The Conservative Party’s Capitulation in the Culture War

It is almost thirty years since the label “culture war” was first attached to the relentless onslaught of liberalism, the ideology that misleadingly took its name from an adjective used by the Romans to denote generosity and all that is worthy of free people, against the traditions, religion, and ancestral ethnic groups of the Christian civilization that succeeded the Graeco-Roman civilization of antiquity. In Canada, the Liberal Party had turned the Supreme Court into a weapon of offence in this war by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to our Constitution in 1982 and in 1988 that weapon was used to strike down all the laws against abortion in Canada, scoring a major victory for what Pope John Paul II would a few years thereafter call “the culture of death.” At the time, the Progressive Conservative Party was inclined to fight back against liberalism and in 1989 introduced Bill C-43, which would re-criminalize abortion while allowing it in instances where a mother’s life was in danger. The bill passed in the House of Commons, but died on its third reading in the Senate in 1991, when it received a tie-vote. The Tories, lamentably, did not press the issue further and today it would appear that the Conservative Party has raised the white flag in the culture war.

Last month, when Justin Trudeau’s Liberals introduced Bill C-16, Rona Ambrose, the interim leader of the Conservative Party, declared that she would not oppose the bill. Several other Conservative MPs followed suit. Bill C-16 is the bill which will make it illegal to discriminate against transgender people, i.e., people who think that they are a sex other than the one they actually are. In practice, what this means is that public facilities designated for the use of one sex, including washrooms, change rooms, and showers, will be required by law to be open to people of the other sex who maintain that they think or feel that they are of the sex for which the facilities have been reserved. It also means that anyone who turns down someone who is in disagreement with their X and/or Y chromosomes as to what sex he/she/it is for a job, passes over for promotion, or fires that person, may face a charge of discrimination in which he will have to bear the impossible onus of somehow proving that he is not guilty of the crimethink of which he accused. If all that were not bad enough the bill will also make “hate speech” against transgender people into an offence punishable with up to two years in prison. Note that the words “hate speech” do not, as sane people might be tempted to think, merely refer to explicit incitement to violence but include the expression of thoughts that contradict what progressives have decided all enlightened people must believe. If ever there was a time for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to oppose something, this is it.

Yet, not only is the Conservative leader supporting this insane new bill but the party, in its national convention held later in the same month, voted by a very large margin to abandon its position that marriage is something that exists “between one man and one woman.” It also voted to change its policy on marijuana and to take the position that the possession of small amounts ought to be decriminalized. The latter is a much lesser matter than the former but we can see the same train of thought at work in both decisions. The Conservatives were trounced majorly by the Liberals in last fall’s election and are now reasoning that this was because the Liberal positions on same-sex “marriage” and marijuana were more popular than theirs and that this means they must change their positions in order to survive as a party. To reason this way seems to be a perennial temptation for Conservatives whenever they lose elections. As long as Conservatives keep succumbing to this temptation, liberalism will keep winning, and will keep moving further and further to the left, dragging the rest of us along with it. The Liberal Party already has a pair of doppelgangers in the NDP and Green Parties and it does not need another one in the Conservatives.

The idea that it was the Conservative Party’s right-wing positions on matters like marriage and election that cost them the last election is absurd when one considers that they had done next to nothing about these issues while they were in office for the last nine years, even in the four years in which they had a majority government. The Civil Marriage Act that created the legal fiction of same-sex “marriage” nation-wide – the courts had already done this at the provincial level through most of the country – was passed during the Liberal premiership of Paul Martin in 2005, the year before the Conservative took power. It was only in that first year that they attempted to re-open the issue, at a time when they had a minority government making it inevitable that the attempt would fail. Nor did they attempt to reintroduce restrictions on abortion – indeed, then Conservative leader Stephen Harper had declared that the abortion debate would not be reopened during his premiership. On the matter of doctor-assisted suicide, Steven Fletcher, at the time a Conservative MP, actually introduced legislation similar to the bill the Liberals are currently ramming through Parliament a year previously.

In other words, the Conservative Party had already basically surrendered in the culture war by the beginning of the Harper premiership. This surrender was even more complete when it comes to immigration and the issues surrounding it than with regards to abortion, same-sex “marriage”, euthanasia and the other issues that are conventionally categorized as “social.” In the late 1960s, during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals launched an aggressive assault against white Anglophone Canadians. Their weapons were mass immigration, the Canadian Human Rights Act, the public schools and the national news media. Under the pretence of making Canada’s immigration laws fair and race-neutral, which the Conservatives had already done during the premiership of John Diefenbaker in 1962 having a negligible effect on the composition of immigration, the Liberals changed that composition from being almost ninety per cent traditional European at the beginning of Pierre Trudeau’s premiership to being seventy per cent Third World by its end. In the Canadian Human Rights Act they made it a civilly liable offence to discriminate on the basis of race. On paper, this looks like it applies to everyone – whites cannot discriminate against blacks, blacks cannot discriminate against whites – but in practice it was only enforced against whites, and only intended to be enforced against whites. This anti-white bias is what the Liberals really mean whenever they say “protecting vulnerable minorities”. They turned the public schools into indoctrination camps to program people into thinking that racism, bigotry, discrimination, prejudice, and xenophobia – on the part of white people, that is - were all greater sins than Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lust. The news media branded anyone who dared to publicly disagree with the Liberals on any of this as a Hitlerite even if, like the late Doug Collins, he was a man who actually fought against Hitler during the war. No subsequent government has dared to do anything about any of this, certainly not the thoroughly cucked Conservatives under Stephen Harper’s leadership.

While liberals claim open-mindedness and tolerance as their virtues, on all of these matters they have insisted every time they have scored a victory in the culture war that all discussion of the issue ought to be closed, and that people who disagree with them publically ought to be punished. Since Canadian liberalism has made it absolutely clear that it will accept no victory short of a Carthaginian peace in this culture war, the Conservatives, in the face of such an attitude, ought never to have ever contemplated surrender.

Having said that, I could have told you thirteen years ago that something like this would happen.

That was the year that the present Conservative Party was formed when the merger between the old Conservative Party and the right-populist Reform Party was completed. Theoretically this could have produced a superior party that would combine the best of both. From the original Conservative Party, formed in the year of Confederation and which under the leadership of Sir John A. MacDonald, Father of Confederation and the first Prime Minister of Canada, governed the country for nineteen of its first twenty-four years, it could have taken its royalism, patriotism, Anglophilia, and economic nationalism. To this it could have added the small town, rural common sense of the Reform Party, founded as a Western protest party in 1988, as well as its opposition to such things as bureaucratic overregulation, progressive social engineering, and socialist wealth redistribution. The social and cultural conservative defence of the Christian religion, its ethical teachings and its traditional and historical role in Canada, an element the two parties had in common, could have served as the glue to make such a union work.

I could not see this happening, however. The old Conservative Party was hardly recognizable as the party of Sir John A. MacDonald any more. Having foolishly added the adjective Progressive to its name in 1942, thus creating a self-contradicting title and a confused identity to go along with it, the party ousted in 1966, John Diefenbaker, a leader who was patriotically fighting for Canada’s traditional symbols such as the old flag against Liberals determined to replace them, and, back in power in the 1980s, abandoned its traditional anti-contintentalist economic nationalism and negotiated a free trade deal with the United States. After its one failed attempt to recriminalize abortion it gave up and it made the immigration problem, started by the Liberals, even worse by jacking the yearly target of immigrants to be accepted up through the roof. As for the Reform Party, or the Canadian Alliance as it was then called after an initial, incomplete, attempt at merging with the Conservatives, its capitalism was always more important to it than its social conservatism. By 2003 – indeed, long before then – capitalism had evolved from a relatively benign, small town, competitive market into a globalist economy controlled by multinational megacorporations who, as an examination of the list of those who have intervened legally against state governments south of the border that have sought to protect traditional marriage or even the freedom of conscience of traditional religious believers, will reveal, have joined forces with liberalism in the culture war. I predicted that the new party would join the worst elements of the two parties rather than the best, and that social conservatism would be the first thing on the chopping block. I decided it would not be worthwhile joining.

Unfortunately, since all the other parties in the House of Commons are completely and extremely liberal, the betrayal of the Conservatives leaves those of us who love this country and would like to pull it out of the abyss of cultural and moral insanity into which it has sunk without a voice in the federal legislative assembly.

Puritanism, Theocracy, and Social Conservatism

Was Canada a theocratic state, scarcely different from the Ayatollah’s Iran, until 2005?

That does not sound like a description of the Canada of ten years ago as I remember it, nor can I think of anyone who was alive and living in Canada back then who does remember it that way. There are those, however, who appear to be suggesting that such was the case.

That was the year that Parliament, led by the Liberal government of Paul Martin, passed the Civil Marriage Act that made “marriages” available to same-sex couples across Canada. This had more or less been accomplished by the courts on a province-by-province basis in the year or two preceding the bill which standardized it. It was, of course, a controversial move - both on the part of the courts and Parliament – and remains so to this day. Many who opposed this change being made would like to see it reversed today. Progressives who supported the change have been known to describe the position of their opponents as theocratic.

Now think about that for a second. If it is theocratic to take the position that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, that it was wrong to re-define it otherwise, and that it ought to be changed back, then this means that our country was a theocracy for most of its history, up until about ten years ago. Similarly, if it is theocratic to say that abortion is murder and ought to be against the law, then our country was theocratic until 1988, especially prior to 1969.

Canada, of course, was not a theocracy prior to these changes, nor has she ever been a theocracy. A theocracy is a form of government in which a deity is the acknowledged head of state, the priests are the ruling class, and laws of religion are also the law of the land. Canada’s head of state is Queen Elizabeth II and neither we nor Great Britain have ever regarded her or her predecessors as a divine being in the way the Japanese used to think of their emperors or the Roman Empire her Caesars. Clergy may run for public office in Canada, have often done so and have often been successful, but nobody holds public office here by right of being a priest. The law of the land consists of the Constitution of Canada, the Common Law, and laws enacted by Parliament. Since we are not now and never have been a theocracy it is therefore not theocratic to oppose the sweeping changes to the traditional moral, social, and cultural order of Canada of the last half century and to seek to undo those changes.

Another accusation, similar to that of theocracy, that is frequently levelled at those who remain loyal to the old, traditional social, moral, and cultural norms is that of Puritanism. This charge often comes from the left wing of conservatism, from those who would consider themselves to be “progressive conservatives” and who, knowing a little bit about the history of English conservatism know that the Puritans were the radical enemies of the Tories or conservatives in the seventeenth century. What this accusation really means, therefore, is that those who oppose changes such as liberalized abortion laws and the redefinition of marriage and are therefore thought of and think of themselves as “social conservatives” are not true to conservative tradition and principles.

What this fails to take into proper consideration is the nature of the conflict between the Tories and the Puritans. It was hardly the case that the Puritans wanted a Christian society based upon the teachings of the Bible whereas the Tories were defending a secular order in which Church and State were kept rigorously separate. The Tories fought on behalf of European Christendom’s traditional alliance of throne and altar – or at least the modern English variation of this alliance that had come out of the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement of the sixteenth century. That is about as far from secularism as you can get!

The English Reformation had begun with an Act of Parliament that declared the king to be the highest earthly authority over the Church in England which was, of course, the same thing as declaring that the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, had no authority over the English Church. This ultimately had the effect of breaking the communion between Canterbury and Rome, and the Church in England became the Church of England. The Elizabethan Settlement at the end of the sixteenth century was the official answer to both Roman Catholics who sought to put the English Church back under papal authority – and had briefly succeeded in the reign of Mary I – and strict Calvinists who wanted a more thorough Reformation that would strip the English Church of every last vestige of Catholicism. The Settlement declared mandatory attendance at the services of the Church of England, which Church was given a moderate Calvinist confession in the Thirty-Nine Articles, and which would conduct its services in the English vernacular, but which would retain its Catholic hierarchy and structure and as much of its rituals, ceremonies, and traditions as were consistent with its Protestant confession. The Calvinists who wished for a more thorough Reformation were the Puritans.

One thing the Church of England retained from the pre-Reformation tradition was the traditional Christian understanding that in the here and now we are living in exile from Paradise and will not be restored to Paradise until the Second Coming of Christ brings history to an end. In the here and now the taint of Original Sin will always be with us, and so, to meet human needs that arise out of Sin, God has appointed the civil government and the Church to two distinct and limited roles. To meet our need for protection from the violence of Sin in others, the civil government has been appointed to the task of passing and enforcing laws against evil acts like murder and theft. To meet our need for confession and forgiveness of Sin in ourselves, the Church has been appointed to proclaim in Word and Sacrament the forgiveness of God given to us in the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In this traditional understanding it was recognized that these were limited roles and that neither of these institutions had either the ability or the responsibility to do what only Christ Himself will do at His Second Coming – restore Paradise.

The Puritans rejected this sensible and traditional way of looking at things. Their doctrine taught them to look upon the king and the priestly hierarchy of the Church as tyrants colluding together in the oppression of the people and to consider themselves to be God’s chosen, godly, few, called upon either to separate from the irredeemable corruption of Church and State or to wage war against it and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. They rejected the tradition of understanding and teaching the Scriptures that had developed from the Church Fathers to the Reformation as being a construction of the conspiracy between king and priest and substituted for it a demagogic method of interpreting the Scriptures in which every condemnation of the enemies of God was applied to the king and priest while every promise to God’s holy elect was applied to themselves.

This doctrine was a tree that bore much fruit, none of it good. The Puritans became politically seditious, going to war with the king and committing regicide in the 1640s, and later leading the republican revolution in the American colonies in the 1760s. They rejected the tradition of Christian liberty that had been built on the foundation laid by St. Paul in his epistles, in which Christians were free do whatever was not explicitly condemned as a sin in Scriptures and thus had liberty in matters of food and drink. It is place they recreated the ethical system of the Pharisees, placing excessive emphasis upon Sabbath keeping, and railing against games, dancing and other “amusements” which no Scripture condemns either explicitly or by general principle, while justifying, for the sake of the merchant trader class from whom they drew their numbers, the grasping rapacity which is both explicitly and repeatedly condemned in Scriptures. Hand-in-glove with the Puritans’ Pharisaism in morality went their Philistinism in art and culture. They objected strenuously to music and drama and when in power they closed the theatres, got rid of the art collection of King Charles I, and removed organs, tapestries, artwork, and everything of beauty that they thought detracted from their perverse ideal of “simplicity” in the churches.

In Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the Elizabethan divine Richard Hooker defended the Church of England and the Elizabethan Settlement from Puritan attacks. Puritanism reduced to the idea that whatever in the tradition of Christendom could not be shown to be commanded by the Bible must be eradicated and forbidden. Hooker argued instead, for the principle that everything in the tradition of Christendom that could not be shown to be forbidden by the Bible, ought to be permitted to be retained. While the Puritans condemned the king and the priests as being “tyrants”, their own system had far less room for freedom. Hooker wisely saw that tradition and freedom stood and fell together, along with the civil and ecclesiastical order. This insight became the keystone of the Tory position in their fight against Puritanism.

The Tories fought on behalf of tradition and freedom and the civil and ecclesiastical order. The Puritans fought to overthrow the civil and ecclesiastical order and regarded tradition as the enemy of freedom. So where is the spirit of Puritanism to be found today? Among those who continue to affirm the traditional social and moral standards that until very recently were recognized as being those of our own culture and society, who were raised themselves under those standards and who wish for their own children and grandchildren to be raised under the same standards? Or among the progressives who rail against tradition as the enemy of liberty, who have turned the public schools into indoctrination centres to re-educate children in case they have been taught the traditional social and moral standards by their parents and churches, who try to use the human rights tribunals to silence all dissent from their revolution, and who have radically changed the nature of one of the most basic of social institutions from what it has been from time immemorial to make it conform to a rigid doctrine of egalitarianism?