If a passage from the Bible advocates violence against homosexuals, should it be it banned from publication and construed as hate literature?

Leviticus 20:13 says, “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

Hugh Owens is a corrections officer in Saskatchewan, and apparently a Christian zealot. He separately posted two defamatory newspaper ads in 1997 and 2001; the first referencing specific Biblical passages and the second providing their full text. He has been fined $1,500 as a result of an upheld Human Rights Tribunal ruling.

I don’t care how you interpret that passage — It is hateful and directly opposes other passages from the same book. A lot of oppression can be traced back to narrow, literal interpretations of the Bible and other religious documents.

Cultural bias is present in all types of writing, including (and perhaps most famously) the Bible. What would happen if people started taking something like “the right to bear arms” out of historical context? Oh, wait…

Free speech is not something that can be accepted and denied on a whim, and this ruling pushes that line. People say ugly things from time to time, but it doesn’t mean they should be prevented from saying it.

In my view, ignorance will always expose itself… Eventually. I’d rather know about it rather than have it fester and boil. I hopefully submit that as generations pass, these types of attitudes will become socially outdated. Some of the accepted ideals that our parents and grandparents grew up with are now eschewed. Similarly, our biases will seem positively primitive to our children.

The question is, can we afford to wait?