The Collective Madness of the Age

As a Canadian I am frequently amused at the way our neighbours across the 49th Parallel often accuse us of having an inferiority complex towards them and their country. What’s there to feel inferior about? We have a parliamentary monarchy, a form of government that has class if you ignore the parliamentary part, whereas all they have is a lousy republic. A century and a half ago they went to war with themselves to drive into subjugation a regional culture that had far more class than the rest of their country and are currently capitalizing on the suffering of those whose loved ones fell victim to a psychopathic killer in Charleston, S. C., to eliminate the last vestiges of that regional culture by ending the public display of symbols of its heritage such as its familiar battle flag.

Having said that, there is nothing classy in being smug and we have little cause to be smug towards the Americans with regards to their Supreme Court’s predictable ruling in the Obergefell case. They, at least, can blame a panel of lunatic judges for something which we did to ourselves a decade earlier by electing the Liberal Party to write the Queen’s laws for us in Parliament.

What SCUSA’s Obergefell ruling has done in the United States and which the Liberal Party’s Civil Marriage Act did in Canada in 2005 was to make same-sex “marriage” legal countrywide. Or, to translate that into the language of the sane person, it declared that the country must now pretend that something that is false is true. It is like the scene in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in which Petruchio, having broken Katharina’s spirit, makes her affirm that the sun is the moon. Marriage is what it is, the union of man and woman through solemn vows, and it cannot be changed into something else by judicial ruling or parliamentary decree any more than the government can, by declaring it to be so, make two plus two equal to five.

“Love wins” is the meme that is spreading through the tweets and Facebook pages of celebrities, activists, and others who see the Obergefell decision as cause for rejoicing, but it would be more accurate to say that hatred has won. Hatred of the constraints and limitations imposed upon our wishes and wills by our human nature and the nature of the world we live in, hatred of truth and order, and hatred of the God Who is the Author of truth and order and the Creator of our nature. Hatred, certainly, of the faith that for two thousand years has offered love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, hope and renewal to sinful human beings, heterosexual and homosexual alike, because of that faith’s refusal to compromise the truth. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that as governments in Europe, Canada, the UK, and the various American states to do so prior to the ruling, have declared the creation of same-sex marriage by legislative fiat it has not resulted in lesbians and gays swarming the altars and courthouses of these nations to get hitched so much as in activists, strategically seeking out Christian florists, bakeries, printers, caterers, and anyone whose business is remotely connected to weddings and marriage, suing them, and winning large rulings if they stood true to the principles of their faith. A direct attack on churches is next in the revolutionary agenda.

Another way of putting it would be to say that truth has lost and that we have collectively descended into a world of insanity. Today we are expected to believe on the one hand that same-sex attraction is innate and unchangeable, as the LGBTTQ* movement insists, but on the other, that heterosexuality is socially constructed and imposed upon women by an oppressive and evil male power structure called the patriarchy, as the feminist movement teaches in its Women’s Studies programs in universities. (1) We are expected to simultaneously accept that sexual orientation, for homosexuals at least, is fixed in stone, but that sex itself, whether we are male or female, is not, that our “gender” is something we determine for ourselves regardless of our biology and that our sex can be changed to conform to our gender. When the Church reaches out to gays and lesbians, like anyone else for whom Christ died, offering them peace and reconciliation with God through the blood of His cross, telling them that in Him they can be made whole and set free from their passions, she, we are told, is being harmful and hateful, but we are supposed to accept as sincere and wholesome, the motivation of feminist and LGBTTQ* groups that put pressure on governments to introduce sexual education into schools at younger and younger ages. If we are unable to buy into all of this hogwash we are declared to be unloving, hate-filled, bigots. To a sane person, surely the most harmful, unkind, and hateful attitude possible towards gays and lesbians is that of the LGBTTQ* movement itself, which tells them to find their identity, purpose, and self-validation in the peculiarities of their libido. We are living in an age of madness, however, and the judgement of bigotry is pronounced on us even regardless of our sexual orientation. The judgement is even harsher on gays who go against the narrative, as Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana discovered to their discomfort earlier this year.

Those for whom SCUSA’s decision is a victory are currently engaged in a round of orgiastic, self-congratulatory, backslapping in which they are congratulating each other for their “courage”. It does not take courage, however, to ride the tide of history. Those who wish to see the virtue of courage on display would do better to look at those who have dared to oppose this juggernaut, especially those who will continue to do so now.

Fifty years ago, Canadian philosopher and conservative George Grant (2) observed that the tide of history was moving towards a “universal and homogeneous state” that would be achieved by a “modern science” that “leads to the conquest of nature…not only non-human nature, but human nature itself”. The “heart of the age of progress”, i.e., the age that is being swept by that tide, is “the definition of man as freedom”, which, Grant noted, meant emancipating the human passions from their traditional constraints and reshaping our nature in pursuit of perfection and defiance of the eternal order. While the masses embrace the spirit of these changes and see, in accordance with the doctrine of progress, the end to which they are moving as being inevitably good, Grant, in the tradition of Plato and Simone Weil, cautioned against the confusion of goodness on the one hand and necessity or inevitability on the other.

In today’s insistence that marriage be changed from the union of man with woman and that the biological reality of sex be altered through medicine to reflect self-determined gender, surely we see the conquest of “human nature itself” and “the definition of man as freedom” taken to the extreme of madness. When we are condemned by the masses as hateful, foolish, and out of step with the times for not going along with this flow it is important that we remember that just because something is unavoidable and has the force of the movement of history on its side, that does not make it right or good.

(1) See Robert Stacy McCain’s just published Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature, (Createspace: 2015) especially the chapter entitled “Essential Feminist Quotes” (pp. 48-54) for details.
(2) George P. Grant, Lament For a Nation, (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1978, 1989)

Words, Words, Words

“Words, words, words” – Hamlet (1)

Words are the building blocks of language which is one of the means by which we communicate with one another. To communicate is to share with other people what one thinks, knows, and feels. Language is not the only means of communication. Through the expressions on our faces, the way we move or stay still, and numerous other visual indicators, we often communicate our emotions, how we feel, without needing to put it into words. Conversely, communication is not the only end to which we can put the means of language. Language can be, and often is, used to obstruct communication in a sense, by concealing rather than revealing one’s thoughts, knowledge and feelings. Lying and deception are obvious examples of ways in which language can be used to conceal rather than communicate but they are not the only examples. Indeed, other examples can be given in which the use of language to conceal rather than to fully share our thoughts and feelings is morally praiseworthy rather than blameworthy as it is in the case of lying and deception.

Suppose, for example, that you run across a friend who is sporting a new outfit. The expression on her face speaks of pride in this new ensemble which you, however, feel must have been invented as an alternative to syrup of ipecac for the induction of regurgitation. You know that she is the type whose feelings are easily hurt and have no desire so to hurt her. You therefore try to conceal rather than convey your revulsion at her fashion failure with your words. This does not necessarily mean that you lie, but you choose your words very carefully so as to avoid causing unnecessary offense. This is called tact. It is both an art and a gift and like all blessings that have been bestowed upon the human race it has not been evenly distributed. It comes without effort to some people, others have to work hard at it, and there are yet others who seem to lack all capacity for it. Indeed, there are even those who reject tact as a euphemism for cant and claim to practice an undiluted candour, the absolute goodness of which they profess to believe in. This is, I think, mostly a North American phenomenon, perhaps a consequence of the early influence of Puritanism in the development of North American society. It is a foolish attitude for as long as imperfect men must live with one another in communities there will be a need to minimize social friction and hence a need for tact.

The minimization of social friction is something that is to our benefit both as individuals and collectively as communities and societies. To help us develop the skill of tactfulness and perhaps to compensate for some people’s lack of natural ability for tact societies have developed something called etiquette. This is a word we have borrowed from the French, in which language it originally referred to a card, (2) having evolved into its present meaning through the practice of printing the rules of courtly and military protocol on cards. It now refers to a rules of speech and behaviour, that are maintained through social pressure rather than the force of law for the purpose of minimizing social friction and preventing situations from escalating to the point where it becomes necessary to use the force of law to maintain the peace. We often use the word manners as a synonym for etiquette because the rules of etiquette pertain to the manner in which we act or speak. Someone who practices good etiquette is said to be polite or civil. These words are derived respectively from the Greek and Latin words for city-state which again points to the purpose of etiquette - to facilitate life in the community or society by minimizing social friction.

The rules of etiquette are not written in stone. They are a cultural tradition, produced and transmitted by the institutions of human societies, and like all such traditions evolve over time. They can, for the most part, however, like those ancient laws which were written in stone by the divine hand at Mt. Sinai, be summed up in the Golden Rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Politeness could be defined as the habitual practice of good etiquette. Politeness and tact must be distinguished from and contrasted with a fairly new phenomenon that also involves the use of social pressure to compel people to speak in certain ways and not in others. That phenomenon is called political correctness.

Politeness and political correctness are similar in that that both seek to discourage language that offends other people. In this similarity, however, there is a crucial difference. The language that etiquette forbids and politeness tries to avoid is language that can be reasonably be expected to give offense to any random member of a society and to the majority of its members. There might be some people who are not made uncomfortable by explicit and detailed discussion of the body’s excretory and reproductive functions during conversation around the dinner table but most people are and we can reasonably expect that any given person will be and so etiquette dictates that such discussion occur at another time and place. The language that political correctness forbids, however, is language that is considered to be offensive to a specific, identifiable group. Ordinarily the specific group is a minority within the larger society, usually a religious, racial or other ethnic minority group, although political correctness also forbids language that feminists consider to be offensive to the female sex, which is approximately half of the population.

Note the irony in this. Political correctness was created to serve the purposes of an ideological agenda. According to the ideology that underlies political correctness, in a just society all members of the society, would have equal social status, equal political and civil rights, equal legal protection and equal economic opportunity, regardless of their race, ethnicity, sex and religion. The same ideology indicts traditional Western societies for sinning against this concept of social justice by failing to treat race, ethnicity, sex, and religion as being matters of no public consequence. Yet, when we compare political correctness with the etiquette and politeness that were part of the traditional culture of Western societies, we find that the former attaches far more significance to such matters as race and sex than the latter. Political correctness tells us to avoid saying the sort of things that might offend X and traditional etiquette tells us to avoid saying the sort of things that might offend Y. X is X by virtue of membership in such-and-such a group, whereas Y could be any member of society.

While some of the rules of etiquette may have been formulated at certain times and in certain places by civil authorities, etiquette as a whole is a tradition that has evolved over a long period of time and rather than an ideological agenda serves the good of the whole society. Political correctness, on the other hand, seeks to subvert that good. Etiquette minimizes social friction by teaching us to speak and act in ways that avoid giving unnecessary offense to other members of our society. The forms of speech it tells us to avoid are those that are the most likely to give offense to the most members of our society. Political correctness does not minimize social friction but rather creates and enhances it. Rather than teaching people to identify their own good with that of the whole of the society to which they belong it teaches people to reject the whole of society and to identify instead with whatever smaller group to which they belong that can claim a grievance against the whole society.

The demands of political correctness are often very silly, petty, and ridiculous. Feminists who take the men out of women by using the spelling “womyn”. People who fail to see the absurdity of calling a black man who lives in France an “African American”. The endless list of long, sterile, compound labels for every sort of infirmity imaginable. The instinctual response of anyone who possesses a modicum of common sense to these sorts of things is one of laughter and dismissal. Appropriate as this response may be, we should not allow the silliness of political correctness to cause us to fail to take its subversive agenda seriously.

Like etiquette, political correctness relies upon social pressure to enforce its rules. Whereas etiquette generally relies upon soft social pressure, however, political correctness customarily uses hard social pressure. If you refuse to obey the dictates of political correctness it can negatively affect your grades in school or even lead to a suspension or expulsion and cost you your job or your career. While the use of law to punish breaches of etiquette is virtually unthinkable, laws have been enacted against certain forms of politically incorrect expression by the European Union and most European national governments, by the United Kingdom, by Australia and New Zealand and by Canada at the federal and provincial levels.

Political correctness has led to attempts to bowdlerize Mark Twain, (3) to pull books from libraries and bookstores, (4) and to ban Dante (5), Dickens (6) and Shakespeare (7). This aspect of political correctness is a chilling reminder that the expression originally referred to the official Communist “party line” in Stalin’s Russia, so effectively parodied in the “Newspeak” and “thoughtcrime” of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. While mercifully the current political correctness, rotten and horrible as it is, is not carried out on the extreme scale of the Soviet Union under Stalin or of the fictional society of Orwell’s book, what the two political correctnesses have in common points to another difference between political correctness and old-fashioned politeness or etiquette. Etiquette teaches us to avoid unnecessary offense by the way in which we speak – our manner of speaking. Political correctness tells us what thoughts we are allowed and not allowed to express with our words.

The thought control by means of language control depicted in Orwell’s book is a good illustration of the way political correctness works. It forced people to compartmentalize their thoughts, placing what they knew to be true into one compartment and what they were allowed to think and say in another, and to completely disconnect the two compartments. Political correctness does the same. A newspaper in Sweden, that most politically correct of European countries, recently attributed the difference in height between men and women to discrimination. (8) To come to this ridiculous conclusion they would have had to have placed all that they knew about heredity and biology into one mental compartment and kept that compartment locked and sealed so that there was no risk that anything might get out and conflict with the politically correct assertion that all differences between the sexes, and especially in which males are seen to have the advantage, are caused by discrimination. The result is politically correct but factually nonsensical. Somewhere deep in the bowels of hell Trofim Lysenko is smiling. (9)

Contemporary political correctness is a plant that sprang up from the same root as Communism, the ideology of the ruling party of the Soviet Union, namely the philosophy of nineteenth century philosopher, economist, and sociologist Karl Marx. Marx was a revolutionary who condemned existing societies, particularly the industrial Germany of his own day, as being intrinsically unjust and demanded that they be violently torn down and replaced by what he considered to be a just society. Leninist Communism was orthodox Marxism in that it was materialistic and economically deterministic, regarding culture and religion as merely masks hiding the economic causes that it believed to be the true motivation of all human action. Political correctness, however, developed in Western academia among Marxists who were willing to rethink this premise and attach greater weight to cultural matters. For these neo-Marxists, culture was the battlefield where the revolution would be won or lost.

Symbols are the building blocks of which culture is composed and the medium by which it is transmitted. The foremost set of such symbols are, of course, words and language. Algerian born French philosopher Jacques Derrida understood the significance of this for the revolutionary cause he had taken up in his youth. He accused language, especially Western language, of being structurally unjust. Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss father of the structuralist school of linguistics, had observed that binary opposition, in which white is set against black, left against right, up against down, etc., was fundamental to the structure of Western languages. This binary opposition, according to Derrida, is a form of injustice because the pairs so formed are hierarchical, with one term being “privileged” over and against the other. Light, for example, is privileged over and against dark. He condemned the “metaphysics of presence” and “logocentrism” as being even deeper ways in which the structure of Western thought and language unfairly privileged one thing over another. The former is the idea that a text’s meaning should be accessible to its readers which, in his opinion, unfairly privileged the “presence” of meaning over its “absence.” (10) The latter is the idea, present in Western thought since Plato, that the written word is a symbol twice removed from what it ultimately signifies because it is a symbol that stands for the spoken word, itself a symbol. This, idea, he complained, unjustly privileged the spoken over the written word. (11)

Now if you are like me, your gut reaction when confronted with this sort of thing is to say that’s nice, slice that up, put it between two buttered slices of bread with some cheese, tomato, cucumber and lettuce and you’ve got the makings of a great bologna sandwich. Some people, however, found in Derrida’s theories, just the tool they were looking for to create what we now call political correctness.

By the time Derrida’s most important writings were published and he began to achieve notoriety outside of France, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, various Marxist groups based in academia had long been working to undermine what Antonio Gramsci called “cultural hegemony.” It is a basic natural function of culture to promote and maintain loyalty to the community and society and to normal, balanced, people this is a good thing which serves the good of the whole society. Revolutionaries disagree because they hate society, consider it to be intolerably unjust, and wish to replace it with something else, with them in charge, and anything which promotes loyalty to the society must therefore produce resistance to their designs. Therefore, Gramsci described this natural function of culture in terms of “hegemony”, meaning that the ruling class used it to maintain their power and to oppress others.

Neo-Marxists employed various strategies and tools to undermine “cultural hegemony” in the post-World War II period. One strategy was that which Rudi Dutschke called the “long march through the institutions.” What this basically meant was that Marxists would infiltrate the institutions that generate and transmit culture and use them to promote revolutionary ends. When one considers the number of university professors and other classroom teachers who teach their students that Western civilization is the hateful source of oppression and injustice, the number of which films, television shows, and other expressions of popular culture that teach youth to disrespect and rebel against their parents, churches, and tradition, and the number of clergymen who preach “liberation theology”, “social justice”, and everything under the sun except the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the commandments of God, the Bible, and the orthodox teachings of the Creeds, one has to acknowledge that this strategy has been a smashing success.

During this period of the “long march” neo-Marxists borrowed the theories and technical jargon of the new psychological and behavioural sciences to diagnose Western societies and civilization as being afflicted with various pathological conditions. This was most notably the technique of the “Frankfurt School” in developing its “Critical Theory” of Western civilization and culture. In 1950, for example, Harper & Row of New York released a book, the first of a “Studies in Prejudice” series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, that diagnosed the ordinary, Christian, middle class, father as having, and through his actions reproducing in his children, a fascist personality disorder. (12) The authors of this book were four researchers at the University of California in Berkeley, one of whom was Theodor W. Adorno of the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer, who had been director of the Institute for Social Research before, during, and after its relocation from Frankfurt to Columbia University, contributed the preface. (13) The book’s equation of the personality of the typical, traditional, father with that of the fascist dictator became a familiar meme in pop culture where it can still be found today.

The neo-Marxists’ psychoanalytical diagnosis of Western societies and civilization was facilitated by a set of words that came into general use during this period, some of which were newly coined for this very purpose, others of which had been around for a few centuries but to which new meanings had been attached. These were words like racism(t) and sexism(t). In the dictionary, these words refer to hostile attitudes and behaviour towards other people because of such factors as their race and sex. There are, of course, people whose behaviour matches the dictionary definitions of these words in ways that most people would find morally objectionable. The Left, however, used these terms to describe pathologies that they claimed were inherent in the structure of Western societies, culture, and civilization. These structural pathologies, they claimed, could be seen in the unfair, by which they meant unequal, distribution of social, economic, and political power between races, sexes, and other groups the list of which keeps expanding.

There is an obvious parallel here between this diagnosis of Western societies and Derrida’s theories about the injustice of the structure of Western languages. This parallel leads, as it was intended to lead, to the neo-Marxist technique of altering language to remove its supposed “bias” as a means of combating what the Left considers to be social injustice. The result of this technique is such things as “gender-inclusive” or “gender-neutral” language. The neo-Marxists were in the position to effect such changes due to their infiltration of the institutions of culture in the “long march” and they achieved their greatest success in the institution where their take-over was most complete, i.e., academia.

The new set of terms (racism, sexism, etc.) contributed to the development of political correctness in one other way. In addition to being used by neo-Marxists as psychoanalytical diagnoses of Western societies they are also used by progressives as terms of opprobrium against anyone who dissents from the Whig interpretation of history as applied to the social progress movements of the last two centuries and especially those of the post-World War II era. The “Whig interpretation of history” was a phrase coined by Cambridge University professor and historian, Sir Herbert Butterfield early in his career, to describe the tendency of historians to see events of the past as progress towards the present and to judge historical figures and movements positively if they worked to advance this progression and negatively if they worked to hinder or reverse it. (14) Butterfield, who disagreed with this way of interpreting history, had in mind the historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who saw liberal democracy as the inevitable outcome of historical progress. While most historians have formally repudiated acceptance of the Whig interpretation it survives in an updated form in the current progressive attitude towards the American Civil Rights movement, feminism, the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements, and the gay rights movement. The leading figures of such movements such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela are regarded almost as gods. To criticize them is to call down condemnation upon your own head as is to offer praise to anyone who was on the other side of history, as Trent Lott, then U. S. Senate Majority Leader, discovered when he offered congratulations to former Dixiecrat presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, at the latter’s one-hundredth birthday celebration fourteen years ago.

Political correctness is ultimately a socially destructive force. It takes every category by which different groups within a society can be distinguished from each other, identifies one group within the category as being unfairly privileged and all other groups as being unfairly oppressed, and generates ill-feeling, ill-will, and resentment on the part of the “oppressed” groups towards the “privileged” and vice-versa and among all groups towards the larger society. This, of course, is exactly what the Marxists who invented it intended it to do. Liberals, who quite reasonably think that if racism and sexism are problems that the answer is to promote good relations and understanding between the sexes and between people of different races, naively assume that political correctness is an attempt to do this and this assumption on the part of the liberal West is one of the reasons political correctness has been able to wreak so much havoc.

Liberals of the older, eighteenth to early twentieth century, type of liberalism oppose political correctness because it infringes upon the freedom of thought and freedom of speech of the individual. At its best this libertarian position provides good arguments against the legal enforcement of political correctness in so-called “hate” legislation. At its worst it can lead to the promotion of behaviour and speech that is not merely politically incorrect but which is also downright rude and impolite. The liberal who takes his stand upon the autonomy of the individual will have a difficult time seeing the difference between politeness and political correctness. That is why the classical liberal position, valuable as its arguments are in the fight against legally enforced political correctness, is not the ground we need to stand upon in combating political correctness as a whole. That ground is to be found in the position of the conservative, the spokesman within liberal Western societies, for pre-liberal, pre-modern, traditions and institutions, including and especially, the classical and Christian concept of society as ordered for the good of the whole. For that, and not the autonomy of the individual, is the true target of the politically correct assault upon Western thought, tradition, and language.

(1) This is the Danish prince’s response to Polonius’ question “What do you read, my lord” in Act II, Scene 2.

(2) The word “ticket” comes from the same root.

(3) http://themendenhall.com/2011/01/16/bowdlerizing-huck-aint-a-good-idea/

(4) http://www.wnd.com/2013/09/librarians-confronted-over-ban-on-books/

(5) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/9140869/Dantes-Divine-Comedy-offensive-and-should-be-banned.html

(6) http://www.jta.org/1949/03/27/archive/n-y-board-of-education-urged-to-ban-oliver-twist-merchant-of-venice-as-anti-semitic This link is to a news item from 1949. This predates the current use of the expression “political correctness” but the attempt by Joseph Goldstein to have Oliver Twist removed from the curriculum in New York schools because of its anti-Semitic content is clearly an early example of the phenomenon of political correctness.

(7) Various school divisions in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States have banned such plays as Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew for politically correct reasons.

(8) http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.svt.se%2Fnyheter%2Fvetenskap%2Fdarfor-ar-kvinnor-kortare-an-man&act=url h/t March Richardson of Oz Conservative, http://ozconservative.blogspot.ca/2014/02/discriminatory-for-men-to-be-taller.html

(9) Trofim Lysenko was the Stalin era, Soviet biologist who developed a treatment that strengthened grain so that it could withstand the harsh Siberian winter but who maintained that the treatment would be passed on genetically to the crop produced. He used his influence in the Soviet government to have disagreement with his theories outlawed and to have anyone who dared to point out that Gregor Mendel had debunked the idea of the biological inheritability of acquired traits back in the nineteenth century sent to the Gulag camps.

(10) Imagine what a text written by someone who took that idea seriously and attempted to write in such a way that the presence of meaning was not privileged over its absence would look like. You now have an idea of what Derrida’s writings are like.

(11) This was the subject of his best known work, Of Grammatology, first published in 1967.

(12) Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950).

(13) Horkheimer also co-wrote a forward to the entire Studies in Prejudice series with Samuel H. Flowerman.

(14) Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973, original edition by Bell Books, 1931).

What About the Death Penalty?

When we are first introduced to the character of Sir John Falstaff, Shakespeare’s corpulent, cowardly, and corrupt comic relief of a knight, in Act I, Scene II of King Henry IV, Part 1, he and Prince Hal are trading jests and insults with each other in the prince’s London apartments. In the midst of this light-hearted banter, Falstaff asks the future King Henry V, a serious question.

But, I prithee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king?

Before allowing the prince to answer he goes on to advise the heir apparent:

Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief.

This advice is entirely self-serving, of course. By this point in the scene we already know Falstaff to be one to “take purses” by the “moon and seven stars” and before the scene ends, he will have made arrangements to commit a robbery at Gadshill. The prince , in response to the advice says:

No; thou shalt.

Falstaff takes this to mean that he will be appointed a judge, but the prince quickly corrects him:

Thou judgest false already: I mean, thou shalt have
the hanging of the thieves and so become a rare hangman.

Upon hearing this, the rotund rogue immediately begins to re-evaluate his position on capital punishment.

There are strong arguments both for and against the death penalty and people who have strong opinions on both sides of the debate, hopefully for nobler reasons than Falstaff. I, for one, have held different views on the matter at different times in my life, and am of mixed opinion on it now.

When I was a youth, before I became a believing and practicing Christian, I thought that the anti-death penalty side had the stronger argument. What if the wrong person is convicted and we put an innocent man to death? This, I was convinced, trumped all other arguments.

I still think that this is a strong argument. It was largely because of the wrongful conviction argument that Great Britain abolished the death penalty in 1969, after Sir Ludovic Kennedy published a number of books questioning the guilt of several people who had been convicted in highly publicized cases. The argument is derived, in part, from an ancient ethical principle found in the teachings of both Socrates and Jesus Christ. Socrates, in Plato’s Gorgias, argues that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one. (1) Jesus does not word it this way, but the same basic concept is there in His teachings when He taught His disciples not to seek revenge or to return evil for evil, but to love their enemies, forgive those who sin against them, and to turn the other cheek. If you suffer an injustice, i.e., are wronged by someone else, you may be harmed physically. If you commit an injustice, i.e., wrong someone else, you will , in addition to harming him, harm your own soul. This sound and ancient ethical concept is an essential component of the “wrongful conviction” argument against the death penalty.

The Socratic/Christian ethic, however, does not in and of itself require an anti-death penalty position. When an argument is made for or against a proposition, it can do one of four things. It can prove or disprove the proposition, or it can support or oppose the proposition without proving or disproving it. What makes the difference is the relationship between the argument and the proposition. An argument that proves or disproves a proposition –assuming, of course, that the statements in the argument are true themselves – is related to the proposition in such a way that if the argument is true, the proposition must of necessity be true or, if the argument is negative proof, false. An argument supports a proposition without proving it when it is related to the proposition in such a way that if true the proposition is also likely to be true. Similarly, an argument opposes a proposition without disproving it when the argument, if true, renders the proposition to be unlikely.

The Socratic/Christian idea that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one may make the proposition “we should not have the death penalty” plausible or even likely. Does it make it necessary?

The answer is clearly no. All that necessarily follows from it is the rather basic idea that we should not unjustly impose the death penalty upon someone.

To make the proposition “we should not have the death penalty” necessary, we would have to either a) demonstrate that the death penalty is intrinsically unjust, or b) demonstrate that our having the death penalty would make it inevitable that it would be used unjustly, i.e., against innocent people or people whose crimes did not warrant so high a punishment.

Can we demonstrate that the death penalty is intrinsically unjust?

No, we cannot, for the simple reason that we can prove the exact opposite, that in certain cases the death penalty is the very definition of justice.

Think about it. Let’s say that Joe Jones comes to hate his neighbor Will Wilson. He decides that the world would be better off if Wilson were removed from it and begins to plot his murder. Then one night, he carries out his plan in cold blood, and robs Wilson of his life. He is caught and arrested, brought to trial, and convicted for his crime. What would be a just sentence for such a crime?

The correct answer is that as he robbed a man of his life justice demands that he pay for his crime with his own life.

There are some who would dispute that answer. Their argument can be worded a number of different ways but they are all variations of the idea that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” It is true that two wrongs don’t make a right, but there is a simple reason why this cannot be used as an argument against the justice of the death penalty. It would be a circular argument for it would use that which it is trying to prove – that the death penalty is wrong – as a proof.

One way to try and get around that is to argue that it is always wrong to kill people, under any and all circumstances. This argument has the merit of consistency but it would seem to be made for a different world than the one we live in. If someone attacks you, with the intention of killing you, and the only way to prevent him from doing so is to kill him, is it wrong for you to kill him?

You could, potentially, answer yes on the basis of the concept referred to earlier that it is better to suffer than to commit an injustice. What if, however, it is not your life but the lives of others the attacker is threatening? What if the others who are threatened are people to whom you owe a particular duty of protection – your wife and children, for example?

There are sins of omission as well as sins of commission, and they consist of the failure to do that which one ought to do. It may seem high and noble to take the position that one should never take a life under any circumstances, but if you have the ability to save the lives of others who are dependent upon you by taking the life of someone who is attacking them, then surely it is a sin of omission not to do so. This means, that in these circumstances, it is right and not wrong, to take a life.

Now, showing that it is right in one specific set of circumstances to take a life, does not prove that it is right in another different set of circumstances. Showing that if it is necessary to take the life of an attacker to protect others it is also right to do so does not prove that capital punishment is right. What it does show is that killing is not wrong in all circumstances. If killing is not wrong in all circumstances then the universal, intrinsic, wrongness of killing cannot be used to argue that the death penalty is unjust because it is punishing one wrong with another of the same kind.

Sometimes the objection is made that taking the life of a murderer does not restore the life of his victim. This is a strong argument for those who think of justice primarily or solely in terms of the model of restoration. The flaw in this argument, however, becomes apparent when we take it to its logical conclusion. Is there any kind of penalty for murder that will restore the life of the murder victim? Of course not. Does that mean that murder should go unpunished? Perish the thought!

What this shows us is that justice must involve more than just restoration. The restoration model of justice may be sufficient for crimes involving the theft, damage, or destruction of property but it is completely inadequate for dealing with murder cases.

Justice has been an important subject of philosophical discussion since the days of Socrates and will likely continue to be so until the end of time. Whether we are talking about the way we treat other people, the distribution of common resources or goods, the settling of disputes or the administration of legal justice, the basic idea of justice is that of giving people that which they deserve. People, as members of a society, owe that society obedience to its laws. When someone is accused of breaking the law, it is the job of a judge to hear the accusation and the defense of the accused, in some cases to determine whether the accused is guilty (2), and to give the accused what he deserves – acquittal if innocent, a just sentence if guilty. The standard by which the judge determines what a just sentence is for a particular crime is the law itself.

In civilized countries we recognize that the law itself can be either just or unjust. A law can be judged just or unjust in one of two ways. It can be just or unjust in what it allows or forbids. Or, if it is just in what it allows or forbids, the penalty it prescribes for a particular crime can be just or unjust. It is only the second of these which is pertinent to this discussion.

Is a law that prescribes the death penalty for an offense just or unjust?

If justice means to give to someone what he deserves then clearly the answer to this question depends upon the nature of the offense. If the law prescribes the death penalty for a minor traffic infraction then it is an unjust law. If the law prescribes the death penalty for premeditated murder, on the other hand, then it is difficult to argue that the prescribed penalty is not deserved.

Indeed, by an ancient principle of justice that pops up throughout history in the legal codes of the most civilized societies, the death penalty is exactly what a murderer deserves. That principle is that the punishment ought to fit the crime. This principle has a number of implications. One implication is that the criminal should be forced to pay restitution to his victim when possible. If a man steals, damages, or destroys another person’s property, then he should be forced to return, repair, or replace that property. This is only possible for property crimes in which the injury done to the victim can be undone by restitution. There are other cases in which this is impossible. If a man rapes a woman, he cannot undo the harm he has done her. If a man murders another man he cannot bring him back to life. In these cases there is no restitution that can be made. For crimes like these justice must take the form of retribution. Another implication, of the principle that the punishment ought to fit the crime, is that the punishment a crime deserves is determined by the nature of the injury the victim of the crime suffered. If a man commits murder then the penalty he deserves is the loss of his own life.

If the death penalty is just for murder then it cannot be intrinsically unjust. Therefore, the only remaining argument that can necessitate the position “we should not have the death penalty” is the argument that if we have the death penalty, it will inevitably be used against innocent people. This might seem to be a very easy argument to make. Human beings are fallen, frail, and fallible. To argue from general fallibility for the inevitability of a particular error is not valid reasoning however (3). Furthermore, if it were a valid argument, it would prove too much. For if human error means that the death penalty will inevitably be used against innocent people, it must also mean that any alternative punishment will inevitably be used against innocent people. If this argument is valid against the death penalty, it must therefore be valid against all other penalties as well.

The wrongful conviction argument is therefore, not the infallible argument against the death penalty that I believed it to be at one time. My evaluation of the relative merits of the arguments for and against the death penalty changed when I realized that the arguments used against the death penalty can be used against the very idea of law and order itself. When I realized this, I realized that the death penalty was essential to criminal justice and the rule of law.

I have since encountered other arguments against the death penalty. These are not as strong as the wrongful conviction argument but I will address two of the more common ones. The first is that the death penalty is contrary to the Bible and to the teachings of Jesus Christ. The second is that the death penalty is inconsistent with the prolife position. Both arguments are addressed to specific groups of people – Christians and opponents of abortion – and assume the worldview held by those groups as part of the argument.

The argument that the death penalty is contrary to the Bible and the teachings of Jesus Christ is just plain wrong. Those who argue this most often point to the sixth commandment (4), the Sermon on the Mount and the story of the woman taken in adultery as evidence.

It is difficult to understand how anyone could honestly believe that the sixth commandment – “thou shalt not kill” – forbids the death penalty. This commandment and the other nine are part of a larger legal code. They are first recorded in the Bible in the twentieth chapter of the Book of Exodus. In the next chapter, the death penalty is prescribed for such crimes as murder, assaulting and/or cursing one’s father and mother, and kidnapping.

Now that same chapter, also includes a version of the ancient lex talionis, the standard of justice in which a man receives as punishment the injury he has inflicted upon another. By this standard, murder warrants the death penalty, and “life for life” is in fact the first thing mentioned in the version which appears in Exodus. Jesus is often said to have disagreed with the lex talionis on the basis of His words in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly those recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel, chapter five, verses 38-42. In these verses He says:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

Jesus, however, warned those who heard Him give this Sermon, against interpreting His words as disagreement with the Law of Moses. Verses 17-18 of the same chapter record Him as saying:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

This warning comes just before the part of the Sermon in which Jesus six times introduces a quotation from the Law with “Ye have heard it said” and His own instructions with “But I say unto you”. In some cases, such as the commandments against murder and adultery, there is no apparent contradiction between Jesus’ own instructions and the Law. His instructions take the commandments further and apply them to a person’s inner thoughts and desires as well as to his outward actions. In the case of “an eye for an eye”, however, Jesus’ instructions appear to tell us to do the exact opposite of what the quoted commandment tells us to do. In this context, Jesus’ warning in verses 17-18 clearly means that we are not to think of His instructions as contradicting the Law. How is this possible?

The key to making sense out of all of this is verse 20 “For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven”. Everything that follows - the six “Ye have heard it said…but I say unto you” passages – is an elaboration on this idea that the righteousness which God demands of us is higher than that which the scribes and Pharisees taught out of the Mosaic Law. Therefore, when Jesus tells us to “resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”, He is not contradicting “an eye for an eye” as a standard for courts of law in dispensing criminal justice, but telling us that we are not to follow it as a set of instructions about how to personally behave when someone wrongs us.

The scribes and Pharisees themselves, of course, misinterpreted Jesus’ teachings in the very way He warned against. When they came to Him, in the incident recorded in the eight chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, with a woman who had been caught in the very act of adultery and said “Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?” they did so, because they wanted to trick Jesus into contradicting Moses. To interpret Jesus’ answer “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” as opposition to the death penalty is to take His words as a contradiction of Moses which is to make the same mistake as the Pharisees who asked Him the question in the first place. He was not speaking to legal authorities with the job of enforcing the law and administering justice but to lay religious leaders who had come to Him in bad faith seeking something they could use against Him. His answer did not condemn the Mosaic Law and the death penalty but convicted those men of their sinfulness and self-righteousness.

To regard Jesus as an opponent of the death penalty, one must regard Him as being opposed to the Law of Moses. To do so is to discount everything He Himself said about the Mosaic Law and to take the position of both the Pharisees who condemned Him and the Gnostics, the early heretics who opposed the authority and teachings of His Apostles and demonized the God of the Old Testament.

The argument that capital punishment is inconsistent with a pro-life stance is more defensible than the argument that Jesus opposed the death penalty. The person like Wendell Berry, who opposes both the death penalty and abortion out of respect for human life, can be said to be consistent. Capital punishment does not devalue human life in the way that abortion does, however, at least if it is reserved for the most serious of offenses. When someone is sentenced to die for a murder he has committed he has done something to deserve the sentence he receives. When a foetus is aborted the human life that is terminated has not done anything to warrant death. When a murderer is sentenced to die it is in order that justice be served. When a foetus is aborted it is usually for the convenience of people (5) who want to be sexually active without the responsibility that comes with it.

In fact it can be argued that the death penalty actually upholds respect for the sacredness of human life. If human life is sacred, and someone takes that human life in the act of murder, to insist upon the death penalty is to insist that nothing short of the life of the murderer is sufficient to pay for the crime. For this argument to be valid, however, the death penalty must be reserved for crimes like murder. As Dr. Johnson eloquently put it:

Death is, as one of the ancients observes, to tôn phoberôn phoberôtaton, "of dreadful things the most dreadful"; an evil, beyond which nothing can be threatened by sublunary power, or feared from human enmity or vengeance. This terror should, therefore, be reserved as the last resort of authority, as the strongest and most operative of prohibitory sanctions, and placed before the treasure of life, to guard from invasion what cannot be restored. (6)

Dr. Johnson write those words in the context of an argument against the multiplication of capital crimes, and particularly against the use of the death penalty for property crimes. He went on to write “To equal robbery with murder is to reduce murder to robbery, to confound in common minds the gradations of iniquity, and incite the commission of a greater crime to prevent the detection of a less”. Johnson’s reasoning is sound and so Falstaff’s advice to Prince Hal appears to be sound, albeit for different reasons than those which prompted him to offer it.

In acknowledging this qualification to the justness of the death penalty, that it should be reserved for the most serious of crimes, we find ourselves returning again to that ancient principle of justice – let the punishment fit the crime. For crimes like murder, death is a just punishment. For lesser crimes, it is not. (7)

(1) Jesus Himself was, of course, the victim of the most famous abuse of the death penalty in all of history. He was accused of blasphemy – falsely, because His claim to be God was in fact true. He was tried illegally in the middle of the night, not by the full Sanhedrin, but by a few of His opponents assembled for the purpose of condemning Him at the home of the high priest. He was then brought to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who, although he knew Jesus did not deserve to die, consented to the crucifixion anyway in order to appease the mob. It is interesting to note that as the Christian faith was born out of an unjust execution, so was the Western philosophical tradition. Socrates was falsely accused of rejecting the gods and corrupting the youth of Athens. This accusation appears to have been at least in part politically motivated – it was made shortly after the restoration of the Athenian democracy and Socrates was known to be of aristocratic sympathy. As told by Plato in Apologia Socrates was found guilty by the assembly by a narrow margin. Asked to recommend an alternative punishment to the death penalty the prosecution was asking for, he proposed, instead of banishment as expected, a lifetimes worth of free dining in the best restaurant in Athens. This significantly increased the votes against him when it came to the sentencing. There are some interesting parallels between the deaths of Jesus and Socrates. St. Peter tried to prevent the arrest of Jesus with a sword, only to be stopped by His Master, who submitted to the arrest and to the crucifixion. Socrates refused to allow his friend Crito to break him out of prison the night before his execution. While their reasons were very different – Jesus went to the cross in order to die for the sins of the world, Socrates, at least as he is depicted by Plato in the Crito, refused to escape on the grounds that to do so would be to commit an injustice against the laws of Athens which he felt he owed a debt of obedience to despite his unjust conviction – both men acted in accordance with the belief that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one.

(2) In other cases it is the job of the jury to determine guilt.

(3) Here is how that argument would look expressed as a syllogism:
A. All human beings sometimes make mistakes.
B. The judges who hear capital cases are human beings.
Therefore:
C. A judge hearing a capital case will sometimes sentence an innocent person to die.
The conclusion C. does not logically follow from the premises. All that can be proven from the premises is that judges, as human beings, sometimes make mistakes, not that they will necessarily make a specific mistake.

(4) Or the fifth commandment if you go by the Roman Catholic and Lutheran system of numbering the commandments.

(5) Only a small percentage of abortions take place in the extreme situations pro-choice activists like to focus on in their arguments.

(6) Samuel Johnson, The Rambler,114, April 20, 1751.

(7) The question of whether or not government as it presently exists, i.e, the modern, progressive, egalitarian, democratic, bureaucratic nanny-state, is fit to administer the death sentence is another question entirely. The answer, unfortunately is no.

A Matter of Honour

In William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing Don Pedro, the prince of Aragon, arranges the marriage of his friend Count Claudio to Hero, who is the daughter of their host, Leonato, governor of Messina. Things would have gone smoothly, and thus have been far too uninteresting to put into a play, were it not for the actions of the prince’s illegitimate brother John. Don John, who is bitter at the world and takes delight in ruining the joy of others, plots against the happiness of the couple. With the help of his attendant Borachio, he arranges it so that Don Pedro and Claudio witness what appears to be a secret tryst between Hero and a lover at Hero’s window after midnight on the night prior to her marriage. Fooled by these machinations, Claudio denounces Hero at the altar with the support of Don Pedro and Don John, then marches out of the church.

As this play is a comedy not a tragedy it all works out in the end, but in the immediate aftermath Hero faints, her cousin Beatrice assumes she is dead, and the devastated Leonato, who has believed the accusations declares:

O Fate! take not away thy heavy hand.
Death is the fairest cover for her shame
That may be wish'd for. (Act IV, Scene 1)

In recent weeks the newspapers have been full of stories about people who obviously agree with Leonato’s sentiments but who have presumptuously assumed to themselves the role that Leonato assigned to fate. On June 15th of this year, Muhammed and Waqas Parvez pled guilty to the murder of Aqsa Parvez, who was daughter of the Muhammed and sister of Waqas. The murder had taken place in December of 2007 in Mississauga, Ontario. The reason, according to the murderers who had turned themselves in, was that she had brought dishonour upon the family by refusing to wear the hijab.

The murder of Aqsa Parvez was an unjustifiable atrocity and has been rightly condemned by virtually everybody who has commented on it. Perhaps, however, we should reflect upon the question of why this murder is so repulsive to us? Is it because our sense of justice is affronted by the idea that a trivial offense like immodesty would receive so disproportionate a penalty as death? Is it because the thought of a father and brother killing a daughter and sister offends our concept of how family members are to love and act towards one another?

Or is it because we as a society have lost all sense of honour and shame and are simply incapable of understanding those who still hold to those concepts, albeit in a warped and twisted form?

How exactly does our modern, liberal, society compare to societies whose culture encourages such things as honour killings? Do we murder our own children less often or more than they do? When we do so, do we at least do so for better reasons than they do, or for worse?

According to Statistics Canada there were 105,535 abortions in our country in 2002, 103,768 in 2003, and 91,377 in 2006. The numbers for 2006 are incomplete, as Thaddeus M. Baklinski reported for Lifesite last year. The numbers for BC, New Brunswick, and Manitoba were for one reason or another left out of the national total. (http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/aug/09082607.html)

In contrast, the United Nations in 2000 estimated the total number of honour killings per year to be around 5000.

Phyllis Chesler argues convincingly, in an article entitled “Worldwide Trends in Honor Killings” which can be found in the Spring 2010 issue of the Middle East Quarterly, that these numbers too, are far too low. However, even if we were to quadruple the UN’s numbers, the total number of honour killings in the world each year would still be less than a quarter of the total number of abortions in Canada alone.

Well, alright, but that’s just numbers, you may say. At least we aren’t barbarically killing the female members of our families to satisfy some outmoded sense of honour.

That is true. Instead of killing those who, however trivially, have done something to shame us, we murder our unborn children to satisfy our own selfishness. We have abandoned our traditional culture, values, and morality, which taught us to behave responsibly and with self-control, to honour the rules of our society, and to at least pretend to virtue even if we do not possess it. In the place of this traditional culture, we have adopted a modern liberal culture of individualistic self-indulgence. We are taught, not to control our sensual desires, but to give in to them, to let them dominate us. If doing so results in pregnancies that we are not willing to take responsibility for, we are told that the solution is abortion.

Who are the barbarians again?

Do not misunderstand me. Our crimes do not excuse the crimes of others, and killing a family member to preserve the families honour, is both a crime and a perversion of the concept of honour.

However, much of the commentary on these recent “honour killings”, even by many who call themselves “conservatives”, has taken the unfortunate form of “look how superior our modern, liberal culture is to these backwards traditional cultures who still believe in honour”.

Those holding such a viewpoint consider “honour” to be a thing of the past, something appropriate to feudal society, but which has been rendered obsolete by modern advancements in democracy, law, and recognition of human rights.

They are sorely mistaken. Society cannot outgrow the need for honour and its opposite which is shame. Human beings, being by nature social, do not live in isolation from each other, but in communities, in societies. To interact socially requires a common set of rules that is understood by everybody. Some of these rules are so important they are codified into law and enforced by the state. These are the rules against criminal behavior, i.e., behavior that harms others, their property, or society itself. Other rules do not properly fall within the jurisdiction of the state but are as essential to the functioning of society as laws. These rules, which include most traditional rules regarding modesty, sexuality, etc., are enforced by society through honour and shame.

Honour is notoriously difficult to define. It occupies the space between character and reputation. Character is the actual makeup of your heart and soul, your virtues and vices. Reputation is how your character is perceived by other people. Honour is related to both, but not quite identical with either. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle declares honour to be the reward society bestows upon virtue. A functional society will bestow honour upon individuals and families who display virtue, and will bestow shame upon those who display vice. Honour and shame affect standing in society and so people are encouraged to protect their, and their family’s, honour, by either cultivating, or at least pretending to virtue.

In the absence of honour, society’s only means of maintaining social control, is through the law. If the law seeks to enforce the rules that should be enforced through honour/shame you end up with an oppressive political and legal system. If the rules are abandoned altogether you get the kind of moral chaos that allows people to kill the unborn children who are inconvenient to their pursuit of sensual pleasure and consider themselves morally superior for doing so.

Traditionally, there is a time and a place, for wielding the sword in defense of honour. A soldier fighting for the honour of his country in warfare is one example. A man fighting a duel in defense of his own honour, or that of a lady, is another. In the one case the sword is used against the enemy’s of one’s country. In the other case it is used against one who has insulted one’s own, or a lady’s, honour.

The traditional culture we abandoned to embrace liberal modernism encouraged fathers and brothers to defend the honour of female family members by challenging those who insulted them, and forcing those who had wronged them to do right by them. It did not tell them to defend the family’s honour by turning the sword on female family members who shamed the family.

You do not wield the sword against your own family members to defend the family’s honour. To do so is murder, which is crime, rightly punishable under Law, by the Crown. Crime is a subcategory of vice, and the reward of vice is not honour, but shame.

So-called “honour killers” in murdering their family members, bring far more shame upon their families, than the women they kill did by the actions which provoked the “honour killing”. In this way “honour killing” is a perversion of honour.

Which, however, is the greater perversion? Honour killing? Or abandoning honour and virtue and morality altogether for a self-serving hedonism that allows one to murder one’s own unborn children in service of one’s selfish pursuit of pleasure?