"We're Vikings! We don't hire Christians!"

Meet Bethany Paquette, a clean-cut, outdoorsy girl with a love for camping, river rafting and suchlike pursuits. She's also a self-proclaimed born-again Christian, and has a degree in biology from Trinity Western University, a Christian university in Langley BC. According to Amaruk Wilderness Corp., a packager of wilderness tours, being a Christian isn't the kind of thing they want to see on the résumé of someone who'd like to work for them.

Ms Paquette applied to work for Amaruk's Canadian operation guiding tours in the Great White North. She was shocked to receive an e-mail from Olaf Amundsen, the company's HR thingy, rejecting her on the grounds that she wasn't qualified and "unlike Trinity Western University, we embrace diversity, and the right of people to sleep with or marry whoever they want."

Apparently Mr. Amundsen had heard that all TWU students must agree to a covenant prohibiting sexual intimacy outside heterosexual marriage, under pain of possible expulsion. That covenant has led to an ongoing controversy over the university's law school -- see footnote below -- since the busybodies in the human rights industry contend that TWU discriminates against the LGBT "community". So, according to the perverse "thinking" of progressive and fair-minded people like Mr. Amundsen, that makes it OK to discriminate against those old-fashioned and narrow-minded Christians.

We shall see. Ms Paquette has filed a complaint with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. Oh the irony! She told CBC News that the series of e-mails she received from Mr. Amundsen "really hurt me.... I did feel really attacked on the basis that I'm a Christian. My beliefs have developed who I am as an individual, but they don't come into play when I am doing my job."

Apart from defending "the right of people to sleep with or marry whoever they want", Mr. Amundsen wrote, "The Norse background of most of the guys at the management level means that we are not a Christian organization, and most of us actually see Christianity as having destroyed our culture, tradition and way of life."

Ms. Paquette replied defending her faith, saying "your disagreement with Trinity Western University, simply because they do not support sex outside of marriage, can in fact be noted as discrimination of approximately 76 per cent of the world population!!! Wow, that's a lot of diverse people that you don't embrace."

And she signed her e-mail, "God Bless, probably partially because I knew it would irritate them." It clearly irritated Mr. Amundsen, who wrote back, describing himself as "a Viking with a Ph.D. in Norse culture. So propaganda is lost on me."

Footnote: If you think it's hard for a Christian to get hired as a river rafting guide, try getting called to the bar (admitted to the practice of law) in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Lawyers in those provinces -- many of whom are secular humanists and/or, errr, non-Christians, have been besieging their law societies with demands that graduates of Trinity Western's law school not be admitted to the profession, because, errr... well... they're religious! See articles listed on the CBC News Topics page for Trinity Western University and "Queer students campaign against Christian law school".