Sorry for the late update this week—I’m still on a campus tour in Florida, so Internet connections come and go and it’s harder to find the time to review all articles!
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I was pleasantly surprised to see Ted Morton in the Calgary Herald last week, delivering a welcome broadside to the NDP and their proposal to forcibly indoctrinate all students into the new transgender ideology. Alberta Tories are typically out-and-out cowards when it comes to social issues, so this was refreshing:
It was not by coincidence that during the Second World War, the Allies adopted the Four Freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want — as their basic war aims. They were fighting totalitarian regimes that rejected these freedoms. And as soon as the war was won, the United Nations embedded these and related freedoms in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 26 declares that while all children have a right to a free education in the elementary stages, “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” This fundamental freedom had been taken away by the Nazis, but also by our erstwhile allies, the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, the communists refused to sign the UN declaration, as these rights did not fit with the new workers’ utopia…
The old egalitarians — Marxists and neo-Marxists — are now discredited, but there is a new wave of egalitarian utopians who are more than happy to throw the rights of parents, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association under the bus. Unfortunately, Alberta’s new NDP government is a shining member of this movement.
These new egalitarians preach toleration, but they are the most intolerant voices in our society. They preach diversity, but then seek to enforce a government-knows-best, one-size-fits-all uniformity. They are the opposite of what they claim to be…
Toleration does not mean forcing people to publicly support ideas or behaviours that they disagree with. And it certainly does not mean forcing parents to send their children to schools to be indoctrinated with values with which their parents disagree. As Canada becomes increasingly diverse, now is not the time to abandon this consensual practice of toleration.
Now, if only Tory politicians around the country would grow a pair—is that transphobic?—and defend the right of Christian parents to educate their children. This column identifies the problem quite succinctly. Now let’s see if our fair-weather Conservative friends are willing to act.
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Over at The Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce pens a brilliant column calling men to slaying dragons. Humanity has been plagued by reptilian wickedness since the very dawn of time, and things have only gotten worse as of late.
In The Hobbit, Thorin Oakenshield gives Bilbo Baggins a beginner’s lesson on the nature of dragons, a sort of dragons for dummies, telling the unschooled hobbit that dragons “carry away people, especially maidens, to eat.”
Dragons have a preference for the virgin flesh of maidens because they are not merely hungry but wicked. They desire the defilement of the pure and undefiled, the destruction of the virgin. Their devouring is a deflowering. Parallels with human “dragons” in our own world are not difficult to discern. The war against the dragon is not, therefore, a war against a physical monster, like a dinosaur, but a battle against the wickedness we see around us in our everyday lives. We all face our daily dragons and we must all defend ourselves from them and hopefully slay them, which is only possible with the assistance of God’s grace which serves as a sort of St. George in the heart of man. The sobering reality is that we must either fight the dragons that we encounter in life or become dragons ourselves. There is no middle-path. No neutrality in this fight to the death is possible. We either fight the dragon or we become the dragon.
An additional problem is that we live in a dragon-culture, a culture of death, which pours scorn on the very concept of virtue and which has banned the very concept of “sin” from its vocabulary. Purity is equated with puritanism and is shunned. Chastity is ridiculed. And true marriage, in which the sexual union is united with the self-sacrificial desire for children, is being ripped apart. To make matters worse, Pride, the wickedest of sins, which rules the heart of every dragon, is now unfurled as an infernal banner and held aloft as a sign of the dragon’s war on Christian humility…
In 2014, the number of young girls and women in the United Kingdom who committed suicide had risen by a third over the previous year. The figures are shocking. Of the 1,181 women who committed suicide, an all-time record, the highest rate of increase was among girls and young women. Whereas the overall increase was 33 per cent, the increase for girls and young women between the ages of ten to twenty-nine had risen by over 36 per cent. Most shocking was the increase of suicides among teenage girls between fifteen and nineteen years of age, a whopping increase of 61 per cent on the previous year. As if this were not shocking enough, the true figure is much higher because of the failure of coroner’s to record “suicide” as the cause of death. “We don’t really know the extent of the problem,” said Roseanne Pearce of the UK charity Childline, “because the coroner often won’t record it as suicide. Sometimes that’s at the family’s request, and sometimes it’s simply to protect the family’s feelings.”
Part of the problem is the relentless rise of pornography. One case study from the UK says it all. Rhea (not her real name) is 17 and has attempted suicide twice. “Porn was everywhere in my school,” she says. Her boyfriend Andy became “obsessed with it.” She’d “made it clear,” she says, that she “wasn’t ready to have sex,” but one evening he sexually assaulted her in a park. The assaults became routine and Rhea felt she could do nothing to stop it. “The constant talk about porn had made me feel like what was happening was normal,” she says. She uses that word repeatedly to describe her attitude towards Andy’s assaults: normal. “I felt trapped, like everyone thought it was normal and I had to go along with it if I wanted to be accepted.” The pressure to conform to these perceived expectations was so great that, eventually, Rhea says, “I felt like there was no way out.” She tried to kill herself…
In a world where virtue is shunned, vice will prevail. In a world where love is replaced with lust, the most vulnerable will be systematically abused. In a world which boasts of its Pride, it is the weakest who suffer. Such a world is destined for anarchy, which Oscar Wilde rightly called “freedom’s own Judas.” Anarchy is the morally lawless society in which the morally lawless prey upon the weak. It is a world that has unleashed the dragon. In such a world, characterized by the increase in the number of damsels in distress, we need an increase in the number of those prepared to go forth, like St. George, armed with courage and the grace of God, to rescue the maidens from the dragons of the death-culture.
In a generation of men without chests, as CS Lewis called them, there are fewer and fewer who will heed Pearce’s call. But still, there are some.
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Securing the support of large corporations has long been a goal of gay rights activists—and one they accomplished with extraordinary success. In order to normalize same-sex relationships and elevate them to the level of the family unit, corporate advertising joined Hollywood and the entertainment industry to saturate the culture with messaging designed to promote the redefinition of marriage. In case you’re wondering, the Huffington Postprofiles five companies that, in their words, have gone “above and beyond” in pursuit of this social transformation.
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As Canada continues down the road towards euthanasia legalization, disability advocates publish warning after worrying warning, even though obviously, no one is listening. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government planning to force all Liberal MPs to vote in favor of a pro-euthanasia law—in Trudeau’s caucus, the only votes where you get no freedom of conscience are votes on issues of conscience. CTV News reported on the Dutch practice—coming soon to a clinic near you!—of killing those with mental illnesses:
A new review of patients in the Netherlands is shedding light on the controversial practice of euthanasia or assisted suicide among patients with psychiatric disorders, as the practice is increasing in certain jurisdictions. The review comes at a time when the Canadian government is crafting new legislation to address euthanasia in this country.
The new review found that in most of the 66 psychiatric EAS cases, the patients had chronic, severe conditions, with histories of attempted suicides or hospitalizations.
Did you catch that? Euthanasia advocates first talked about “medical aid in dying,” or “physician-assisted suicide” or “end-of-life care” for “terminal patients.” Terminal, as we see, can also mean “chronic,” which can easily refer to “depression.” And suddenly, there you have it: Regardless of what the intention is, “medical aid in dying” advocacy becomes “suicide advocacy.”
On that note, I would encourage you all to take a look at this great piece in Public Discourse, detailing the liberal case against assisted suicide. In the war against killing, we can never have too many weapons.
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Doctors who joined the medical profession to heal rather than to kill are already making provision for the rise of euthanasia in Canada. From the London Free Press:
Dr. Maria MacDonald laboured 12 years as a student and medical resident to become a neurologist, but the Londoner may give that up if she’s forced to refer patients to a physician-assisted death.
“My freedom of conscience has been violated,” she said. “Do I have to leave and go to another field?”
Other doctors are asking that same question in Ontario, whose regulatory college is the only one in Canada to demand that physicians who oppose helping patients die refer them to a colleague willing to assist in a death.
“It’s an extensive belief,” said Larry Worthen, executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada.
A month ago, Worthen said, he teleconferenced with 40 doctors and some already had taken steps so they could leave Ontario and practise medicine elsewhere.
“They were all as concerned as (MacDonald) is. Some have already applied for privileges in Michigan. One in Ottawa had moved to Alberta,” he said.
I’m quite sure Justin Trudeau and his minions won’t care in the slightest.
