Bill C-9 and the Difference between Good Law and Bad

On Lady Day this year, which fell on the Wednesday before Palm Sunday, Bill C-9 passed its third hearing in the House of Commons.  The following day the first reading in the Senate was completed and it is now in its second reading before that august chamber of sober second thought.  This bill, entitled the “Combatting Hate Act”, was introduced by the governing Liberals last September.  It consists of a series of amendments to the Criminal Code.  These would create four new offences.  The first two have to do with preventing access to places of worship, cultural centres, educational institutions (including daycare centres), seniors’ residences, and cemeteries, by means of intimidation (the first offence) or obstruction (the second offence).  The third new offence is “hate crime” defined to include any existing offence when it is committed with the motivation of hatred.  Creating this “hate crime” offence includes increasing the penalties attached to the existing offences when committed for this motivation.   The final new offence involves the public display of specified symbols, including ones used by terrorists, Nazi symbols, and “a symbol that so nearly resembles” the aforementioned “that it is likely to be confused with that symbol”.  The order in which I have listed the offences here is that of the government’s initial announcement of the legislation, not the order in which they currently stand in the bill (1).

 

In addition to creating these new offences the bill adds a definition “hatred” into the Criminal Code.  Here is the definition from the text of the bill: “hatred means an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation; (haine)”.  It also adds this clarifying note “For greater certainty, the communication of a statement does not incite or promote hatred, for the purposes of this section, [Section 319 of the Criminal Code pertaining to “hate propaganda”] solely because it discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.”

 

The bill will also remove something from the Criminal Code.  This is mentioned alongside the four new offences in the summary at the beginning of the bill, indeed, it is the second item in the summary: “repeal the defence based on the expression of opinions on religious subjects or texts in relation to the offences of wilful promotion of hatred or antisemitism”.  What this will repeal is subsection 3 (b) of Section 319 of the Criminal Code as it currently stands.  This reads “3 No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2)… (b) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text”.  The repeal of this subsection, it was reported last fall, was added to this bill in order to obtain the support of the Lower Canadian separatists who made it a condition of their support.

 

Most of the discussion of this bill – the popular discussion, I mean, not the official discussion in the House and Senate – has centred around this last matter, the removal of the good faith religious defence.  The entire bill is rotten to the core, in my opinion, and so is the entire section of the Criminal Code (318-319) which it seeks to amend. 

 

Consider the proposal to create a “hate crime” offence consisting of other offences committed with hatred as their motivation.   If somebody shoots you in the head, will you be deader if he shot you because of the colour of your skin than if he shot you because you were impeding his attempt to rob your house?  Or, if he hits your foot instead of your head, will it be less likely to turn gangrenous and have to be amputated?  Suppose instead of shooting you he punches you in the nose and kicks you in the groin.  Will this hurt any less if he does so because he is high on meth than if he does so because he doesn’t like your religion?  If these questions are absurd then so is the idea that a law prescribing higher penalties to the same crime when committed for reasons having to do with hate could be just. 

 

Someone might counter that the law recognizes different grades of homicide.  For a homicide to be classified as murder the murderer must have intended either to kill the victim or to do something criminal that would make the victim’s death a likely outcome.  (2) To be classified as first degree murder either the murder or some other felony in the context of which the murder took place has to have been planned in advance in cold blood. (3)  A homicide that does not meet the requirements to be classified as murder but is still culpable under law - if done out of the necessity of self-defence it is not so culpable, at least by the letter of the law if not by how morons in His Majesty’s constabulary and on His Majesty’s benches interpret it (4) - is classified as manslaughter (unless it falls under the category of infanticide).  Homicide committed in the heat of passion is the primary example of culpable manslaughter. (5) 

 

These differences, however, are more substantial than mere differences in motivation, they are differences in the very nature of the crime.  In the case of the proposed “hate crime” offence, the motivation is only the difference.  This is because it is the motivation of “hate” and not the criminal act per se that the bill seeks to punish.  This ought to be obvious from the fact that every single act that will fall under the classification of “hate crime” if Bill C-9 passes the Senate and receives royal assent is already against the law.  That this is the case is spelled out in the very wording of the bill.  Therefore, it can only be the motivation that the bill seeks to punish. 

 

A far more honest version of Bill C-9 would simply state that it is creating a new offence, punishable under the Criminal Code, entitled “hate.”  The Liberals would not likely have drafted a bill worded this way, however, because it would have stood far less of a chance of passing the House, and little to no chance of surviving a court challenge if it made it into law.  A bill that proposed directly criminalizing “hate” itself, without attaching it to some act or another, would be a bill that proposes criminalizing something people think and feel.  This would be open intrusion into what has long been regarded as beyond the legitimate sphere of government authority.

 

By “long”, I do not mean merely going back to 1982 when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed, or even back to the formulation of classical liberal theory in the eighteenth century.  When Queen Elizabeth I acceded the throne in 1558, the people of her realm were divided in religious opinion.  Some were opposed to the reforms introduced in the brief reign of her brother Edward VI or even those moderate reforms her father Henry VIII had allowed and favoured the reconciliation with Rome during the reign of her sister Mary. Others were the exact opposite of this and felt the Henrician and Edwardian reforms had not gone far enough and that every last vestige of the pre-Reformation tradition needed to be expunged from the Church. Most fell somewhere in between.  Elizabeth restored the Henrician and Edwardian reforms, in a few instances moderating them somewhat, rarely going further, and required of all her subjects external conformity to the Church of England.  While it is unlikely to win her any accolades as an advocate of freedom of conscience from an age like ours, drunk on liberalism and its doctrine of separation of church and state, Elizabeth declared “I have no desire to make windows into men's souls.”  With both papists and Puritans threatening the security of the realm with their plots against her, she defended her authority to regulate the externals of the Church and require conformity to it, while denying to Parliament as much as to herself the right to dictate what her subjects privately believed and how they interpreted the Prayer Book and Articles.

 

A bill that proposed criminalizing “hate”, something that people think and feel, would do the very thing that Elizabeth I said she had no desire to do, open a window into men’s souls.  While volumes could be written about how Modern democratic liberalism has made government more intrusive rather than less intrusive than it was in Christian civilization prior to the onset of the Modern Age, that is something to be explored at length at another time.  Our point here is different.  The governing Liberals, by not drafting such a bill, and by introducing C-9 in the way they did with a lot of fluff about how it was carefully worded to avoid violating the Charter, demonstrated that they recognize that a bill that proposed to directly criminalize what people think or feel would intrude into an area beyond where government can legitimately govern.  What they either are not aware of or are pretending not to be aware of – and this lack of awareness predates the Charter, all the way back to when the Liberals added Sections 318-319 to the Criminal Code in 1970 – is that indirectly criminalizing what people think and feel is no better than directly criminalizing it.

 

All “hate” laws are fundamentally bad laws because they all try to do indirectly what would be instantly recognizable as a tyrannical or totalitarian move if it were done directly

 

Defenders of “hate” laws, particularly those that would limit what someone can say in public, try to ward off criticism by saying that all these laws do is prohibit threatening and urging violence against protected groups.  If this were the case, such laws would still be bad laws because they are not needed due to their redundancy. Incitement has been a crime for a very long time – it did not begin as a statutory offence, that is to say one written into law by an act of legislation, but as a Common Law offence.  Incitement is the act of encouraging others to commit a crime.  It is itself a criminal act because it involves the person who does the incitement in the guilt of the person who commits the criminal act that has been incited.  The fact that it is a crime is a limit on speech, but not a limit due to the thought or feeling expressed in the speech, but rather due to its nature as an act, as explained in the previous sentence.  For speech to be incitement it must take the form “Do X to Y”.

 

Either “hate speech” legislation prohibits only speech that takes the form “Do X to Y” or it prohibits speech that does not take this form.  If it only prohibits speech that takes the form “Do X to Y”, it is redundant because that was already covered by the law against incitement.  On top of its redundancy, it adds to the law against criminal incitement by saying that such and such groups deserve more protection against criminal incitement than others, in order to make it easier for law enforcement to “get” such and such offenders.  Neither of these things, providing special protection for certain groups nor trying to “get” someone, is characteristic of good law, it is rather a red flag that the law in question is bad. 

 

If, on the other hand, the “hate speech” legislation goes beyond “Do X to Y” then it is limiting speech due to something other than it being an act of incitement.  It is limiting speech due to its content, due to its expression of what the speaker thinks or feels.  It is the government intruding where it has no business to intrude, trying to open up “windows into the souls of men.”

 

The history of “hate” legislation in Canada shows that it has been bad in both of these ways at the same time.

That the original “hate propaganda” act that put Sections 318-319 into the Criminal Code in 1970 was intended to “get” certain people is evident from the fact that when, due to defendants under these sections being entitled to the protections all defendants are entitled to under criminal law (right to a trial, right to a defense, right to the presumption of innocence until guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt), it turned out that it was not so easy to “get” those people after all, the government was immediately lobbied to find a way around this, which it did by including Section 13 in the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977.  The Canadian Human Rights Act is civil, not criminal, legislation and so those accused under it do not have the rights to which criminal defendants are entitled.  Section 13 was hardly limited to speech that takes the form “Do X to Y”, it was so broadly worded – speech that is “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” - that you could drive a convoy of trucks driving side by each through it.  The entire Canadian Human Rights Act, obiter dictum, is bad law, passed like its UK equivalent the Race Relations Act, in imitation of a bad Act in the United States.  For decades complaints made under Section 13 had a 100% conviction rate, which is a huge indication that the law is not just bad but horridly so.  Eventually, when the spotlight was turned on Section 13 in the first decade of this millennium, public opinion turned against it in Canada and in 2012, a private members bill to repeal Section 13 which had been introduced by Brian Storseth, then MP for Westlock-St. Paul, passed third reading in the House, receiving royal assent in 2013, and coming into effect in 2014. 

 

That the people that both Sections 318-319 and Section 13 were originally intended to “get” were people generally reviled in Canadian society does not make these laws any better.  Indeed, this is the way bad laws of this sort work.  They start by going after people who, because of the general revulsion against them, have few defenders, and then, when these have all been “gotten” move on to others.  Although the Rev. Martin Niemöller’s famous poem starting with “First they came for the Communists” was talking about the actions of a regime rather than the cumulative mission creep of a piece of legislation, it illustrates the process quite well.  That those the Canadian “hate” laws were initially intended to “get” were those who continue to identify with the ideology of the regime that did the “coming for” in Niemöller’s poem does not alter the point.  This ideology was one of two ideologies held by parties that established remarkably similar totalitarian terror-states that murdered a lot of people in the twentieth century.  This ideology was short-lived, it basically died with its regime in 1945, whereas the other ideology seized power earlier (Russia, 1917), in more countries (at its peak it controlled roughly a third of the world), lasted longer (some countries still officially claim the ideology today), and killed more people (over 100 million).  Yet the second category of “hate” symbols to be banned under C-9 consists entirely of symbols of this dead ideology, which very few people would display in public in Canada at this point in time, but not the symbols of the other ideology which plenty of people, especially idiots in academia (faculty and students alike) are fond of displaying.  No, my point is not that Bill C-9 would be improved if the hammer and sickle were banned alongside the swastika.

 

There are two reasons the swastika and the SS symbol are specified to be banned by C-9 and the hammer and sickle, red star, and raised fist are not.  The first is that the ban is designed to “get” an extremely small number of people.  The second is that it is designed to provide special protection to the adherents of one particular religion in Canada, Judaism.  There is already a subsection of Section 319 of the Criminal Code that explicitly provides special protection to the adherents of Judaism. (6)  This subsection, which was smuggled in by the Liberals under their previous leader in a budget bill four years ago, deserves examination here because it demonstrates that speech of the “Do X to Y” form is hardly what “hate” legislation is intended to combat.

 

The special protection that subsection 2.1 provides to adherents of Judaism is protection of their feelings. This is because hurt feelings is the only way the speech prohibited by subsection 2.1 could possibly hurt them.  The speech prohibited does not take the form “Do X to Y”.  It takes the forms “I approve of Event A”, “Event A happened differently than what we have been told” and “Event A wasn’t as important as it is made out to be.”  Only the first of these could be reasonably considered to be an expression of hatred.  Speech of the second and third forms ought never to be banned, it is a crime against conscience, reason, and common sense to ban it and a violation of the fundamental freedoms of His Majesty’s subjects, even in the watered down wording of section 2 of the Charter, to so ban it.  (7)

 

Organizations purporting to speak for Judaism – generally self-appointed activists rather than the religion’s spiritual teachers and leaders - had been lobbying for “hate” legislation since long before the first “hate” bill was passed in 1970.  This is not a criticism of such organizations, per se.  Any group of His Majesty’s subjects has the right to petition His Majesty’s government for what they feel is in their own best interest.  They do not, however, have the right to have their petition granted at the expense of the general good of the realm.  It is the duty of His Majesty’s government to see to it that the general good is protected, even if it means denying the petition of the lobbying group.  This duty that has been sorely neglected, when it comes to “hate” laws, when the Liberals have formed His Majesty’s government in Ottawa, at least since the first Trudeau premiership.  Yes, it is a duty of His Majesty’s government, because the general good that is compromised by “hate” legislation is the good of freedom of conscience, of freedom from having the government try to open “windows into men’s souls” a good that protects us all.

 

Now, someone might object that the religious defence that Bill C-9 will remove from Section 319, also provides special protection to specific groups.  Unlike the case of the second class of symbols to be banned under C-9, however, the defence to be removed is written in general terms.  See the text of the defence quoted in the third paragraph of this essay.  Subsection 3 (b) was included in Section 319 to prevent a section intended to prevent people from being made the targets of propaganda because of their religion from itself becoming a weapon with which to target religion.   The assurances of government ministers, such as Marc Miller, that the removal of this defence will not mean that religions will be so targeted ring very false and are not to be trusted.  In the context of advocating this bill, he declared three Biblical passages, two from the Old Testament and one from the New to contain “clear hatred”. That anyone quoting these passages in public might find himself to be charged is hardly an unlikely outcome of this bill. (8)

 

To put the matter in more general terms, the proposed removal of a legal defence should sound warning alarms.  A fundamental principle of our justice system – not merely that of Canada, not merely that of the Commonwealth, but of the civilization formerly known as Christendom, with roots in ancient Roman Law and in the Scriptures common to Christianity and Judaism (9) – is that it is better to leave the guilty unpunished than to unjustly punish the innocent.  Good laws, rarely if ever, make it easier to prosecute.  This is the reverse side of the coin to the bad laws are written to “get” people principle that we have already discussed.

 

Defenders of the removal of the defence argue that nobody should be allowed to use religion as a defence for urging violence.  As we have seen, those who drafted this defence, did so with regards to speech that was not limited to the “Do X to Y” form.  There is, however, a simple solution to this which would give the advocates of C-9 what they claim they want without creating a cudgel against religion.  That is to eliminate Sections 318-319 entirely.  

 

This should have been done long ago.  There is nothing in Sections 318-319 worth preserving.   There is only one thing under the absurd category of “hate speech” or “hate propaganda” that ought to be against the law.  That is criminal incitement, the urging of violence or other criminal activity in the “Do X to Y” form.  This was against the law before Sections 318-319 were entered into the Criminal Code.  It will still be against the law if those Sections are removed.  Moreover, it will only be against the law in a way that protects everyone, without trying to “get” anyone and without pandering to those who think they deserve special protection.  There will be no religious exception, both because this will die with Sections 318-319 and because it won’t be needed.  The basic law against criminal incitement cannot be weaponized against religion because unlike “hate” laws which are designed to be weaponized against certain people on behalf of other people, it is there to keep the king’s peace.  There is little, if anything, that could be regarded as good law, which does not exist mainly if not solely for this purpose.

 

 (1)   In the text of the bill the prohibition of symbols is the first offence, hate crime is the second, intimidation the third, and obstruction the fourth.

(2)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 229.

(3)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 231.

(4)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 34.

(5)  Criminal Code of Canada, Section 232.

(6)  Criminal Code of Canada, Section 319, (2.1).

(7)   The two most notorious “hate” trials in Canadian history, both of which took place in my youth during the Mulroney premiership, were primarily about speech of this “Event A happened differently than we have been told” form.  One individual, the one charged under section 319 of the Criminal Codes, was also charged with speech in the form “Y is guilty of Z”.  None of the speech was in the form “Do X to Y”, and in the course of the trials, the other individual, who was charged under a different law that the Supreme Court of Canada threw out on appeal, himself became the target of criminal violence.  I thought at the time, and I think so still, that these trials were an utter disgrace and the type of thing better suited to the sort of regime that these men were accused, with varying degrees of accuracy, of supporting, than to a Realm of His (Her at the time) Majesty’s Commonwealth.  In February 2001, Esquire published an article by Jewish, liberal, literary journalist, war correspondent, and author John Sack in which he discussed a meeting he had attended of those who hold the “Event A happened differently than we have been told” perspective where he had met the second mentioned of these defendants.  To this day it is my go to reference whenever some jackass takes exception to my obviously correct position that if the spirit of the Third Reich lives on today it is more in the “liberals” (would J. S. Mill recognize them as such?) who pass laws against “Holocaust Denial” than in those they persecute.

(8)   Charges of this sort were made against Hugh Owens in 1997.  During the week which has subsequently dropped the lesser of the two sins in its title and retained the worse (and expanded to a month, then a season), he took out an advertisement with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix with two male stick figures holding hands inside the red circle with a slash symbol.  It also contained references to a number of Bible verses on the subject.  The complaint, which was made under the provincial human rights code, was initially upheld, but in 2006 overturned by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal.  More recently (2013) the Supreme Court of Canada overturned Bill Whatcott’s successful appeal to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal against his conviction by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal in a somewhat similar case.  In the unanimous ruling, the Court utilized the earlier court definition of hatred from R v Taylor.  Although the Supreme Court said that “hatred” needs to be understood as "extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words 'detestation' and 'vilification'" the fact that they ruled that Whatcott’s flyer distribution constituted such shows how empty this description really is.  That this is the basis of the definition of “hatred” to be added to the Criminal Code by C-9 is not a good sign.  An “extreme manifestation” of “detestation”, to any sane person, would consist of violent actions rather than words.  “Vilification” is an act not an emotion and it is already covered by defamation law, there is no need to include it under “hate.”  The use of the word “emotion” is revealing (among other things it reveals how much a better sort of justice is needed for the highest bench of His Majesty’s court).  It is not the place of government to tell people what to think or feel.

(9)   Gen. 18:16-33.

 

Faithfulness and Fortitude

The Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, the thirteenth clergyman consecrated into the Apostolic Order to have occupied the diocesan See of Rupert’s Land and its present incumbent, was recently featured in an article by John Longhurst of the Winnipeg Free Press.   Now, one must keep in mind that when it comes to the Winnipeg Free Press, which has been an organ for Liberal Party disinformation since the days when it was edited by John Wesley Dafoe – 1901 to 1944 – it is best not to believe everything one reads or even, for that matter, to give the paper the benefit of the doubt.   If you assume that the exact opposite of what the Winnipeg Free Press says on any given subject is true, you will be right more often than not and will be far better informed than are most people in our city.   That caveat having been given, let us consider what has been reported about our diocesan shepherd. 

 

According to Longhurst, Bishop Geoff and Susan Johnson who presides over the “Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada” (see, I told you the Winnipeg Free Press could not be trusted, that is supposed to be “in Canada” not “of Canada”) have signed what Longhurst calls “an international interfaith declaration that calls for an end to violence against and criminalization of LGBTTQ+ people and a global ban on conversion therapy.”

 

Before offering any thoughts upon the act so reported, the signing of the declaration, let us hear what His Grace has to say by way of explanation of this.   He is quoted by Longhurst as having said “I signed because of the relationships I have within the church with transgender and LGBTTQ+ people, people I nurture and care for, just like everyone else in the church” and “When the world is hurting someone, I’m going to stand by that person being hurt.”

 

With regards to the first of these sentences there is not much to say.  Certainly, His Grace is to be commended for attempting to follow the example set by St. Paul of “I am become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some”, although I tend to be of the opinion that it would be more advisable to do so in a way of which the Apostle would approve rather than by signing political declarations over which he would have pronounced an anathema.   The practice of providing the same nurture and care for all in the church is also commendable and a fairly basic expectation of someone in a pastoral role, perhaps especially of the one who carries the crosier (this is the fancy name for the bishop’s big stick, bishops having long followed the advice of St. Teddy of Roosevelt to “talk softly and carry a big stick”, in their case one shaped to look like a shepherd’s crook, symbolic of the office of the chief pastor of the diocesan church and very useful on occasions where he is required to emcee events, whenever a speaker drones on too long or in a boring fashion, or when an impromptu hockey or cricket game breaks out).   Why this pastoral duty would require the signing of this particular political declaration, however, remains a mystery that has not been satisfactorily explained.

 

His second sentence also expresses a most commendable sentiment.   Indeed, it is so commendable it is worth hearing again so here it is “When the world is hurting someone, I’m going to stand by that person being hurt.”   Speaking out for and standing by those whom the world is hurting is indeed a part of the prophetic vocation of Christian leadership.  Most, if not all, of the duties of Christian leaders or even the duties of Christians in general, require the exercise of a particular virtue or set of virtues and this is no exception.    The most obvious virtue called for here is the one traditionally called fortitude, which is more commonly called courage or bravery.

 

The thing about the act of standing up for the weak, the helpless, the little guy, the person who is being picked on and beaten up by the world is that the further away you are from that person in place and time, the less courage the act requires, and therefore the less virtuous the act becomes.    This is especially true if the person whom you are standing up for was picked on and beaten up by the world in another time and place but in your own time and place has become the one doing the picking on and the beating up.   Would it not be accurate to say that in such a circumstance the act has lost all of its virtue?   Indeed, might it not even be fair to say that it has been transformed into the opposite of a virtuous act and become a vicious one?

 

In Longhurst’s description of this international interfaith declaration he said that it called for two things.   The first was “an end to violence against and criminalization of LGBTTQ+ people” and the second was “a global ban on conversion therapy”.   With regards to the second of these items, apart from the fact that it would be a major departure from the older, better, kind of liberalism ala J. S. Mill with its central tenet of freedom of religion, I will note that it is rather inconsistent with the spirit of openness, inclusivity and acceptance that those who drafted this declaration presumably wished to be perceived as their motivation.   After all, our governments now, for better or worse, allow doctors to perform what until very recently would have been regarded as genital mutilations in order to accommodate those who were born of one sex physically, but who self-identify as members of the other.    What about people who were born gay, as we have been repeatedly told by such authorities as Stefani Germanotta is the source of this orientation, but who self-identify as straight?   Or for that matter people who were born transgender who self-identify as cis-gender?   Would not conversion therapy be to such people the equivalent of gender reassignment surgery to those who regard their anatomy as inconsistent with their self-chosen sexual or gender identity?   Where is the openness, acceptance, and tolerance of such people?   This is not being very inclusive in my opinion.

 

Now, with regards to the first item, are “violence against” and “criminalization of” LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY people, hereafter to be referred to as the alphabet soup crowd, serious problems in the Dominion of Canada in the Year 2021 AD?

 

The “criminalization of” part of it certainly is not.   Homosexuality was legalized in Canada in 1969, when the first Trudeau declared that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation”, a remark which has since been re-interpreted ex post facto to include the exception “unless a new virus is going around in which case the state is required to enter every room of the house and force you to wear a mask and keep apart from others.”   There has been no serious attempt to re-criminalize it since.   This sort of liberalization of the Criminal Code was occurring throughout the entire Commonwealth at the time and it is worth noting that the laws which were being removed had not had much bite to them.   This is because the principle that a “man’s home is his castle”, which in effect keeps the state not just out of the bedroom but out of the house entirely, had been a part of the Common Law tradition longer than these laws had been on the books.   Thus, apart from police harassment of gay bars and other establishments, (1) the only real way to run afoul of such laws had been to do something incredibly stupid, such as when Anglo-Irish wit and literary giant, Oscar Wilde, filed a libel suit against the notoriously pugnacious Marquess of Queensberry, otherwise famous for drawing up the rules of pugilism, for calling him a sodomite, thus allowing the latter to raise, in his own defence, the truth of the accusation (Wilde was buggering the Marquess’ son, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, at the time).    At any rate, such laws have been off the books for decades throughout the Commonwealth and, indeed, Western Civilization as a whole.   The countries which have laws against homosexuality today, with far more serious enforcement and severer consequences than was true of the former laws here, are countries in the Third World.    I wonder how many of the clergymen who have signed this declaration are, unlike myself, in sympathy with the sort of crackpot radical politics that otherwise objects to Western Civilization assuming its ways are preferable to those of Third World countries and peoples?

 

Moreover, not only are the alphabet soup crowd not targeted by the law in Canada, it is the other way around, they now benefit from bad laws which beat up on other people for their sake.   Ever since Bill C-16, amending the Canadian Human Rights Act and Section 318 of the Criminal Code to include “gender identity or expression” among prohibited grounds of private discrimination, passed Parliament and became law four years ago, people have been in danger of punitive legal consequences for “misgendering” someone, i.e., calling that person “him” or “her” according to what had been universal usage everywhere in the English-speaking world up unto that point.   This is, as Professor Jordan Peterson pointed out, “compelled speech”, the next stage of Orwellian thought control via language control beyond prohibited speech, taking it from the level of “you can’t say that” to that of “you must say this.”   Among those most in danger of falling prey to this insanely twisted new law are those who accept such Scriptural words as “so God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” by faith, in the way in which those words have been understood throughout the catholic church “everywhere, at all times, and by all”, and who even prior to Bill C-16 had been subject to legal harassment for expressing views consistent with Scripture and tradition on matters affecting the alphabet soup crowd (look up Hugh Owens and Bill Whatcott).   One would think that a successor to the Apostolic office of oversight in a branch of that church, a branch that asserts the high Protestant view of Scriptural authority in the sixth of its Articles of Religion, and which likes to define its catholicity by the Vincentian canon quoted in my last sentence, would regard standing up for such believers, who are targeted by laws in his own country, as a more important and necessary way of standing by the person the world is hurting, than signing political declarations on behalf of people who may be the subjects of unjust persecution elsewhere in the world, but in whose name the persecution of believers is now taking place in this country.  

If I, a mere parishioner and lay theologian, might make a humble suggestion, it would be that if the Right Reverend Woodcroft truly wishes to cultivate the virtue of fortitude by standing by those whom the world is hurting, a most admirable goal indeed, that there are examples closer to home and better suited to the purpose in that they require going against the tide of popular opinion, well-funded and well-organized mass movements, and the power exercised by the corporate media or even, if necessary, the state.   One such example would be to stand up for the unborn, who have had no protection under law in the Dominion since 1988, no party in Parliament seeking to redress this, and who are slaughtered by the thousands in this country in the name of “reproductive rights” each year.   Or, if the bishop really wants to put his fortitude to the test, he might try standing up for those poor students in Strathcona High School in Edmonton, Alberta, who have recently been demonized by their school, the chair of the board of which, a publicity-hound named Trisha Estabrooks got herself into stories on the CBC, CTV, and Global, which are constantly trying to outdo the Winnipeg Free Press as organs of left-wing disinformation, by complaining about how horribly racist and hateful these students apparently are, because they put up an Instagram page quoting Martin Luther King Jr., calling for racial equality, and criticizing their school for having become “increasingly anti-white rather than pro-black”, criticism which has been abundantly justified and proven by the school board’s actions, which included asking the Edmonton Police to investigate.    This would be a particularly appropriate example because in the last couple of years our ecclesiastical leadership has expressed much concern about racism and it would be much better for them to do so by standing against real racism, such as the BIPOC supremacism these kids have been subjected to, rather than the “systemic racism” that they apparently do not realize is merely Marxist coded language for “being white” and thus a racist expression in itself.

 

Might I also recommend that His Grace add to his Lenten reading list this year, the recent book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019) by Douglas Murray?   The author, who is Associate Editor of The Spectator and, a detail I would not mention other than in the context of a discussion such as this one, a gay man, has many excellent insights into the nature of the “woke” mob that has sprung up out of what until quite recently was considered the lunatic fringe of the academic left and which threatens freedom, traditional justice, order, and civilization itself in the name of a false and obscure “social justice” for various groups identified by their sexual orientation, race, sex, and gender identity, an ideal that has been made deliberately unattainable so that the destructive civil unrest and agitation it towards it might be kept going in perpetuity.

 

(1)   Even this had more to do with the tendency of police to periodically harass establishments that are in technical violation of some minor law so that they will give them a payoff to be left alone than with general societal prejudice.   Even the 1995 film Stonewall, a kind of combination of musical comedy and historical drama loosely based upon the riots in response to such harassment at the Inn of that name in Greenwich Village that launched the American gay rights movement in 1969, testifies despite itself to the general toothlessness of the laws regarding homosexuality in that day and the  indifference with which they were regarded.   I refer to the scene involving the “sip-in” in which the gay liberation activists went from establishment to establishment, ordering drinks and informing the servers of their orientation – it was against the law to serve alcoholic drinks to homosexuals – but never being met with a refusal until they ended up staging one of their own at the gay bar.    The more general problem of police harassment arises out of the nature of the police.   The state consists of many elements, the best of which is the entirely respectable royal monarchy at the head of the state in Commonwealth realms like Canada, an important but much less respectable and rather sleazy element being the legislative assembly of elected politicians which in Canada we call the House of Commons, and an even more disreputable element being the civil service, consisting mostly of the same kind of arrogant, rent-seeking, pencil-pushing, bossy, technocrats who make up corporate management.   At the very bottom rung of the state in terms of respectability are the police, who are basically low-life thugs, drafted from the criminal element of society, in order that their violence might be turned to the service of law and order rather than against it (see Anthony Burgess’ brilliant illustration of this in A Clockwork Orange).   This is clearly demonstrated in the phenomenon under discussion here, which mimics the “protection racket” activity of the mob.