Dear Editor:

Margaret Somerville's piece fails to convince on multiple levels.

She compares the suppression of speech on campus (which I decry) with
the Ontario Human Rights Commission "forc[ing] physicians to act
against their conscience", presumably in reference to physicians who
refuse to refer lesbian couples for in vitro fertilization. But these
two cases are not in the least comparable. In the latter, the question
is whether physicians have the right to shirk their professional duty
and engage in discrimination simply by calling their view "religious".
Would Margaret Somerville also support the right of a physician to
refuse to treat black patients, because the physician belongs to an
Aryan church that views blacks as subhuman? I doubt it. Then how can
she support the "right" of physicians to treat lesbian couples
differently from heterosexual couples?

Somerville decries the tendency of the Left to dismiss those holding
opposing views as "intolerant, a bigot, or hatemonger", and she says
"[t]he substance of their arguments ... is not addressed". But she
behaves in exactly the same way when she dismisses Richard Dawkins, Sam
Harris, and Christopher Hitches as "neo-atheist fundamentalists"
without addressing their arguments.

Somerville thinks religion deserves an equal place at the table as
science. But why? Why should belief systems that rely on ancient dogma
and maintain nonsensical, unverifiable, and contradictory beliefs
deserve the same status as rational and verifiable thought?

If Somerville's commentary is considered an example of award-winning
ethicism, something is seriously wrong with the state of Canadian
philosophy.


Jeffrey Shallit