‘I was defending God’: Senior censored by public library wins right to display newsletter

by Laura Hensley:

Mary Stanko holding her newsletter, Senior's Alert, at the library.
  
An Ontario woman whose community newsletter was banned from her local library has won the right to distribute it on the institution’s pamphlet stands, after a year-long battle that nearly ended up in court.
Last year, Mary Stanko, who is retired after teaching for 34 years, was told by the St. Catharines Public Library her Senior’s Alert newsletter did not meet its requirement that any publicly posted material be “educational” or “cultural.” This was despite the fact she had been allowed to leave the four-page publication there for nearly two decades.
   “For the last 18 years, I’ve been putting out my newsletter, which I voluntarily edit and publish for the good of the community,” she said. “And all of a sudden, because I mention the preamble to the Constitution … I was quoting the Constitution, and I was defending God.”
Stanko’s spring 2015 newsletter included an editorial about the abandonment of God in modern society, with references to the opening line of the Constitution Act of 1982 and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
   “Pointedly, this Constitution opens with the declaration stating that ‘Canada is governed under the supremacy of God and the rule of Law,’ ” she wrote.
   “Yet, why are we law-abiding citizens allowing these apostates and atheists, who are in the minority, to install their undemocratic rule of terror in which mention of His Name has become anathema in public governments, their arms-length commissions, colleges of physicians and surgeons, universities and some secular media?”...Continue reading...