On the evening of Saturday, October 20th I attended a lecture at New Life Sanctuary Church here in Winnipeg. The lecture, given by the Church’s pastor, Christian apologist John Feakes, was on the subject of “Abortion: Is it a Woman’s Right.” Feakes, of course, took the position that it is not, a position with which I fully agree. What was somewhat unusual about the lecture was the number of private security guards present in the church. Evidently trouble was anticipated. Indeed, there was good cause for expecting troublemakers to show up. The lecture was not originally supposed to be a lecture but a debate, co-sponsored by Feakes’ church and by Life’s Vision Manitoba in which Mark Fenny would take the opposing position. It had been scheduled, at first, to take place at Jubilee Place on the campus of the Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute. MBCI, however, rescinded its agreement to allow the debate to take place on its site and, at the last minute, Fenny backed out. “Concerns regarding event security” were cited as the reason the event would not take place at the location or in the format originally advertised. Anyone familiar with the way in which antiracist groups (1) operate will immediately recognize one of their favourite tactics for shutting down an event they disapprove of - pressuring the venue hosting the event into withdrawing by raising security concerns.
Five days after the lecture, Jakob Sanderson, president of the University of Manitoba Students’ Union, tabled a motion for the Union to endorse a “woman’s right to freedom of reproductive choice; and a woman’s right to be free from coercion or attempted coercion with respect to making reproductive choices.” This motion passed on Monday, November 5th and effectively established a no-tolerance policy for any activity on the part of pro-life people that the leadership of the Student’ Union regarded as “coercive.” The targets of this motion were a pro-life students group, the University of Manitoba Students for a Culture of Life, and the Canadian Centre for Bio-ethical Reform, both of which had come under attack by the leadership of the Students’ Union in the weeks leading up to and culminating in this motion. The Students’ Union objected to the pro-life groups handing out post-cards containing images of aborted foetuses. Like the anti-racist groups that attempt to shut down any public talks about racial differences or the case against open immigration, the Students’ Union leaders denied that they were engaged in censorship and claimed that they objected, not to the pro-life groups’ beliefs, but to their actions which they said were “coercive” and “discriminatory.” They apparently do not understand the difference in meaning between “coercive” and “persuasive”, thus calling into question their qualifications to attend an institution of higher learning, let alone serve in a student leadership capacity.
It was only a couple of weeks after this that Nahanni Fontaine, who sits as the NDP Member of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly for St. Johns, introduced a private member’s bill that, if passed, would create buffer zones around abortion clinics within which pro-life protestors would not be able to come. Fontaine’s stated reasons for introducing this bill, entitled the “Safe Access to Abortion Act”, are similar to those of the UMSU. “Manitoba women have the right to access the essential reproductive health care they need safely and without harassment” she says, using “essential reproductive health care” as a euphemism for “the deliberate termination of unborn human life.” Do not be deceived by Fontaine’s rhetoric about protecting abortion doctors and their clients from threats, assaults and violence. The existing laws against assault and uttering threats are sufficient to do that. To see the true intent behind this bill all we need to do is look at how this kind of legislation is being used one province to our east.
On October 24th an eighty-three year old Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Tony Van Hee, was arrested in Ottawa for violating Kathleen Wynne’s “Safe Access to Abortion Act”. Not only is the name of this act identical to the one Fontaine has introduced here, it does the exact same thing and establishes a bubble zone around hospitals and abortion clinics within which negative views of abortion cannot be expressed. Apparently this is being interpreted as including negative views of the law itself. The “crime” for which Van Hee was arrested was merely sitting across the street from the Morgentaler clinic wearing a sandwich board which read “The Primacy of Free Speech: Cornerstone of Western Civilization” on the front and “Without Free Speech the State is a Corpse” on the back. A simple and effective defence, in this case, would have been to point out that the messages on these signs said nothing about abortion one way or the other. His lawyer, however, has gone the more difficult route of launching a constitutional challenge against this draconian law. Let us hope and pray that it succeeds.
It is evident from the above mentioned incidents that the pro-infanticide movement – away with this euphemism of “pro-choice” that is so utterly inappropriate for these tyrannical mind-control freaks - has adopted the arrogant attitude and aggressive methods of antiracist groups such as the antifa. Indeed, on the day of the lecture mentioned in the first paragraph the friend of mine who had invited me to the lecture, an aboriginal student at the University of Manitoba who had participated in the pro-life activism referred to in the second paragraph, told me that he had been accused of “white supremacism” for doing so by someone in student leadership a day or two previously.
This association between the pro-abortion and anti-racist causes is not entirely new. You might remember Anti-Racist Action, a street gang with Marxist and anarchist backing, similar to the skinheads but with the opposite agenda that was a precursor to what is now called antifa. Most active in the 1990s and early 2000s, it used threats, intimidation, and violence in its confrontations with neo-Nazi groups and conservative groups that it falsely accused of racism. Its manifesto, in addition to what one would expect to find there, also contained a declaration of its full support for abortion. The Anti-Defamation League, which was founded one hundred and five years ago, may be the oldest antiracist group in existence. It too has been very supportive of abortion. Eighteen years ago in Stenberg v. Carhart the US Supreme Court struck down Nebraska’s law against partial-birth abortion – the kind of abortion that has the least support. The ADL applauded the Court’s decision and indeed had intervened in the case on the side of the abortionists. Earlier, in 1998 it had labelled Human Life International an extremist group. Before that, when the HLI had scheduled a conference in Montreal in 1995, the vice-president of the Canadian branch of the ADL’s parent organization, the Binai B’rith, had accused HLI and its founder, Fr. Paul Marx, of “being infected with this virus of anti-Semitism.” The grounds for this spurious accusation were remarks Fr. Marx had made in articles he had written in 1977 and 1993, and in a chapter of his Confessions of a Pro-Life Missionary, about how odd it was that there is so much Jewish support for abortion. However, as Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a frequent speaker at HLI conferences, wrote in defence of Fr. Marx in his 1999 book, America’s Real War, “the prominence of Jews in the pro-abortion movement” is “a factually correct detail about the Jewish community” and not an invention of anti-Semites. Normal people understand the word “defamation” to refer to the deliberate spreading of falsehoods in order to injure someone’s reputation. Anti-racists like the ADL, however, believe that even the truth can be defamatory. This attitude towards truth they have in common with the pro-infanticide movement.
The standard response on the part of pro-lifers to this strange convergence of movements that seemingly have little to do with each other except that they mutually receive support from the liberal-left is to observe that a century ago the alliances were quite different and abortion was being promoted – along with birth control, sterilization and euthanasia – by the advocates of eugenics and racial genetic superiority. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood is the obvious, but hardly the only, example of this. Pro-life advocates might also point out that the number of abortions per 1000 women is considerably higher among racial and ethnic minority groups. In the United States, the highest rate of abortion is among black women and if abortion were counted, as it ought to be, as a cause of death by the organizations that keep track of such statistics, it would be listed as the leading cause of black deaths each year, being more than double that of heart disease which is usually listed as the official leading cause. Such arguments will never convince either pro-abortion people or anti-racists, however, seeing as both movements have thoroughly inoculated their members against such things as facts and reason.
In Canada the knowledge that they have the full support of the majority government in Parliament has undoubtedly contributed to the heightened arrogance being displayed by pro-abortion groups. Prior to the last Dominion election, Justin Trudeau let it be known that he would not approve as a Liberal candidate anyone who did not whole-heartedly support a woman’s “right” to have an abortion. Around this time last year he announced that this year, all employers applying for grants under the federal Student Jobs program would be required to attest to their commitment to a set of values that included the same so-called right. Trudeau can be accused of many things, but subtlety in making his wish that the pro-life movement would give up and disappear is not one of them. It does not help matters that the Conservatives, even when they had a majority government, were afraid to do anything about abortion and the other major party, the NDP, takes the position that the Liberals are too soft, wishy-washy, and compromising in their support for abortion.
The Liberals and NDP and their toadies in the media want us to believe, whether we agree with it or not, that a woman’s “right” to an abortion is a settled matter in Canada. This, however, is a gross distortion of reality that can only be arrived at by ignoring the history of how we arrived at the present status quo and why it has not changed in the last three decades Thirty years ago the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in R v Morgantaler that Section 251 of the Criminal Code was unconstitutional. The vote was five to two in favour of striking down the section, but it was not as simple as that. There were four separate opinions, three of which concluded via three separate lines of reasoning that the section was unconstitutional, one of which dissented. None of these opinions had more than two supporters. Such a ruling would not in ordinary circumstances be considered the last word on the subject, and where the justices did agree was in the fact that it ought not to be so in this case. They acknowledged precisely what the Liberals and NDP deny – that the state has a responsibility to protect the foetus. Each of the authors of the three opinions supporting the repeal of Section 251 – Chief Justice Brian Dickson, Justice Jean Beetz, and Justice Bertha Wilson, states that protection of the foetus is a valid objective of legislation (See R v Morgentaler, pp. 75, 112-113, 181, 185) None of the justices took the position of the Trudeau Liberals and New Democrats that a woman has an absolute right to an abortion with which the state has no right to interfere and that abortion ought to be freely and universally accessible and unregulated. They expected Parliament to pass new legislation and the fact that abortion has remained entirely unregulated since is due to Parliament's failure to follow through. This was not a matter of Parliament bending to the will of the public. In the immediate aftermath of Morgentaler, the Mulroney Conservatives tried to introduce new legislation which was narrowly defeated. They have not tried since and the post-Morgentaler status quo has never been put to a vote at election time. The Grits and Socialists have largely relied upon keeping the public uninformed to maintain this status quo. There may not be enough public demand to restore the pre-1969 status quo ante of all abortions being illegal, but there would certainly be more support for this than for the present status quo if were widely understood that for the last three decades abortions have been available, right up to the very moment of birth.
The necessity of widespread ignorance to maintain the progressive status quo goes a long way towards explaining why this has now become a free speech issue. The less the public knows about how small a percentage of abortions have anything to do with rape or life-threatening pregnancy complications, the less likely they are to demand new legislation on abortion. The modern day cult of Moloch does not want women to be confronted with the truth about abortion because it knows that far fewer of them would choose to undergo that procedure if they fully grasped that more is at stake than their own health and convenience. Hence their objection to graphic depictions of the aborted foetus. Thus their demand for bubble-zones around abortion clinics in which the truth cannot be legally spoken.
(1) Antiracist individuals and organizations have the self-proclaimed mission of combatting racial prejudice, hatred, and violence by keeping tabs on, informing the public about, and protesting the activities of individuals and groups that promote racialist ideologies such as national socialism. In reality, however, they for the most part ignore the activities of non-white racialist groups, no matter how violent, classify any pro-white group as extremist no matter how peaceful, and attack anyone who disagrees with whatever liberal orthodoxy happens to be at the present moment on matters concerning race and immigration. Their tactics include private espionage, lawfare, spreading disinformation, intimidation, and generating security concerns that they then exploit to shut down speeches and other events of which they disapprove.
No comments:
Post a Comment