Anglican priest jailed for pipeline protest

The Diocese of New Westminster’s Rev. Emilie Smith was sentenced to seven days in jail for blocking the road to Trans Mountain’s Westridge Marine Terminal.

In contrast, Linda Gibbons was arrested not for blocking access to an abortion clinic but for standing on the sidewalk, a crime for which she has spent over seven years in jail. I know where my sympathies lie.

From here:

A New Westminster priest is one of the latest anti-pipeline protesters to be sentenced to seven days in jail for violating a court injunction banning protesters from blocking access to Trans Mountain facilities.

Emilie Smith, a parish priest at St. Barnabas Anglican Church, is headed to the Alouette Women’s Correctional Centre in Maple Ridge for seven consecutive days after being sentenced in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver Wednesday morning.

She and former Mennonite pastor Steve Heinrichs, originally from Burnaby, were arrested at Trans Mountain’s Westridge Marine Terminal on April 20 after blocking the road into the facility and refusing to leave when asked by police.

“This is a way we are called to live out the reconciliation, is in standing with the Tsleil-Waututh and others to defend this holy land,” she told the Record before her arrest. “I think our faith teaches us that we’re not supposed to just say nice things to each other, we’re supposed to live out our faith in our bodies … we believe in taking action.”

Smith’s other major contribution in the fight for justice, equality, diversity, nightmare utopianism, and hallucinogenic alphabet soup rainbow inclusion comes in the shape of a sign telling people not to litter on church property. More specifically, not to drop their crap there. It must be legitimate because it is signed by God.

2 thoughts on “Anglican priest jailed for pipeline protest

  1. Apparently spelling is not a St. Barnabas management strength, although it did manage to do the four-letter words correctly.
    Then again, this may be a contribution to science in the way a bolt is described. Maybe it’s part of the pipeline?

    • Dear Grace Lineman,
      Concern for correct spelling, e.g. “lightning”, referring to the causative
      precursor of thunder, in place of the much more inclusive variant
      “lightening” (despite that variant’s potential confusion with a necessary
      precondition for a literal rapture by negation of gravity), is just one
      more symptom of the “cisheteronormative capitalist patriarchal classist
      empire” that Rev. Jean-Daniel, youth pastor in the Diocese of Montreal,
      wishes to overthrow, with the legions of youth he intends to recruit 🙂

      Laugh as we may, there is a serious, and I would say Satanic, component
      to that mindset which can lead to an asymptote expressed by, for
      example, something derived from Orwell :
      “Come the Revolution, all you Oldthinkers will be put up against a wall
      and shot !”

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