Brian Pallister Removes All Doubt

There is an old saw that goes “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.   It has been attributed to pretty much everyone with a reputation for folksy wisdom of this sort from the last millennium or so, and is sometimes ascribed to sources of ancient wisdom such as Confucius.   Indeed, it could be taken as a rough paraphrase of Proverbs 17:28.    Homer, when confronted with it in an early episode of The Simpsons, promptly set about illustrating it.  Internally, he asked himself “What does that mean?  Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid”, and then blurted out “Takes one to know one”, after which his inner voice applauds this supposedly witty comeback.  Brian Pallister, premier of my province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, is either unfamiliar with the adage or he has decided to follow in the footsteps of Homer Simpson.

 

On Tuesday, the day his public health mandarin Roussin informed us that he would finally be lifting the vile and absurd requirement that we gag and muzzle ourselves with face diapers in indoor public places which tyrannical order ought never to have been imposed on us in the first place, Pallister ensured that this news would be overshadowed by issuing a poorly worded apology for his remarks of the seventh of July. 

 

In those remarks for which he apologized, he had not said anything bad about anyone – except the Marxist terrorist mob that had vandalized the statues of Canada’s founding and reigning monarchs on Dominion Day and who deserved his rebuke.   Nor had he said anything that could be reasonably interpreted as justifying historical wrongs that had been done to anyone.   Note the adverb “reasonably”.   The interpretations of the nitwits and nincompoops whose thinking has been perverted and corrupted by being infected with the academic Marxist virus of Critical Race Theory, a pathogen far more deadly and dangerous than the bat flu, don’t count.   His comments were entirely positive and affirming, but because they were positive and affirming about the people who settled and built Canada, that is to say the very people whom the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoists wish to erase from history, they were met with outrage and outcry on the part of the same.

 

In other words he had said nothing for which he owed anyone an apology.   Indeed, he owed it to Canada and to all patriotic Canadians regardless of their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, not to apologize for his remarks.   This is because to give in to the demand that he apologize for his remarks of the seventh of July is apologize for the very existence of Canada.    Canada owes nobody an apology for her existence.   Academic Marxists who think otherwise, and the far too many who speak for them in government and in the media, need to be slapped down hard, not coddled with apologies intended to appease.

 

Astonishingly, for someone who gives the impression of being a man who is quite proud of the fact that his only ethics are those acquired in the schoolyard, Pallister would appear to have forgotten one of the most basic lessons of the same – bullies cannot be appeased.   Bullies feed off of the weakness of their prey.  By appeasing them, people merely announce their own weakness and let the bullies know where their next meal can be found.  

 

Surely Pallister must realize that those who have been demanding that he grovel and eat his innocuous words spoken in defence of the people who built this country are bullies.   What other word could better describe those who make such irrational demands knowing that they can count on the Crown broadcaster, the “paper of record”, and most of the other public opinion-generating media to back them up, with nary a word of dissent?

 

Therefore, Pallister should have known that there was no apology that he could make that would have satisfied these wolves.   The fact that he has spent the last year and a half throwing his weight around, telling Manitobans they cannot meet with their friends in either public places or their own homes, blaming Manitobans for when his own draconian policies failed to produce the desired effect of a drop in bat flu cases, berating and insulting the few of us who dared stand up for our constitutional rights and freedoms, and trying to blackmail us all into agreeing to take a hastily prepared, experimental new medical treatment, might help explain why he failed to grasp this.   Having enjoyed playing the bully himself for so long he forgot what to do when on the receiving end of bullying.  

 

In this situation, offering an apology of any sort, was the worst thing Pallister could have done.     The people demanding that he apologize are not interested in receiving an apology from him, sincere or otherwise.   They want to remove him from office and replace him with the one man in Manitoba who would have handled the situation of the last year and a half worse than he.    Whereas the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is supposed to be to hold the government accountable to the elected assembly for its actions and to speak out when the government abuses its power, Wab Kinew, the leader of the provincial socialists, has spent the pandemic, not calling Pallister out for how his actions have trampled the most basic constitutional rights and freedoms of Manitobans, destroyed businesses and livelihoods, and done tremendous harm to our mental, social, and overall wellbeing, but saying that he should have locked us down harder, faster, and kept us in lockdown longer.   When groups who have been speaking out about how our rights and especially our religious freedoms were endangered by the lockdown measures met with one of Pallister’s minister’s to express their concerns, Kinew condemned the government for agreeing to meet with them and hear their point of view.    Those who want this man to become our next premier, either can see nothing wrong with a government strategy of closing all businesses and paying people to stay home for the duration of a pandemic, or don’t care about his policies and want him in power for no reason other than his race, while accusing those of us who do very much see something wrong with his political philosophy and strategy of being racists for opposing him.

 

If we limit the options to those of which Pallister is capable, the best thing he could have done would have been to follow the advice of the old saying with which we opened this essay.   That was more or less what he had been doing for the previous few weeks and it had been working fairly well.   The media was running out of things to say about his remarks and would eventually have moved on to something new, whereas Manitobans were given a respite from having to see his face on the news every day.    It was a win for everybody!

 

If, however, we expand our options to include what Pallister might have done had he been a different person with a better character, the best thing he could have done would have been the following.   

 

He would have held another press conference in which he flat out refused to apologize for his comments.   He would have said that his words had been directed towards the mob of Maoist radicals who attacked Canada, her constitution and institutions, and her founders and history in their criminal and terrorist acts on her national holiday.   He would have then pointed out, correctly, that throughout history, any time a mob like this has been allowed to get its way it has turned out very, very, bad for everybody, and that therefore this sort of thing must not be tolerated but rather nipped in the bud.    He would then have reiterated his comments and insisted, quite rightly, that Canada owes nobody an apology for her founding, history, and very existence as a country.

 

He would then have directly addressed the media and the phoniness of their manufactured moral outrage.   He would have pointed out that they themselves carried the lion’s share of the blame for stirring up the Marxist mob whose actions he had rightly condemned.   They had completely abandoned even the pretense of journalistic ethics, integrity, and responsibility when they spun the discovery of graves on the sites of the Indian Residential Schools into a web of exaggerations and outright lies about murdered children (1) which has incited not only the aforementioned mob actions but the largest wave of hate crimes this country has ever seen.

 

Finally, he would have addressed the Indian chiefs who took offense at his remarks – note the distinction the late Sir Roger Scruton liked to make between “taking” and “giving” offense – and issued rude and arrogant demands for his resignation in which they insulted and demonized other Canadians in a most racist manner.   He would have told them that if they persist in their crummy attitude then they can take it and their “reconciliation” and stick these where the sun don’t shine, to which location he would be happy to provide directions.

 

Of course, the Brian Pallister who would have done this would have had to have been a very different and very better Brian Pallister than the one we actually have.   The same would have to be true of the Brian Pallister who would sincerely apologize to those whom he actually owes an apology – all Manitobans, of all races, cultures, and creeds – for the way he has bullied us all with his lockdowns, masks and other such draconian nonsense.

 

(1)   That thousands of graves could be found on these sites has never been a secret.   The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discussed these at length in the fourth volume of its final report.  They are not “mass graves” – the media falsely labelled them such and the bands that had announced the finding of the graves corrected them and while the media  eventually switched to talking about “unmarked graves” they issued no retractions.   “Unmarked” refers to their present condition, it does not mean they were always unmarked.   The TRC Report says that graves in the Residential School cemeteries were usually marked with wooden crosses.   Students were not the only ones buried in these cemeteries – school staff were buried there as well, and often the school shared the cemetery of the church to which it was related and the nearest community.   There is no reason to think that the graves contain murdered children.   No bodies have been exhumed, no autopsies conducted, and the TRC Report itself indicates that disease was the cause of most of the deaths of children buried in the school cemeteries, tuberculosis alone accounting for almost half.   The huge gulf between what the actual known facts are and the narrative imposed over the facts by the media, arises entirely out of the anti-Canada, anti-Christian, hatred and malice of the latter. 

Death and Doctors

Human fertilization occurs when the two human gametes, the sperm provided by the male and the egg provided by the female, combine to form a zygote.   The gametes, formed by the process known as meiosis, are haploid, which means that they each possess half of a full set of human chromosomes.   The zygote is diploid, which means that it possesses a full set of human chromosomes, half from the sperm, half from the egg.   With the formation of the zygote, the process whereby it grows through the ordinary cell replication known as mitosis into a multi-celled embryo and then a foetus, begins.    What this demonstrates is that a) the zygote is alive and b) it is human, therefore c) it is already a human life.    The ethical implication of this is that the deliberate termination of a pregnancy, unless it can be shown to fall into any of the recognized categories of justifiable homicide, such as self-defence against criminal assault or in execution of the sentence of a court of law after a conviction, following due process, for a capital crime, is an unjustifiable homicide, or, to use the plain English word for this, a murder.

This fact was recognized by Canadian law until relatively recently.   It was Pierre Trudeau, who after contributing to the overthrow of the traditional Roman Catholic cultural establishment of his home province in his career as a Communist propagandist in the 1950s was brought into the Liberal Party at the Dominion level by Lester Pearson in the 1960s and groomed to be Pearson’s successor as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister which he became in 1968, who changed this.    In 1969, Trudeau altered the Criminal Code to allow for abortions in cases where three physicians would attest that the pregnancy was endangering the life of the mother.    This, however, was small potatoes, compared to the effect of his addition of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the constitution in 1982.   This gave the Supreme Court of Canada powers similar to those of the American Supreme Court.   The consequence was that in 1988, the Supreme Court struck all remaining laws against abortion from the books, telling Parliament that it would have to pass new legislation restricting abortion that would conform to the Court’s interpretation of the Charter, which Parliament has failed to do to this day. 

Now, as bad as Pierre Trudeau’s role in creating this unprincipled exception whereby the protection of the rule of law against murder is withheld from the most vulnerable undoubtedly was, it was not exactly out of character for him either in his role of Communist radical or his role of sleazy, dirtbag, politician.   The same cannot be said for those who have the task of doing the dirty work of abortion – the physicians.   The first principle of the ethics that supposedly binds the medical profession is primum non nocere – first do no harm.    The deliberate termination of life is a fairly obvious and extreme violation of that principle. (1)   Yet abortion is not the only procedure in Canada today in which those who have sworn the oath attributed to Hippocrates of Kos intentionally put an end to human lives.

 

Physician-assisted suicide was against the law in Canada until very recently.    In was only in 2014 that the province of Lower Canada became the first to pass “right-to-die” legislation.   In February of the following year the Supreme Court gave its Carter ruling on the constitutionality of the law against physician-assisted suicide.   In the Morgentaler decision in 1988 in which the abortion laws were struck down, the Court had invited Parliament to pass new legislation that would restrict abortion without violating the Charter, which they never did.   In the Carter decision in 2015, the Court gave Parliament one year in which to fix the existing law before it was struck down absolutely.   Not only did Parliament fail to do this, but in passing Bill C-14 the following year, it legalized the procedure and, under certain circumstances, allowed for physicians to go even further than what the word “assisted” implies.  

 

The old expression for this sort of thing, where a physician kills or helps to commit suicide, a patient who is suffering from an incurable condition that causes excruciating pain, was "mercy killing".   This has long gone out of style, since its supporters are squeamish about acknowledging the reality that it involves "killing".   It was replaced years ago with the neologism euthanasia, formed from the Greek words for “good” and “death.”  Euthanasia is an example of a euphemism, a word with which it shares a component part.   Euphemism combines the word for "good" with the word for "talk" or "speech" and refers to inoffensive or at least less offensive words used as substitutes for more offensive ones.    George and Sheila Grant wrote an excellent essay about the euphemistic language of euthanasia - not just the term itself but the accompanying rhetoric such as "death with dignity" and "quality of life" - that first appeared in Care for the Dying and Bereaved, edited by Ian Gentles and published by the Anglican Book Centre in 1976, and which was subsequently republished as the second last chapter of Grant's Technology and Justice published by Anansi in 1986.   The Grants focused on the language surrounding the practice because they believed, rightly, that confusion with regards to terminology was creating confusion in the public debate about the issue.   They made this important distinction:

 

It must be forcefully stressed that the proper refusal to prolong inevitable death is quite different from deliberately causing the death of someone who is not already dying.  Only the latter is euthanasia.

 

Confusion over this point, they maintained, was what was generating sympathy for the practice:

 

If the public rightly disapproves of the abuse of technology on the dying, yet wrongly identifies euthanasia with letting the dying die, then our attitude to euthanasia inevitably becomes more positive.

 

Imagine what they would have said could they have seen ahead to 2020 in which physician-assisted suicide was embraced while letting the dying die was condemned to the point that it was deemed necessary to take away everybody's most basic rights and freedoms in order to prevent the latter from happening.   Actually, maybe we don't need to imagine.   Here is the concluding paragraph of their essay:

 

The three ideas which have been discussed - "death with dignity" and human autonomy, the distinction between "persons" and "non-persons", and "quality of life" judgements - all have something in common.   They are all used dogmatically, leading to great confidence in our right to control human life.  These are areas where the great religious tradition at its best has been restrained by agnosticism and a sense of the transcendent mystery.  Some believers have tried to combine these two views of life in a crudely simplistic manner.  They have identified the freedoms technology gives us with the freedom given by truth.  The result in the public world, if policy flowed from this identification, would be the destruction of cherished political freedoms.

 

Although decades have passed since the Grants warned us about where the paths of abortion and euthanasia were leading us, decades in which we, ignoring those warnings, proceeded down those paths at an accelerating pace, never have their words been more timely.

 

Today, the battle, for many of the sane remnant who think that an MD should not be regarded as the real life equivalent of a Double-O designation with a licence to kill in one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, has shifted from protecting human lives from the threats of abortion and euthanasia, to protecting the rights of physicians to refrain from performing or taking part in these gruesome slaughters against their consciences.    This is unfortunate, because it sends the message of a retreat from, if not a concession to, the advancing foe, but it cannot, perhaps, be helped due to the many indications we have seen over the last decade or so that toleration of dissent to abortion and euthanasia within the medical profession is shrinking and short-lived.    In Upper Canada, for example, there is a requirement that physicians who do not want to take part in an assisted-suicide provide an “effective referral”.   If you don’t know what that means, think of the episode of the Simpsons where Homer comes up with a scheme to gain a whole lot of extra weight to qualify as clinically obese so he can work from home.   When Lisa tells him that “any doctor” would tell him that obesity is unhealthy, he says “well, we’ll just see about that little miss smart guy” and goes to see his family physician Dr. Hibbert.   Dr. Hibbert says “My God, that’s monstrous!  I’ve never heard of anything so negligent.  I’ll have no part of it”.   Homer, unperturbed, asks “Can you recommend a doctor who will?”  Dr. Hibbert replies “yes” and the next thing you know Homer is seeing Dr. Nick, who after his usual greeting of “Hi everybody”  tells Homer “Now there are many options available for dangerously underweight individuals like yourself.   I recommend a slow, steady, gorging process combined with assal horizontology…You’ll want to focus on the neglected food groups, such as the whipped group, the congealed group and the chocotastic.”   The point, before I end up quoting the entire episode, is that Dr. Hibbert performed an “effective referral”.  

 

Last November, the National Post’s Barbara Kay, writing for The Post Millennial, informed us about the case of Rafael Zaki, a young man who had been a student at the College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba here in Winnipeg.   He had written an essay against abortion for his Sunday School - he is a devout Christian of the ancient Coptic communion whose parents came to Canada fleeing religious persecution.   He posted the essay to Facebook, which prompted a number of anonymous complaints to the school.   The school investigated and, in Kay's words, this "led directly to a remediation process, during which Zaki was summoned to seven meetings with Dr. Ira Ripstein, the Max Rady College of Medicine associate dean for undergraduate medical education".   Kay's description of this "remediation process"  confirms what I assumed upon reading that expression - that it was euphemistic for the kind of nasty Communist official intimidation and reeducation process that hides behind the smiley-face of fake, outer "niceness" that evokes the image of Dolores Umbridge, the authoritarian bureaucratic educator from the Harry Potter books and which is ubiquitous on campuses all across Canada.   Kay drew the parallel with what had happened to Lindsey Sheppard at Wilfred Laurier University four years ago.   Although Zaki wrote letters of apology for giving offence - he should have refused to do so and read what the late Sir Roger Scruton had to say about the difference between giving and taking offence - this was not good enough for Ripstein because he, that is Zaki, did not recant of his views.   He was expelled from the College, appealed, and, despite any number of policy violations, procedural irregularities, and such, on the part of the school on top of the blatant injustice of it all, his appeal was turned down.   He has filed an application to have a real court, the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench, conduct a judicial review, although he was denied an injunction staying the expulsion until the outcome could be determined.   Kay's focus in her commentary on this entire episode is on the growth of a totalitarian climate on the campuses of academe, suppressing freedom of thought in what until recently was considered to be its bastion.   The story, which does indeed, illustrate this well, also tells us that in at least one College of Medicine, the next step in the corruption of the medical profession has begun, the weeding out of dissenters to abortion and euthanasia before they can be licensed, so as to eventually produce a profession monolithic in its support of this blatant repudiation of basic medical ethics.  

 

The high esteem in which the medical profession is held has long brought to its members temporal rewards both social, in the form of respectability, and pecuniary in the form of very comfortable salaries.   Society has bestowed this esteem upon this profession based upon its image of learning put to the service of mankind in the alleviation of suffering, promotion of good health, and sustaining of life through the treatment of injury and disease.   That the putting to death of the vulnerable at both ends of life, the unborn in the womb on the one hand and the aged and the infirm on the other, is now also a part of this profession clashes with this image.   That the majority of the profession see no fundamental contradiction here is good cause for us to stop blindly trusting these overpaid rectal orifices, when they tell us that we must sacrifice our rights, freedoms, social lives, communities, jobs, and businesses in order to “save lives.”

 

(1)   This is obvious in any language, but interestingly to say “first do not kill” in Latin you would say primum non necare.   The second conjugation nocere – to injure, harm – and the first conjugation necare – to kill are both derived from a common root, believed to be the word for death in Proto Indo European, also the source of the cognate words nasyati, which means “perish” in Sanskrit and nekros which means “corpse” in Greek.

The Bogeyman

A few years ago, when the progressive commentariat was going on and on about the evils of “homophobia”, before that became old hat and they turned to the new bugbear of “transphobia”, there was a man who happened to catch the end of one of their sermonettes warning about homophobes.   Now this fellow was a little hard of hearing and he mistook the word for “homophones”.   Consequently, he began avoiding the dance hall like the plague.   He didn’t want to run in to the Boogie Man.

 

Now that you are all groaning over that exceedingly dreadful double-pun, allow me to say a few words about the Bogeyman.  

 

The Bogeyman is a figure who has appeared, under one name or another, in pretty much all of the world’s folklore, in all places and all times.   He can be regarded, in a sense, as the standard to which all other legendary spooky monsters are to be compared.  The details about his nature and appearance vary considerably, except in that they are usually quite vague, much more so than is the case with most other legendary beings.   It is the purpose he serves that is consistent.   He serves as a warning to children against bad behaviour.   Behave yourselves or the Bogeyman will get you.   In the cultural traditions in which Saint Nicholas or whoever else has been assigned the role of bringing gifts to the good children around Christmas time is accompanied by someone whose job it is to deal with the other kids, that someone – Black Pete, the Krampus, Knecht Ruprecht, whoever – is essentially a Bogeyman, certainly in function, often in description as well.

 

While frightening children into good behaviour is the primary and universal purpose of the Bogeyman, a notable secondary purpose for his legend can be found in the song “The Booger Man” which is the second track on the 1989 studio album, I Never Made a Record I Didn’t Like, by the “Clown Prince of Country Music”, Ray Stevens.   The song, co-written by Stevens and his longtime friend and song-writing collaborator, C. W. “Buddy” Kalb, the alternate spelling in the title of which reflects a Southern regional variation rather than the reference to mucus that would probably be the first thing it brings to mind for most others, involves a narrator boasting about how he is not afraid of a long list of monsters, movie and otherwise, all of whom he dismisses as nothing in comparison to the Booger Man, who “don’t need no other makeup/no fancy Hollywood name/his mangled bloody victims/are his only claim to fame.”   Towards the end of the song, it is revealed that the narrator is a young man, parked with his date in Lovers’ Lane.   “Listen, did I hear some scratchin’, outside your side of the car?”

 

There are those these days who object on moral grounds to telling children scary stories to frighten them out of misbehaving.   I am not going to pass judgment on this one way or another, and bring it up merely to note the irony that these are often the same people who buy completely into stories that are clearly designed to frighten the entire populace, adult and child alike, into obeying some set of, usually ridiculous, new rules.

 

That there is nothing sadder than an adult terrified of the Bogeyman was well illustrated by The Simpsons in an early episode.   The tenth episode of the fifth season was entitled “$pringfield (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling), in which Mr. Burns builds a casino and Marge becomes addicted to the slot machines.   Since Marge is now spending all of her time in the casino, Homer is the only one home one night, when Lisa, woken by a nightmare, wakes him up and tells him “I know its absurd, but I dreamed the Bogeyman was after me” at which she is interrupted by a screaming Homer “Aaarggh.   Bogeyman!   You nail the windows shut, I’ll get the gun.”   Homer then wakes Bart, saying “Bart, I don’t want to alarm you, but there may be a Bogeyman or Bogeymen in the house.”   When Marge finally returns home, a gun shot blows a hole in the door of the house, which, when she opens, she finds it barricaded with Homer, hiding behind a mattress with the kids, aiming his shotgun at her.  “What happened here?” she asks, to be told “Oh nothing Marge, just a little incident involving the Bogeyman.  Of course, none of this would have happened if you had been here to keep me from acting stupid.”

 

A truly pathetic number of adults have been behaving just like Homer this year.   Just last week, Donald the Orange, was asked by both his opponent in the televised popularity contest by which our American friends and neighbours foolishly choose their head of state rather than rely on the time-tested, God-honoured, tradition of royal lineage, and by debate moderator Chris Wallace, to denounce the Bogeyman.   Granted, they called the Bogeyman “white supremacism”, but actual white supremacists have not posed a real threat to law, order, civilization, rights, and freedoms, anywhere in the Western world for decades now.   White supremacism is now merely another name for the Bogeyman.  Donald the Orange did not, contrary to the lying left-wing newsmedia, refuse to make the worthless ritual denunciation.  He has, in fact, gone through with this stupid ritual many times in the past, and agreed to do so this time as well.  He asked for specific names, and all he was given was the Proud Boys, a multi-racial organization this is not, and never has been, white supremacist.   By contrast with the lies told by CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and even liberal newspapers and the Crown broadcaster up here, it was Joe Biden who refused to make a denunciation.   Except that in his case he was asked to denounce a real, present day, menace, Antifa, the well-organized groups of mask-wearing, far-left, thugs who have been going around beating people up, shutting down events and speeches they disapprove of, and terrorizing university administrators and hotel managers into giving in to their demands for years now, and this year, have been aiding and abetting Black Lives Matter, in their spree of looting, vandalism, violence, and destruction.   Indeed, rather than denounce these bastards, Biden denied their existence, saying that “Antifa is an idea not an organization.”   No, Mr. Biden, despite what you and that wretched, vile and contemptible nincompoop Christopher Wray have to say, the burning cities and toppled statues, all across the United States and the larger Western world, demonstrate Antifa to be an extremely real threat, unlike the Bogeyman of white supremacism you keep going on about.

 

Of course the biggest Bogeyman of this year has not been white supremacism but SARS-CoV-2.   This coronavirus produces mild to no symptoms in over 80% of those who come in contact with it.   It can produce the very painful and potentially fatal form of pneumonia dubbed SARS when the first coronavirus to produce it made its appearance twenty years ago, but for people who are under 65 and have no complicating chronic health problems, the survival rate is well over 99 percent.   Even for those who are at a higher risk, their chances of surviving are still pretty good, even more so now than in March and April when the virus was first making the rounds of the world, after escaping the confines of Wuhan.  Back in March, when the World Health Organization pressed the panic button, and governments around the planet took the unprecedented and insane step of shutting down their economies and ordering their entire populations, healthy or sick, into quarantine, we were seeing a rise both in the number of people testing positive for the presence of this virus, and in the number of people experiencing symptoms ranging from cough and shortness of breath to full-blown, death-dealing, SARS.   We have again this fall, seen a rise in the number of people testing positive, which, plotted on a graph, looks very similar to the one we saw in late winter-early spring.   We have not been seeing a similar rise in the number of people hospitalized and dying.   Indeed, plotted on the same kind of graph, the hospitalization/death numbers appear as a flat-to-declining line from the beginning of summer onward.

 

Sane, grown-up, people will recognize that if there is no drastic rise in people getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying, then the rise in the number of people testing positive is no cause for alarm.   Viruses have been present with us since the beginning of time and will be with us until the end of time.  To lock ourselves away in our houses, refuse all contact with other people, and worse, to demand that other people be forced to do the same, is to behave out of irrational fear, to be frightened, as it were, by the Bogeyman.  

 

The media is intentionally trying to frighten us in this way.   Note how they are constantly reporting about the “alarming” rise in the numbers of those who test positive.   As Karen Selick pointed out in The Western Standard about a week ago, this number is meaningless when it is not presented as a percentage of tests given.   The number of tests given has been going up steadily and is much higher now than it was back in March and April.    To emphasize only the number of new “cases” – or, more precisely, new “positive results”, for the tests give false positives all the time – without also emphasizing that they are out of a much larger number of tests being given, and that the number of people getting sick, requiring hospitalization, and dying of SARS has not been commensurately rising, but, indeed, has been remaining steady and even declining, is to engage in dishonest scare-mongering.

The “Wizard’s First Rule” in Terry Goodkind’s novel of that title, the first in his Sword of Truth series and the last in the same series worth reading, is “people are stupid” and we have certainly been living down to that this year.   Despite everything pointed out in the previous paragraph, we have been putting up with our governments’ responding to the rise in numbers by slapping more restrictions down on us, and even calling upon them to do so.   Here in the Province of Manitoba, we are now in the second week of a four-week period of heightened restrictions in Winnipeg and the surrounding region, that Dr. Brent Roussin, the public health officer who has given every evidence of having gone mad from the dictatorial-level powers given him during this scam of a health emergency, slapped down on us a couple of Fridays ago, to start from last Monday.   Earlier in the week in which he announced this, Roussin was publicly pressured to do this by Brian Bowman, the clown of a mayor that this city elected, and re-elected, although about the only thing that can be said in his favour is that he is a look-alike of television actor Jon Cryer, and even then I would have preferred Charlie Sheen any day.   Among the new restrictions a return to the limiting of gatherings to ten or under, and a new mandatory mask policy for all public indoor places.

 

The mask policy is especially indicative of the infantile, afraid of the Bogeyman, mentality that has infected the thinking of our adult populace.   The pores of cloth masks are 200+ times larger than the virions of SARS-CoV-2.   Anybody with an ounce of logic and who is willing to actually use it, ought to be able to deduce from this that the virus will have no difficulty passing through these masks.   Youtube videos, showing that cloth masks can lessen the spread of visible particles, hardly constitute proof to the contrary, at least to anyone aware that viruses are too small to be visible to the naked eye apart from very powerful magnifiers.   Nor do scientific research studies purporting to show that masks are effective at reducing COVID-19 transmission constitute such proof.   There is no dearth of such studies demonstrating the exact opposite, and these are more consistent with logic.   While I reject the modern consensus that logic and science trump tradition and divine revelation, I will say that between the two former, logic trumps science, and that thinking otherwise is the ultimate formula for allowing oneself to be duped.

 

The mandate to wear masks everywhere is essentially a mandate to wear a talisman, a magic symbol to ward off the Bogeyman.   It is very ironic, therefore, that in the popular culture of recent years, the Bogeyman has been the mask wearer.

 

Think back to the film that launched the plethora of serialized slasher-film franchises that glutted the cinema in the 1980s.  In 1978, John Carpenter co-wrote, directed, and composed the music for the film Halloween.   At the beginning of this film, the six-year old Michael Myers – the character’s name, not to be confused with the actor who portrayed Wayne, Shrek, and Austin Powers – wearing a Halloween costume, complete with mask, stabs his older sister to death.   The film then jumps ahead fifteen years to when Michael, who has spent the whole time in a mental hospital under the care of Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) (1), escapes and makes his way to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, stealing a bleached Captain Kirk mask on the way.   From behind that mask, he stalks teenage girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her debut role).   He kills a number of her friends, one of whom calls Laurie at the home where she is babysitting on Halloween night just before Michael gets her.   She, rather foolishly, heads over there and comes face-to-mask with Michael.   In the confrontation, she manages to pull his mask off, but would undoubtedly have been killed then and there, had Dr. Loomis not entered at that moment and emptied his revolver into Michael, knocking him from the hall to the bedroom, out the picture window, and over the balcony to the ground below.   Laurie turns to the psychiatrist and asks “was that the Bogeyman?”   “As a matter of fact, it was” he answers, finding confirmation when he steps out onto the balcony, looks down, and finds that Michael has disappeared.

 

To John Carpenter, the Bogeyman was the one in the mask.   Does this tell us anything about the multitude of dolts today, cowering away in fear behind their masks, hoping that they will save them from the Bogeyman?

(1)   In case this sort of thing interests anyone, Donald Pleasence is the one-person connection between Michael Myers the character and Mike Myers the actor.   Long before taking on the role of Dr. Samuel Loomis, which he would continue to portray in the Halloween franchise through several sequels, he was one of the actors to portray James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who, prior to this Christopher Walz’s performance in SPECTRE and the upcoming No Time To Die, had never been portrayed by the same actor twice), and the first to portray him as anything other than a shadow, seen only from behind, stroking a cat.   Pleasence’s version of the character, from 1967’s You Only Live Twice, is the direct basis of the look of Mike Myer’s character Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers trilogy.

Scriptural Truth, The Equality of the Sexes, and “History’s Greatest Monster”

Suppose someone were to tell you that the idea that men ought to love their wives is archaic, out-of-date, and offensive and that moreover it was invented by women in a bygone age in order to make their men into slaves and that it needs to be done away with in our more highly enlightened era. Would you not think this person to be stark, raving, mad and furthermore be justified in so thinking?

Let us suppose that the person making this novel argument against the uxorial right to husbandly affection professes to be a Christian. You make the observation that “husbands, love your wives” is backed by divine authority, being an injunction written to the church of Ephesus by the Apostle Paul in inspired writ. Would you consider his exegesis to be sound if he replied that this verse was the product of the selfsame gynocratic culture that he has been decrying and that it is in no way binding on Christians today?

You, dear reader, knowing the Scriptures would undoubtedly raise in objection to this singular interpretation the fact that the Apostolic injunction is grounded in a metaphorical application of the relationship between a husband and wife to that of Christ and His church and therefore cannot be simply dismissed by an appeal to the so-called cultural argument. The New Testament commandment to husbands together with accompanying reasoned explanation reads in whole as follows:

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; (Eph. 5:25-33a)

The chances are, of course, quite slim, that you will ever find yourself in discussion with anyone who maintains that the Apostle’s commandment to husbands to love their wives is cultural and non-binding. I suspect, however, that you have probably encountered more than one person who insists that the parallel instructions to wives from the same passage be interpreted this way. The final verse of the passage quoted above, concludes with “and the wife see that she reverence her husband” and immediately prior to that passage we find the following addressed to wives:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (Eph. 5:22-24)

As you can see, the Apostle grounds his instructions to wives in the same metaphorical likening of the relationship between a husband and wife to that between Christ and his church that his commandment to husbands is based upon. There is no honest, consistent, and logical way to say that the one commandment (to husbands) is an enduring and binding edict that stands for all time whereas the other (to wives) is a product of first century culture that can be set aside for our own day. Yet this is precisely what many do with these texts.

The reason for this is because the instructions to wives contain an element that clashes with an idea that is considered very important in the culture of the present day. It declares the role of husband to be an office of authority and the relationship of marriage to be a hierarchical relationship. The culture of the Western world in the present day has been permeated by the modern ideology of liberalism to the point that its ideals are widely regarded as so self-evidently true as to be beyond reasonable question. One such ideal is that of the equality of the sexes. This is an ideal that does not harmonize well with Ephesians 5:22-24 or, for that matter, the similar instructions given in Col. 3:18 and 1 Peter 3:1-7 or the instructions to Timothy, Titus, and the Corinthian church that restrict women from certain authoritative teaching offices.

The question, therefore, for those of us who claim Christianity as our faith and therefore profess to regard the Holy Scriptures as authoritative sacred writ, inspired by God Himself, is do we subject the ideals of the present day to the judgement of the Scriptures or do we do it the other way around.

One person who has chosen the latter path is James Earl Carter Jr., who served as 39th President of the United States of America from 1977 to 1981, and who was amusingly described by a member of an angry mob in an episode of the Simpsons as “history’s greatest monster”. Seventeen years ago, Carter decided to secede from the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination in which he had been raised, in which he had served as a Sunday School teacher, and which had provided him with the “born again Christian” credentials he used to his advantage in his gubernatorial and presidential election campaigns. He objected to the SBC’s decision to take a step away from sliding into the abyss of the unbelief of liberalism by affirming a conservative view of Scriptural authority. He especially objected to their affirmation of the abiding authority of the above discussed verses. Nine years later he wrote an article explaining his decision, entitled “Losing My Religion for Equality” that was published in the Australian newspaper The Age in July of 2009 but which has recently resurfaced from the obscurity it deserves to once again poison the minds of gullible people.

The article is neither inspired nor insightful, consisting mostly of a psittacine recital of tired out liberal and feminist talking points, each of which has been soundly rebutted a thousand times over. Even the title is, except for the last two words, second-hand, having been borrowed from that of the song that had become R.E.M.’s biggest hit – eighteen years previously. Carter writes:

During the years of the early Christian church women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets. It wasn't until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy.

This view of church history sounds like it was lifted from the rants of a Dan Brown villain – presumably from Sir Ian McKellen’s portrayal of such in the film version of The Da Vinci Code that was released three years prior to the article as it is highly dubious that Carter possesses the literacy necessary to have made it through the novel. At any rate it is pure nonsense. The fourth is the century in which Emperor Constantine, inspired by a dream, won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge under a standard bearing the symbol ☧ (Chi Rho – the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek), converted to Christianity, legalized the faith, and called the patriarchs and other bishops of the church to the first post-New Testament general council (the First Council of Nicaea of 325 AD). Towards the end of the century the Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of Rome. This century has long been pointed to by those who wish to resurrect the heresies that plagued the church in the early centuries as the point when the church abandoned a supposedly pristine and pure primitive Christianity for an adulterated pagan version. It is particularly reviled by those who reject the Trinity and the hypostatic union of perfect deity and perfect humanity in the Person of Jesus Christ. It is only by pointing to the Gnostics and other heretical sects who denied these doctrines, the rebuttal of whose false teachings occupies much of the writings of the second and third century Fathers, and who were formally condemned by the church in the Nicene and subsequent councils, and by regarding these rather than the orthodox as the “real Christians” that this myth of an early church full of female priests and bishops can be maintained. To hold to this perspective consistently, one also has to reject the authority of the Apostolic writings traditionally considered to be Holy Scripture by orthodox Christianity, i.e., the New Testament, for it is the earliest manifestation of these heresies combatted by the early church fathers and condemned in the early church councils that was the doctrine held by those that St. John called “antichrists” in his epistles.

Such a rejection of the authority of the New Testament can, in fact, be found in Jimmy Carter’s screed. He makes it absolutely clear that when Scriptural authority and truth come into conflict with the liberal spirit of the age, he sides with the latter over the former.

Carter says, for example:

The carefully selected verses found in the Holy Scriptures to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place - and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence - than eternal truths.

By saying that these verses – rather than an interpretation of them with which he disagrees – are the product of the time and place in which they were written and that they are an expression of the selfish wish of male leaders to “hold on to their influence” rather than eternal truth – he is denying their divine inspiration. He thus testifies to his holding to the view that the Scriptures contain the Word of God – or that they “become” the Word of God when we experience God through them – but that they are not themselves the Word of God. This is called the “neo-orthodox” view of the Scriptures, but the term is a misnomer for this is not a form of orthodoxy. The orthodox doctrine of Christianity is that the Holy Scriptures are the written Word of God which bears authoritative witness to the living Word of God, Jesus Christ.

Carter rejects the orthodox view of the Scriptures because he has weighed them in the balance of the modern liberal idea of the equality of the sexes found them to be wanting. By doing so, however, he has been applying an unjust measure.

Equality means sameness. It is used in political philosophy to refer to the idea that people are all basically the same and that they ought to be the same in terms of status, power, and wealth. Egalitarianism is immature to the point of being infantile – an unworthy elevation of the toddler’s cry “Johnny’s piece of pie is bigger than mine!” into something that passes for an intellectually respectable political position. Its appeal is to human vice – specifically to the vice of envy, of looking to others and hating them for what they have that one does not have oneself. It is the wellspring of the evil of violent revolution.

The egalitarianism of our age is a form of idolatry – not in the literal sense, of awarding a wood or stone representation of a pagan deity the honour and worship due to the true and living God but in the extended, philosophical sense of the substitution of a counterfeit or lesser good for a true or higher good. In this case equality has been swapped for the good that has been recognized since ancient times under the name justice. Justice is the state of being and acting rightly in accordance with divine, natural, and civil law. Unlike equality, justice recognizes the legitimacy of hierarchy, of differences between people, and of differences both in degree and kind between our relationships with other people, and the obligations it places upon us differ accordingly. Justice is a far more difficult and exacting standard than equality, which is perhaps why our lazy and decadent age, has turned to the latter.

Men and women, as everyone who is not a total moron knows, are not the same. They both belong to the species Homo sapiens to be sure, and there are many ways of the ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, one nose variety, in which they are alike. Traditionally, orthodox Christianity has acknowledged other, less trivial, ways in which they are the same. Men and women are alike created in the image of God, alike fallen into sin and exiled from Paradise, alike loved by God and through faith share alike in the redemption provided by God through Jesus Christ. In these senses men and women could be said to be equal and it is in the last mentioned of these senses that Galatians 3:28 – written by the same man who wrote most of the verses that Jimmy Carter objects to - declares there to be “neither male nor female” in Christ. In other ways, men and women are very different, and until very recently, our societies and traditional religions, took those differences into consideration in the roles assigned to the two sexes. We never came close to achieving actual justice, of course, but the rise of sexual egalitarianism was not a step towards this ideal but rather away from it.

One of the biggest differences between the sexes is natural and biological – women conceive, carry developing foeti in their wombs for nine months, give birth, and then nourish young infants with their milk. Nature has placed no similar burden upon men. The traditional way in which human societies dealt with this was to acknowledge the difference and to compel men to protect and provide for the women they impregnate and the children they sire. Indeed, human societies traditionally inspired men to do all sorts of unpleasant things, from working at backbreaking labour from sunup to sundown to going into battle to fight and die, with the motivation that they were doing all this as a duty owed to their wives and children. Need we look further for evidence of the insanity of liberal egalitarianism than to the fact that it seriously maintains that such societies were organized for the oppression of women and preservation of a male monopoly on power? Those who make the equality of the sexes their goal, have a very different approach to this natural difference between men and women. It is to assert the right of women to terminate their pregnancies.

This is a matter on which Jimmy Carter has long sat on the fence. Having courted the evangelical vote throughout his political career, he never endorsed the “abortion on demand” pro-choice position of the typical liberal Democrat and has at times criticized his own party for its position, seemingly trying to move it closer towards the pro-life position. In the article we are discussing, however, he used language that sounds very much like that of the pro-choice movement. More recently he told the Huffington Post that Jesus would approve of abortion in cases of rape or incest. It was inevitable that someone who has worshipped at the shrine of the equality of the sexes would eventually come around to endorsing abortion to some degree for that idol is the equivalent in our day of the Moloch of the Old Testament.

In the same interview Carter said that Jesus would approve of same-sex marriage, providing further testimony that when he speaks of “Jesus” he is not talking about the Jesus of orthodox Christianity. In this we can see the idea of the equality of the sexes taken to its logical conclusion. If the sexes are equal they are the same and interchangeable, and if that is the case, there can be no reasonable objection to a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman. If there are to be no distinct roles for men and women, there is no barrier to a man being another man’s wife, or a woman being another woman’s husband. For that matter, if the sexes truly are equal and therefore interchangeable, there is no barrier to a man being a woman or a woman being a man. Those who still believe in traditional, man-woman, marriage, and can see the gender insanity that has swept North America in the last couple of years for the madness it is, should think twice about jumping aboard Jimmy Carter’s “equality of the sexes” train for that is the vehicle that has led us to this terminus.

Climbing aboard that train is not an option for orthodox Christians of any denomination. We are to evaluate the ideals of our culture by the truths of the Holy Scriptures and not the other way around. We are not to be like King Jehoiakim of Judah, cutting out parts of the Scriptures we don’t like and burning them. We cannot have Galatians 3:28 without 1 Timothy 2:9-15. If husbands are to love their wives, wives must submit to their husbands. If in our doctrine we reject the authority of fathers/husbands for the sake of equality, we will find that authority not so easy to undermine. Children will continue to look to their fathers for the leadership and direction that God has appointed them to provide, and if men are driven from the pews by these feminist attacks on the role of father and husband from the pulpit, the children will follow them out, a fact to which the rapidly shrinking and aging congregations of the churches that have gone this route bears testimony. Look to their example and be warned.

Hic et Ille VI

A Correction

In my essay of March 30th, on the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada I declared that anything less than wholehearted support for the institution of royal monarchy ought to disqualify anyone from running as a candidate for the Conservative Party, much less for the party’s leadership. On those grounds I said that Erin O’Toole ought to be ruled out. This was based upon a survey of the prospective Conservative leaders done by the blogger A Kisagari Colour of the blog Maple Monarchists who had reported, on March 3rd, that O’Toole “has refused to answer my question regarding the monarchy.” On the ninth of this month, Maple Monarchists posted a second entry on O’Toole. It turns out that he had been given several policy questions at once and that his collective response was one of “While I don't have these detailed policy positions right now, I am working on it... I intend to release my policy proposals in the near future.” Commenting on this, A Kisagari Colour says “in hindsight 'refusal' was too strong of a word to have used” and quotes a statement Mr. O’Toole has given to the Monarchist League of Canada, expressing his “steadfast support for the monarchy as a foundational element of our parliamentary democracy and a positive force in our society” and outlining his past track record of support for the institution. Welcome back to the race, Mr. O’Toole!


Common Sense from Kellie Leitch

Kellie Leitch, one of the other candidates for the Conservative leadership, sent out an e-mail on April 22nd with the subject line “a common sense approach to immigration” and the content of the message lives up to this. She talks about a visit she made to Emerson, the border town in my home province of Manitoba that has been deluged with illegal aliens crossing over from the United States since the Trump administration introduced its highly sensible immigration/refugee policies a couple of months ago. While the pinheaded dolt who to the great misfortune of our Dominion has been put in charge of Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa has refused to talk to the people of Emerson whose lives he is ruining with his bloody “compassion” and his damned obnoxious and obscene “welcoming” attitude towards anyone and everyone who self-identifies as an “asylum seeker”, Leitch did so talk to them and stated the following:

Throughout this campaign I have been clear:
• I will ensure that every immigrant, refugee, and visitor to Canada receives an interview with a trained immigration officer

• I will ensure they are screened for their agreement for Canadian values before they are admitted to the country

• I will ensure that illegal border crossers are detained, questioned, and returned to the United States

• I will ensure that any city that declares itself a sanctuary does not receive federal funding for transportation

While this still leaves much to be desired it is by far the most sensible position on these matters that a major Canadian political leader has taken in the last twenty years.

Common Sense From Andrew Scheer

Andrew Scheer, as noted in my essay on the Conservative leadership race, has taken a particularly strong stand for the monarchy for which he ought to be commended. Now, in his bid for the Conservative leadership, he has also proposed measures to combat the Social Justice Warriors who harass, bully, and intimidate officials on the campuses of our universities into cancelling events and banning speakers with whom they disagree. Pointing to incidents such as the harassment of the University of Toronto’s Professor Jordan Peterson and the cancelling of pro-life meetings at Wilfred Laurier, Scheer has called on the government to withhold federal funding from any university that gives in to this kind of bullying and refuses to protect freedom of speech. This proposal is long overdue and it is greatly to the credit of Scheer that he has put it forward, just as it is to his credit that he has fought for freedom of speech in Parliament against the draconian thought control bills of the present Liberal government.

If there are any who question why it is laudable in a prospective Conservative leader that he be a strong and consistent advocate of a liberal doctrine like freedom of speech the answer is that while classical liberals may have been the first to formulate the idea of free speech it is an idea to which all people who genuinely believe the creeds they profess can subscribe. The person who believes his creed is the person who believes it to be true and truth is what it is independently of whether a single soul believes it. While there is danger in error to the minds, hearts and souls of those it misleads error can pose no threat of harm to truth itself. Truth, therefore, rather than suppression, is the answer to error. Whether you are a Tory like myself, who believes in Christian orthodoxy, in time-tested ways, in ancient institutions like royal monarchy, and in his country or some left-wing radical who believes in socialism, feminism, egalitarianism, anthropogenic global warming and other such asinine drivel you testify best to your confidence in the truth of your creed by responding to those who disagree with you with persuasion rather than suppression. Those who seek to suppress views they do not like testify only to their own lack of faith in their supposed convictions.

Liberals may have been the first to formulate this idea, but today they are the ones who seek to abridge the freedom of speech of others. Eleven years ago Sir Peregrine Worsthorne memorably noted that “with remarkable rapidity, from a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people, liberalism has become a doctrine designed to put it back again.” Nowhere is this more evident that when it comes to freedom of speech and what this tells us is that liberalism is a creed that has run its course, which everybody is now required to pay lip service to, although no one really believes it anymore.

SJWs Lampooned by The Simpsons

In a recent episode of the long-running television cartoon The Simpsons the kind of campus bullies referred to in the previous segment were brilliantly and hilariously lampooned. At one time, successful satire required quite a bit of exaggeration. Those days are behind us now for there is very little exaggeration in this.

Yet Another Big Leap Downwards

The Whiteoak Brothers is, in order of publication, the thirteenth in Mazo de la Roche’s series of novels chronicling the lives of the Whiteoak family of Jalna manor in rural Ontario. Set in the year 1923 it is the sixth in the series by order of internal chronology. In the sixteenth chapter of the novel, Wakefield Whiteoak, the youngest of the family’s third generation, is placed under the tutorage of the Reverend Mr. Fennell, the rector of the Anglican parish church that had been built by his grandfather Captain Whiteoak. He was unable to attend regular classes due to a diagnosis of a weak heart and had previously been taught by his older sister Meg, who now found him too much of a handful. In their first session with the vicar they discuss Wakefield’s grandmother, who is approaching her centennial, causing the rector to speculate:

“If you live to her age, I wonder what sort of world this will be. The year 2013—hm.”

We, of course, do not need to engage in such speculation as we are now living in the second year beyond the annum specified. I suspect that if a vision of the present day had been given to a clergyman ninety years ago he would have been horrified at what he saw. A great many changes have occurred since 1923 and, indeed, since 1953, the year the words quoted above saw print for the first time. They have almost all been for the worse, but that goes without saying as the vast majority of all change – a good 99.99% at least – is always for the worse.

Some of these changes have been specific to Canada, rendering our country virtually unrecognizable as the same Dominion in which the Jalna saga is set, and in which de la Roche, who died in 1961, lived all her life. We are coming up close, for example, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Pearson Liberals’ changing of our national flag from the Canadian Red Ensign to the Maple Leaf, which, despite Allan Levine’s recent remarks to the contrary in the opinion pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, was an attack on our country’s British heritage, and a slap in the face of all the Canadian veterans who fought under the Red Ensign in our country’s finest moment when we stood with Britain against the Axis powers from the beginning of the Second World War.

Other changes, however, have been part of a wave of change that has swept Western civilization as a whole. There are many factors that contributed to bringing about this wave of change. One of these was the drawing to an end of the Modern Age, itself brought about by the triumph of liberalism, the moving and energizing spirit of the Modern Age, which had more or less completed all of its original goals by the middle of the twentieth century (and had also seen its claims to be able to provide a better and brighter future for man aptly refuted and debunked by the two World Wars, the rise of a whole new scale of tyranny made possible by modernity in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the invention of the atomic bomb). Another factor was cultural Marxism, i.e., the infiltration and takeover of the political, social, academic, cultural, and other institutions of Western civilization by those who were intent upon redirecting these institutions towards the subversion of the civilization and ordered societies they comprise.

This wave of change has not yet ebbed out or shown any indication that it will do so within the foreseeable future. Instead, it has swept away yet another remnant of what used to be our civilization, as the Supreme Court of Canada, yesterday, in a unanimous decision, struck down the law against assisted suicide. Their ruling, in a case brought before them by the BC Civil Liberties Association, was that the law violated the worthless appendage to our constitution that Pierre Trudeau tacked on when he had it repatriated in 1982. Last year, Steven Fletcher, the MP for Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia here in Winnipeg had introduced bills that would have legalized assisted suicide in certain circumstances. It is expected that Parliament will pass new laws to replace the ones struck down. If the present government’s track record is anything to go by I would not anticipate any improvement. In December of 2013 the Supreme Court struck down our laws against prostitution and the present government replaced them with a horrible new unjust law based on a bill passed by the rabidly egalitarian, socialist, and feminist government of Sweden in 1999.

There is a great deal of muddled thinking about assisted suicide today. Suicide means the deliberate taking of positive action towards ending one’s life. The person who knowingly ingests cyanide is committing suicide, the person who refuses treatment that will prolong his life, is not. It needs to be clear that to prohibit assisted suicide does not mean that people should be forced to go on life support, to take chemotherapy, or undergo any other potentially life-extending treatment. The question of assisted suicide is not even a question of whether a person has the right to take his own life or not, although the assertion that he does ought be challenged because it is itself a manifestation of an idea that is far too uncritically accepted today, namely the autonomy of the individual and his absolute right to do whatever he wills provided that others are not adversely affected It is a question of whether he has the right to involve other people in the deliberate termination of his life. This is a question to which the answer ought to be a resounding no. Of course nobody should have the right to place the burden of terminating his life on another person’s shoulders.

Allowing assisted suicide is the first step down a slippery slope. The next step is allowing doctors to decide to terminate the lives of people who cannot make the decision to terminate their lives for themselves. Make no mistake – this next step will follow the first one. For decades now, the kind of people who have been making radical changes have been pooh-poohing everyone who has warned about a slippery slope, and each time we ended up sliding down that slope. The justices of the Supreme Court of Canada must be frothing-at-the-mouth mad to think it wise or right to start the ball rolling on giving physicians, a notoriously arrogant class of people who have great difficulty with differentiating or distinguishing between themselves and God, the power of life and death. Apart from the matter of their inflated egos, physicians are required to swear a solemn oath that includes a pledge to do no harm. Terminating someone’s life is the ultimate in harmdoing. The physician willing to assist in suicide, therefore, is an oathbreaker, and hence somebody who should not be trusted, and certainly not trusted with power over whether people live or die.

Years ago, the television cartoon The Simpsons ran an episode in which Homer Simpson was put in a coma by an exploding beer can in an April Fool’s joke gone wrong. Mr. Burns, complaining of the hospital bills his company’s insurance was having to cover, brought in Dr. Nick Riviera who looked at Homer and concluded “Oh dear, I can find no signs of life. Just to be safe, we’d better pull the plug”. At the time this was brilliant satire. Now, thanks to our satire-killing Supreme Court, it seems more like a dark foreshadowing of things to come.

It would be nice to think that those who we send to Parliament to write Her Majesty’s laws for us will find away of rescuing us from the goofy decision by the clowns on the bench to allow the medical profession to decide whether we live or die. I wouldn’t wager a plugged nickel on that happening, though. I’m afraid things are only going to progress from here in the more honest meaning of the word progress, i.e., get worse.