interest disclosures, which are published with the authors’ articles, can be seen as surprising and probably not wise,” she continued.

 

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Further information:

• Judge me by my ideas, not my religion (The Globe and Mail)