Dissenting priest and separatist member of parliament

Raymond Gravel: Nov 27, 2006: "If the question is directly asked: 'Are you for or against gay marriage?' then as a Catholic priest I would simply abstain from voting."

Raymond Gravel: Dec. 13, 2007: "When a pregnant woman is assaulted or killed and her fetus is killed at the same time, I agree completely that it is an abominable crime. It is revolting, but at the same time I believe that when the fetus is in its mother's womb, they are one being. Only when it leaves her womb does it become a child."

A little background for non-Canadian readers. Canada is composed of ten provinces and three territories. One of those provinces, Quebec, is primarily French-speaking and has a culture which is in many ways unique in North America. One of Quebec's provincial political parties, the Parti Quebecois, is committed to Quebec sovereignty as an independent country.

Its federal counterpart is the Bloc Quebecois. It is composed entirely of Quebecois (or Quebecers as one might say in English) who rarely speak anything but French in Canadian Parliamentary debates and committee meetings. Of the 303 Members of Parliament, the Bloc comprises 50.

Despite Quebec's traditional Catholic heritage, the province has become one of the most secular in Canada. A minority of the Bloc M.P.s define themselves as Roman Catholics. However, one of them is a priest--Raymond Gravel.

That valuable resource, Wikipedia, has the following entry for Father Gravel:

As a youth, Gravel had worked as a male prostitute and in a gay leather bar. He left home to be a male escort at the age of 16 in Montreal. After working in two gay bars, he decided to enter the seminary in 1982. He is currently the priest at St-Joachim de la Plaine Church in La Plaine, Quebec.

The Montreal Gazette (Oct. 25, 2006) adds:

As a priest, Gravel has been an outspoken critic of the church's opposition to same-sex marriage. In February, he was one of 19 Roman Catholic priests who signed an open letter, criticizing the church's stance on the issue and its opposition to the ordination of active gays into the priesthood.

Now I'm presently a Baptist (however reluctantly) myself, but it seems to me that the honorable member (as parliamentarians are called) is off on a tangent that few priests would follow. While he is not the only R.C. member of Parliament who has voted in favour of a so-called "pro-choice" positions and same-sex marriage, he is the only clergyman from a church that opposes these positions that has done so.

I would say that this makes him a unique Canadian politician.

What is this free thinker's view of the pro-life/pro-abortion impasse? This can be gleaned from a debate in which he participated in Parliament in December 2007. The bill in question is called C-484 Unborn Victims of Crime Act. It is similar to legislation in the U.S. entitled the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Presently in Canada, if a pregnant woman is killed and her unborn child also dies, the murderer is charged with only one crime. Under this bill, the death of the fetus would be considered a second murder.

The parliamentarian who has put the bill forward for debate, Mr. Ken Epp, has attempted to make it abundantly clear that the act does not impinge on a woman's right to choose. As is found on Mr. Epp's website:

The Unborn Victims of Crime Act has nothing to do with elective abortion. This Bill is totally focused on protecting the choice of a pregnant woman to carry her baby to term and to give her child life. Elective abortion is explicitly excluded. The Bill uses terminology that describes the injury or death of the unborn child during the commission of a crime against the mother. Elective abortion is not a crime in Canada. The Bill goes on with explicit language: “For greater certainty, this section does not apply in respect of … conduct relating to the lawful termination of the pregnancy of the mother of the child to which the mother has consented.”

Nevertheless, Father Gravel opposes the bill. He feels that it is a back door method of eventually re-criminalizing abortion. Some of his comments are fascinating (not convincing, mind you, but fascinating). But before I reproduce them, I'll just note the remarks of another M.P., Alexa McDonough, a member of the socialist New Democratic Party which favours abortion. I do this because Mr. Gravel says that he agrees with her:

Ms. Alexa McDonough: I do not think there is a single member here, regardless of where they stand on this bill, who cannot empathize 100% with the grief that such a loss would cause an individual and their loved ones. However, it has reminded me that there is a good reason why we do not turn over the drafting, or the crafting or the adoption of laws in a democratic and diverse society to people who are singled out for being grief-stricken by personal tragedy.

I did not expect to say this until I listened to the amount of focus on the issue of grief, but I returned briefly in my own life experience to my period of time as a psychiatric social worker. Grief is a very normal human emotion, and it is something around which we comfort people and support them. However, we also know that grief is almost always accompanied by feelings of anger, despair, rage and quite often revenge.

In our democratic society, we have long decided that revenge is not a proper basis for drafting or adopting our laws. A great deal of psychiatric evidence indicates that if there is a great deal of reinforcement for the notion of revenge, when someone has suffered a loss through a violent, unacceptable act, it impairs the emotional healing process.

I do not want to go further down that road, but my discomfort with the bill, before hearing the comments of the member for Edmonton—Sherwood Park, has been deepened and intensified by the amount of emphasis he placed on the issue of grief, anger and rage. I do not question his sincerity about identifying and empathizing with the grief, but I think it is a very questionable basis for introducing such a law.

Pro-choice activists typically say that only women should be allowed to frame abortion legislation because a man could never know what a crisis pregnancy is like. But in reasoning thus, surely they are including the argument that men have never had to experience the intense feelings of pain, hopelessness and despair that women in crisis pregnancies feel. But in saying this, they are using the opposite argument that Alexa McDonough proposes. She is saying that emotions should be left out of law-drafting. I guess what we need are some emotionless women who have gone through crisis pregnancies with equanimity, or mothers and sisters of murdered pregnant relatives who can view it all from a completely objective perspective.

YMFR can decide for yourself if you find Ms McDonough's arguments, founded as they are on some rather questionable stereotypes and assumptions, convincing. But Father Gravel does.

Mr. Raymond Gravel: I was listening before to the speech by the NDP member for Halifax and I agree with what she said. As a Catholic priest, I find it somewhat difficult to relate to this bill quite simply because the member who tabled it belongs to a pro-life group, the Campaign Life Coalition, which, in my humble opinion, is a fairly extremist and fanatical group. I am pro-life, but I do not belong to that group.

The Hon. Mr. Gravel opposes the bill for the same reasons as Ms. McDonough, and then goes on to say that he also opposes it because he doesn't like the company that Mr. Epp keeps. Normally when a man says that women are too emotional to make good decisions they get lambasted by the nearest female (and rightly so). But now we're seeing it as a argument in Parliament. We are in deep waters here.

But Father Gravel's insightful analysis does not stop there. He also introduces a new definition of pro-life and anti-abortion:

In my opinion, this bill will open the door to re-criminalizing women who have an abortion, and that is not a good thing. I am against abortion, but I do not believe that is how we will deal with the problem of abortion. I have always stated that we need education, support and assistance for women dealing with unwanted pregnancy. In my opinion, the problem of abortion will be solved with these types of measures and not by re-criminalizing abortion. I absolutely do not want that.

When a pregnant woman is assaulted or killed and her fetus is killed at the same time, I agree completely that it is an abominable crime. It is revolting, but at the same time I believe that when the fetus is in its mother's womb, they are one being. Only when it leaves her womb does it become a child. I believe that is the Supreme Court definition of 1969.

I know that killing a pregnant woman, like any murder, is a serious matter. However, I believe it is dangerous to establish a new law that would treat the murder of the fetus and of the mother as a double murder. I believe that it is dangerous and that is not how we will put an end to abortion. Not in this way.

"I am pro-life and against abortion, but when the fetus is in the mother's womb they are one being"? If you believe that the unborn baby is a non-person (as is presently the case in Canada), on what basis do you oppose abortion if the mother wants one? Why is the killing of a fetus abominable? Does anyone else see an inconsistency here?

"We need education, support and assistance for women dealing with unwanted pregnancy." Yes, this is exactly what crisis pregnancy centres provide. Yet pro-choice activists denounce such centres as existing only stop abortion.

Regrettably this is what passes for debate in the Canadian Parliament.