Michael Coren is a newly minted priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. He is supporting the current fad of tearing down statues of people who did not live up to contemporary standards of what is acceptable or not acceptable. I’m not using “right” or “wrong” in case it triggers someone.
Naturally, this amounts to whether the person was a racist or a slave trader. Hence we have Coren’s article applauding the casting of Edward Colston’s effigy into the the sea. I confess, although I am indifferent as to whether Edward Colston spends quality time with the fishes, I am uneasy of the impulse to expunge the parts of history that don’t live up to the expectations of contemporary mores.
Still, back to the headline. The Anglican Church of Canada has admitted that it is riddled with systemic racism. Michal Coren has joined the ACoC. That means he is, at the very least, drawn to a racist organisation; he is simpatico with it – it’s no good, I can’t bring myself to call it a church.
And to think he might have joined ANiC. Good riddance Michael Coren
From here:
Good riddance Edward Colston
Bristol, Liverpool and London were the three main slave ports of Britain in the 18th and early 19th century. It was an inconceivably lucrative business, and financial failure was virtually impossible. Ships sailed off to Africa, loaded up on human cargo, exchanged men, women and children in the West Indies for sugar or in America for cash and goods, and then returned home to sell what they had. Countless people made fortunes, and if slaves died on the voyage—and many did—there were plenty more to steal. And rape, beat and torture.
One of those profiteers was Bristol’s Edward Colston, who in the late 1600s as a prominent member of the Royal African Company transported more than 80,000 people, making what today would be tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. He was also a moneylender. When he died in 1721 he left a substantial amount to local charities, perhaps out of a guilty conscience. There were oceans of blood on his hands.
It was the statue of this man that was torn down and thrown into the harbour last week in Bristol, and became a pulsating image throughout the world as those protesting against racial inequality had their long overdue say. Ten thousand people demonstrated in the western city of Bristol in a peaceful show of defiance, and when they disposed of the repugnant Colston the local police not only refused to intervene but also explained that they understood.