As low as it gets and beyond

Page 4

When we heard that churches have actually been using a legal strategy at trial in residential school cases that is based on the idea that an Indian's life is worth less than a white person's life, well, what can you say about that?

How about: it's disgusting, it's un-Christian (although some of sexual predator Arthur Plint's victims would say the opposite), it's racist, it's inhuman, it's shameful.

We've sat and listened to the horror stories of many a school victim. We've watched them sob and choke out those memories, and it's changed each of us here forever. You can never wash that off, you know. It stays with you for a long, long time. We can only imagine what it's like for the victims. And then we hear something like this and all we can feel in this newsroom right at this moment is anger and outrage.

Tony Merchant, a man who can smell an opportunity to further his cause a mile away, we'll admit, has nonetheless rarely steered us wrong when we contact him for the latest developments in residential school litigation. He said the churches and the federal government- but mostly the churches, he emphasized- have used and are using this sickening strategy in several cases. All we can say is, for the love of God, take a closer look at what you're doing.

There's no biblical scholars on this publication's payroll but we all absorbed a little bit of the basics of Christian ethics in Sunday school or elsewhere and we're pretty sure that all souls have value to the Creator.

To say that a ruined Indian life deserves a lower rate of compensation because Indian life is worth less, to say that compensation for violent rape should be lessened for these people because the schools were such horrible places that the students forced to attend them had no hope of ever leading normal lives after they "graduated" anyway, goes beyond shameful, it's loathsome.

Where's the morality in that approach? How are you going to explain that one on Judgement Day?