Hate and Hypocrisy

Just before Parliament adjourned for the summer, David Lametti,  who has been the Minister of Justice and Attorney General ever since his predecessor Jody Wilson-Raybould was shifted to Veteran Affairs after she refused to cave to pressure to improperly intervene in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin, introduced a truly odious piece of legislation in the House of Commons.    If Bill C-10, which the Liberals rushed through the House and is currently on hold for the summer in the Senate, which would give the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regulatory oversight over social media similar to that it exercises over traditional broadcasting, is a threat to Canadians’ freedoms of thought, conscience, expression and speech, and it is, Bill C-36 is much worse.    Bill C-36 aims to undo the efforts of those who fought long and hard for the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.   Section 13, which was included in the CHRA in 1977 because grievance groups had complained to the first Trudeau government that it was too difficult to silence their enemies using the hate propaganda provisions that had been added to the Criminal Code in 1971 since these required that the accused be given due process, defined it as an act of discrimination to communicate via the telephone – or any electronic communications after an amendment in 2001 – anything “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of membership in a group protected against discrimination, a definition so broad as to make anyone who said anything negative about members of such groups susceptible to a complaint from which there was, in practice, no defense, where the complainant had no liability for false or mischievous prosecution and was not held to the reasonable doubt standard of proof, which could potentially result in crippling fines and other penalties completely inappropriate for something that is supposedly remedial civil law.    This repulsive statute was the textbook example of bad law.   Up until the final complaint made under it, during the hearings over which it finally came under intense public scrutiny, no defendant had ever won.   Lametti’s Bill C-36, if passed, would reintroduce a clause to the CHRA defining certain types of speech as defamatory.   The new “hate speech” provision would define hate differently than Section 13 did prior to its repeal passing Parliament in 2013.   The government seems to be relying upon this to sell the idea that this new law will not have all the problems that Section 13 had.   According to Lametti, “simple expressions of dislike or disdain that pepper everyday discourse, especially online” will not fall under the new “hate speech” provision, only speech that “is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals”.    This is disingenuous, however, because it is the words “likely to” which occur in the new provision as they did in Section 13, which make the law so subjective, that anything anyone chooses to take offence to could potentially be ruled “hate speech”.   Indeed, Bill C-36 would actually create something worse than Section 13, because the new provision would make offenders liable to up to $50 000 in fines, which is five times higher than the already absurdly high maximum fine under Section 13.   Even worse, it would allow people to go to court, say that they are afraid they are going to be made the target of online “hate speech” by such-and-such a person, and have a “peace bond” issued against this person, who has not yet committed any offence.

 

The Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, whose admirers and detractors sometimes call him by the insulting epithet of Justin Trudeau, has made no secret of his intention to pass a bill of this sort ever since he first took office six years ago.   This is yet another demonstration of his utter contempt for the rights and freedoms of Canadians, due process, and the entire traditional concept of limits and restraints on government power that prevent the government from being able to just do whatever it wants.    The Liberals argue that this sort of thing is necessary on the grounds that the internet is full of “hate” from which “vulnerable groups” need protection.   The further left parties, such as the NDP, say the same thing, only louder and with far less concern for keeping their rhetoric within the boundaries of what is sane and civil.   Resistance to this line of thinking from the Conservatives in Opposition has been pathetic to the point of being virtually non-existent.   Early in June, the Prime Minister and Jimmy Dhaliwal, the clown who leads the NDP and performs under the stage name of Jagmeet Singh, jumped all over an incident in London, Upper Canada, where the driver of a pickup truck had run down a Muslim family as they were waiting to cross at an intersection, and seized the opportunity to condemn “Islamophobia” while pointing to the incident as illustrating the need for strict new “hate” laws, although little in the way of evidence that the driver had been motivated by “hate” was presented to the public.

 

Later in June we saw the beginning of the longest string of hate-motivated crimes in Canadian history, one which is still ongoing.   Lest you think that this is evidence which supports the Liberals’ claim that we need “hate” legislation, understand that although these crimes involve actual violent and destructive behaviour rather than merely words posted on the internet, they are not the sort of hate that the Liberals and other progressives say they are determined to eradicate.   This is because those perpetrating these crimes are targeting people that progressives have no interest in protecting from the hatred of others.  Indeed, several progressives have openly egged the perpetrators of these crimes on.

 

In less than a month, the buildings of approximately  twenty parishes, mostly of the Roman Catholic Communion, but also a few that were Anglican, at least one Lutheran and United, and a handful belonging to such sects as the Christian and Missionary Alliance and Baptists were set on fire and in several cases burned to the ground.  About thirty others have been vandalized in other ways, such as being splattered with red paint.

 

Imagine if this had been done to a single synagogue, mosque, Buddhist or Hindu temple.   Captain Airhead would have immediately called a press conference and there would have been no stop to his hand-wringing, weeping crocodile tears, and lecturing all the rest of us who have never worn blackface once, let alone on at least three separate occupations of which there is photographic and video evidence, about how we need to be more enlightened, tolerant, loving of diversity, and less prejudiced and bigoted, from that day to this.    Jimmy Dhaliwal would have commenced riding around the ring on his unicycle, honking his nose, and angrily berating Canadians, especially white Christians, about how such-and-such a group doesn’t feel safe in Canada.

 

That is not what happened with this ongoing series of attacks, which are obviously motivated by religious hatred, hatred of the Christian faith and religion in general, and of the Roman Catholic Communion in particular.

 

Captain Airhead, instead of issuing a denunciation of these anti-Catholic, anti-Christian acts of terrorism on the day they started, delayed commenting for over a week, and then, while he opened his remarks by acknowledging that burning church buildings was “unacceptable and wrong”, soon after shifted gears and made a lengthy statement that sounded more like an expression of sympathy for the vandals and arsonists, than a condemnation of their crimes.    If any other religion were being subjected to this sort of attack, do you think he would be talking about how the “anger” towards that religion was “understandable”?

 

As for Jimmy Dhaliwal, if he has issued even the anemic, “this is not the way forward”, type of denunciation that Captain Airhead has, I have not been able to locate it.   He is probably too busy spraying people with seltzer water from his lapel flower, climbing out of tiny cars, and trying to make balloon animals. 

 

Although Dhaliwal has not said anything about the church arsons that I have been able to find, members of his party, at least on the provincial level, have openly sided with the arsonists..    South African born Rima Berns-McGown, for example, who represents the constituency of Beaches-East York in the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada, tweeted her “solidarity with Harsha Walia”.   Walia is the far left activist who became executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association last year and who tweeted a link to an article about the burning of Catholic churches in BC to which she added the words “burn it all down” and later justified this remark by saying that it was “a call to dismantle all structures of violence, including the state, settler-colonialism, empire, the border., etc.” as if this sort of revolutionary Maoism which has never had any but massively evil consequences whenever and wherever it has been put into practice anywhere in the world, somehow made the remark better, instead of, as is the actual reality, much, much worse.   Although in the absence of any official statement from the NDP or its leaders at either the Dominion or provincial levels it would be going too far, perhaps, to say that Berns-McGown was speaking for the party in expressing solidarity with the activist and her violent, incendiary, revolutionary rhetoric, neither the leaders not the other members in general have shown much interest in putting any distance between themselves and their party on the one hand and her remarks on the other.

 

Other Liberals, such as the close friend of Captain Airhead’s who, in order to avoid calling the so-and-so by my own first name, I borrow a joke from The Simpsons and call Seymour Butts, have parroted their leader’s remarks about this Christophobic violence being wrong but “understandable”.

 

As hypocritical as it is for progressives, whether of the liberal or openly radical socialist variety, to demand that “hate”, even when merely in the form of words, against certain groups be punished to the limit, while excusing or even in some cases cheering on hate against other groups, this hypocrisy is hardly surprising.    The left has actively and aggressively promoted Christophobic hatred for a long time.    They have also been actively and aggressively promoting anti-white racial hatred.   Most recently, progressive politicians and their allies in the academe and the media – this includes the vast majority of professors and journalists – have been promoting both kinds of hatred simultaneously, by spinning a few half-truths, many outright lies, and a sea of conjecture, into a disgusting false narrative regarding the Indian Residential Schools.    This narrative is the pretext for the church burnings.  

 

Interestingly, although those fabricating this narrative have incorporated as much anti-white racial bigotry into it as they have Christophobia, the church buildings that have been attacked have conspicuously included a large number belonging to parishes that are not white.   The first Roman Catholic buildings to burn and many of those that have since been set aflame, belong to Native Indian parishes.   The House of Prayer Alliance that saw its building was set on fire on the fourth of July in Calgary had two congregations, one Filipino, the other Vietnamese.   All Nations Full Gospel which was vandalized by paint in the same city has a predominantly African congregation   This does not make these crimes worse than if all the parishes targeted had mostly white congregations, of course, but it shows just how intense the hatred of Christianity on the left is that the burning of church buildings the congregations of which consist of racial and ethnic groups who if targeted in any other way would have provoked an avalanche of outcries and denunciations from progressives has been met instead with the sort of response discussed above.

 

All of this talk about how the anger behind these attacks is understandable needs to cease immediately.    It is empty sentiment.   Taken literally, the statement that anger is “understandable” means that the reasons behind it are capable of being comprehended, which, unless we are talking about a kind of rage that is irrational, psychotic, and detached from any cause outside the angry individual’s own mind, is a truism.   This, of course, is not what those who are talking this way mean by it.   What they mean is that in their judgement the anger is partially or entirely just and that they sympathize with it.    Expressions of this nature are entirely inappropriate in the context of addressing a spree of violent crimes motivated by hatred of a religion. 

 

Can you imagine Captain Airhead saying “this is not helpful, but your anger is understandable” in response to somebody painting a swastika on the wall of a synagogue or an insulting depiction of Muhammed on the door of a mosque?

 

For the same reason such words would be unthinkable in those scenarios they ought to be unacceptable here.   They are also unacceptable in that they indicate an uncritical acceptance of the media’s defamatory spin on the discovery of a large number of graves near former Indian Residential Schools, which spin is at best indicative of a media that has completely abandoned journalistic standards, integrity, and responsibility and at worst of a media with deliberate intent to deceive, defame, and incite Christophobic, anti-white, and anti-Canadian hatred.

 

People who talk and behave like Captain Airhead and other progressives have no business lecturing the rest of us about “hate” or trying to pass laws that are an affront to due process and the freedoms of conscience and speech in an attempt to stamp “hate” out.

 

 

The Kangaroo Court is Now in Session

The sixth of June is the anniversary of D-Day, the day, in 1944, when the Allied forces landed on the beach of Normandy and launched the offensive that would liberate Occupied Europe from the forces of Nazi Germany.  This year, on that date, something happened in the Upper Canadian city of London, which the government of the Dominion has declared to be an attack of an entirely different sort.  That evening a family was waiting to cross at an intersection, when a pickup truck ran into them.   One was killed on the spot, three later succumbed to the injuries they had sustained, a fifth was wounded but not fatally.

 

This would be a horrible occurrence, of course, under any circumstances.  It appears, however, that this was not just some terrible mishap where the driver lost control of his truck.  It seems to have been deliberate.    If this is indeed the case that makes it much worse because a crime is much worse than an accident.  I am speaking, obviously, about how the incident as a whole is to be evaluated.  The dead and wounded would have been no less dead and wounded in an equally fatal accident.

 

The London police very quickly announced that they were investigating this as a hate crime.   Indeed, the speed in which they made this announcement seems extremely irresponsible when we consider that virtually nothing in the way of evidence corroborating this interpretation of the incident has since been released.   This could be explained, perhaps, if the perpetrator, who soon after asked a taxi driver to call the police and thus essentially turned himself in, had confessed to being motivated by hate.   If this is the case, however, the police have not yet disclosed it.   From the facts that have been disclosed, the only apparent grounds for classifying it as a hate crime are the ethnicity and religion of the victims, who were Muslims and immigrants from Pakistan.

 

There are many who would say that just as a crime is worse than an accident, so a hate crime is worse than a regular crime.   I am not one of those.   There are basically two angles from which we can look at the distinction between hate crimes and regular crimes.   The first is the angle of motive.   Viewed from this angle, the distinction between hate crimes and regular crimes is that the former are motivated by prejudice – racial, religious, sexual, etc.- and the latter are not.   The second angle is the angle of the victim.   Viewed from this perspective, the distinction between hate crimes and regular crimes is that the victims of the former are members of racial, religious, or ethnic minorities, women, or something other than heterosexual and cisgender and the victims of the latter are not.  Viewed either way, however, the idea that a hate crime is much worse than a regular crime is extremely problematic.

 

Is it worse to take somebody’s life because you don’t like the colour of his skin than to take his life because you want his wallet?  

 

If we answer this question with yes then we must be prepared to support that answer with a reason.   It is difficult to come up with one that can stand up well under cross-examination.   One could try arguing, perhaps, that the murder motivated by prejudice is worse than the murder committed in the act of robbing someone on the grounds that whereas prejudice is irrational, wanting someone else’s money if you have desperate need of it yourself, is not.   This runs contrary to long-established judicial precedent, however.   If a man is so irrational that he is considered to be insane this is grounds for a plea of not guilty in a court of law.   Conversely, the man who did not go out intending to kill someone but does so in the act of stealing his wallet can be charged with first-degree murder.   This is because his intention to commit the crime of robbery makes it a premeditated act.  

 

Suppose, however, we take the view from the other angle and distinguish between hate crimes and regular crimes based upon the identity of the victims.   From this standpoint, the assertion that hate crimes are worse than regular crimes translates into the idea that it is worse commit a crime against members of such-and-such groups than it is to commit crimes against anyone else.  Worded that way, is there anyone who would be willing to sign on to such a statement?

 

The idea that hate crimes ought to be considered worse than regular crimes of the same nature but with other more mundane motivations arises out of the idea that “hate” itself ought to be treated as a crime.   The problem with this is that hate, whether in the ordinary sense of the word, or in the rather specialized sense of the word that is employed when discussing “hate speech”, “hate crimes”, “hate groups”, etc. is an attitude of the heart and mind.   To say that “hate” ought to be a crime, therefore, is to say that the government ought to legislate against certain types of thought.   This, however, has long been considered one of the distinguishing characteristics of bad government, government that is tyrannical and totalitarian.   Those familiar with George Orwell’s 1984 will remember that in the totalitarian state of Oceania there was a special police force tasked with tracking down anyone questioned, disagreed with, or otherwise dissented from the proclamations and ideology of the ruling Ingsoc Party and its leader Big Brother.   Such dissenters, including the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith, were regarded as being guilty of crimethink.    I’m quite certain that if Eric Blair were alive today he would be reminding us that this was supposed to be an example to avoid rather than one to emulate.

 

To return from the idea of hate crimes in general and in the abstract, to the specific, concrete, incident of the sixth of the June, the way our politicians and other civil leaders, aided and abetted by media pundits and religious leaders have been behaving is absolutely atrocious.   All evidence that has been released to the public to date points in the direction of this Nathaniel Veltman having been a “lone truckman”.   Our politicians, however, led by Captain Airhead and his goofy sidekick Jimmy Dhaliwal, but including Upper Canadian Premier Doug Ford and London Mayor Ed Holder, very quickly and very shamelessly politicized the incident and capitalized upon the suffering of the Afzaal family in order to shift the blame off of the actual perpetrator and onto the Canadian public in general with their incessant talk about “Islamophobia”.  

 

Once again Captain Airhead has been demonstrating his total inability to learn from his past mistakes.   One might think that the man who after building his political career upon a carefully constructed image as the poster boy for “woke” anti-racism was revealed to be a serial blackface artist would have learned a little humility and would have given up lecturing the Canadian public about how we all need to be more enlightened and less prejudiced.   Or that the man whose efforts to use inappropriate political influence to obtain a prosecutorial deal for a company that was a huge donor to his party landed him in the biggest political scandal of his career might have learned that it is not his place to issue proclamations about criminal guilt before the investigation is complete, charges have been laid, and a conviction obtained.   One would certainly hope that the man who has long made it a point of never calling acts of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam “terrorism” would not use this word to describe any act of violence committed against Muslims at the first opportunity that presented itself as if he lived in some fantasy world where Muslims could only be victims and never perpetrators of terrorism. Anyone thinking or hoping such things does not know Captain Airhead very well.

 

The cynical among us would observe first and foremost just how this incident seems tailor-made to fit Captain Airhead’s agenda.   Captain Airhead has made no secret of the fact that he wants Canadians to be less free to disagree with him on matters of race, religion, sex, etc.   Granted, he doesn’t word it that way, he says that free speech is important but it doesn’t include hate speech.     Here is the key to understanding him.   Every time someone says “I believe in free speech” or some equivalent statement expressing support for free speech and a “but” immediately follows that statement, everything that follows the “but” negates and nullifies everything that precedes it.   Captain Airhead has been trying since the beginning of his premiership to re-introduce laws forbidding Canadians from expressing views that he doesn’t like on the internet.    Bill C-10, introduced last fall for the ostensible purpose of bringing companies like Netflix under the same regulatory oversight of the CRTC as traditional broadcasters, has been widely regarded as a means of smuggling this sort of thing in through the back door, and the Liberals numerous attempts to circumvent open debate in the House so as to ram the bill through prior to the summer adjournment have hardly done anything to assuage such suspicions.   Captain Airhead was undoubtedly looking for an incident that he could blow out of proportion enabling him to grandstand and basically say, “See, I’m not a creepy little dictator-wannabee, I’m just trying to fight hate like the kind that we saw here”.     No, I’m not suggesting that Captain Airhead faked the incident.   I would not be surprised to learn, however, that some memorandum had been sent to law enforcement agencies telling them to be on the lookout for anything that could be plausibly spun as a hate crime, and to flag it as such regardless of the evidence or lack thereof.  

 

As for Jimmy Dhaliwal, the less said about his ridiculous assertions that Muslims are living in constant fear of their Islamophobic neighbours in Canada the better.   Such nonsense does not deserve the dignity of a response.

 

By politicizing this incident in this way, Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal are, of course, trying to put the Canadian public in general on trial.   “It is because you are prejudiced against Muslims” they are saying in effect “that this happened, and so you are to blame for this young man’s actions, and therefore you must be punished by having more of your freedoms of thought, conscience, and speech taken from you”.   For years the Left has put the Canada of the past, and her founders and historical figures and heroes on trial over the Indian Residential Schools.  It has been the kind of trial where only the prosecution is allowed to present evidence and the defense is not allowed to cross-examine much less present a case of its own.   Over the past few weeks this mockery of a trial has been renewed due to the non-news item of the discovery of an unmarked cemetery at the Residential School in Kamloops.   The incident in London is now being exploited by the Left to put living Canadians of the present day on the same sort of unjust trial before the same sort of kangaroo court of public opinion.

 

In 1940 the film “My Little Chickadee” was released which starred the legendary sexpot Mae West and the equally legendary lush W. C. Fields.   It was the first – and last – time they would appear together.   West and Fields had also written the screenplay, or rather West wrote it with some input from Fields in the rare moments he wasn’t totally sloshed, and there is a scene in it in which some of the dialogue is purportedly taken from West’s own experience of thirteen years earlier, when she had been briefly jailed in New York on the rather Socratic charge of “corrupting the morals of youth” over the Broadway play “Sex” that she had written, produced, directed, and, of course, starred in herself.   In the scene in the film, West’s character, Miss Flower Belle Lee finds herself, through the tongue of the character played by Margaret Hamilton, the actress who had portrayed the Wicked Witch of the West the previous year and who seems to have remained in character sans green makeup for this film, appearing before a judge.   After one of her trademark flippant remarks, the judge asks her “young lady, are you trying to show your contempt for this court?”   Her famous reply was “No, your honour, I’m doing my best to conceal it”.

 

I trust that you, my readers, will recognize that no such concealment is being attempted here.

Some Mother’s Day Reflections

It’s Mother’s Day again in Canada, the United States, and many other countries of the world. I’m pleased to see the holiday is still around. It is a wonder that it was not declared a hate crime to celebrate Mother’s Day decades ago.

After all, it isn’t exactly an inclusive holiday. It excludes all people who are not mothers. That by definition excludes all people who are not biologically female (although pointing that out might be a hate crime in and of itself these days). It excludes plenty of females too, however. What about daughters and granddaughters? What about our sisters and our cousins, whom we reckon up by dozens, and our aunts?* I had started to get the impression that to exclude people was the worst possible thing one could do, a crime of hate so ghastly, so horrible, that is was absolutely unpardonable under any circumstances. At least that is the impression the news and entertainment media, classrooms, and many a pulpit have been giving for decades.

Then there is the fact that Mother’s Day is honouring, well, motherhood. Isn’t motherhood supposed to be degrading to women though? Isn’t that what the great and wise leaders of the Womyn’s Revolution, who brought Enlightenment and Liberation to Personkind back in the 1960’s taught us? That to be a wife and a mother is to be a slave or at best a second class citizen. That motherhood is an inferior choice that keeps women from achieving self-fulfillment through the pursuit of a career.

I suppose that I should not have written the above even in a sarcastic fashion. One doesn’t want to give the humourless dingbats who have created this oppressive cultural climate in which everything ordinary, decent, and honorable in life is degraded and everything weird, indecent, and ignoble is honored any new ideas.

The honouring of motherhood in Mother’s Day seems to be pleasantly out of sync with contemporary Western culture. On an ordinary day of the year the only kind of motherhood that seems to be honoured in our society is single-motherhood. Single-motherhood is honoured today because in traditional culture, our society regarded having a child outside of wedlock as being both sinful and shameful.

That, of course, is completely unacceptable to people living today. Contemporary society likes to justify its rejection of the standards of the past by saying that those standards were unfair.

“It placed an unfair stigma upon the child born out of wedlock. Why should he be blamed for the actions of his parents”.

“It reflects a double standard. The mother who had a child out of wedlock was judged far more harshly than the father of the child if he was judged at all”.

There is some truth to these judgements. All error must be mixed with truth if it is to become widespread and popular. Unmixed error deceives very few. There is much however, that people who make these judgements gloss over, and much that they are simply wrong about. The way traditional society behaved towards men who got unmarried women pregnant, for example, is grossly misrepresented.

It is often forgotten that the social purpose of the stigma against unmarried pregnancy was not to punish the child but to deter people from having children outside of the bonds of marriage. Likewise, the social purpose of seeking to prevent people from having children outside of marriage was not to prevent young people (or anyone else) from “having fun”. Rather it was to promote responsible behavior and stable families. A child raised by a father and mother who are married to each other stands a far better chance of doing well in every area of life than a child in any other situation. Society as a whole is much better off when children are raised by their fathers and mothers in traditional homes than when they are raised in other situations.

Implicit within traditional standards is the concept that we as members of societies have duties to our societies that must govern and take precedence over our personal desires and pursuits. That is a concept that is not well liked today and is widely rejected. It’s current unpopularity, however, does not make it false.

Now, the category of single-motherhood covers more than just women who have gotten pregnant outside of wedlock. It also includes women whose husbands have died or abandoned them. The shame that society attached to out-of-wedlock pregnancy should never have been allowed so spill over onto such women.

This, however, is only a minor consideration in contemporary society’s decision to simultaneously lower the status of traditional motherhood within the context of marriage and elevate the status of single-motherhood. What it really demonstrates is that we have lost our sense of the value of parents, family, and the home. Money, science and technology, and the material resources the latter can provide, are all we value these days. We assume that by having society provide resources for the raising of children through government social programs that we can replace stable marriages, legitimacy, and the home, and get rid of all the rules that supported such things while interfering with our freedom to pursue our pleasure in whatever way we saw fit.

In our rejection of our society’s traditional standards we are saying that we think we know better than our parents, grandparents, and all the generations of great-grandparents prior to them.(1) On this day, devoted to the honouring of one of our parents, we may wish to reflect upon the significance of that. Is such arrogance honouring to our fathers and mothers?

It is God, of course, who tells us to honour our fathers and mothers in the fourth commandment. Some churches, today, have started to address God as Mother rather than Father, or to combine Mother and Father in a single title “Mother-Father God”. This is yet another product of the same collective brain rot afflicting our society that I have been discussing.

Now, someone might object and say “What is wrong with calling God Mother?” Assuming that the objector professes to believe in Jesus Christ and Christianity my answer would be that while feminine images of God do exist in Scripture, and while God is Spirit which cannot be categorized according to biological sex, God in His revelation of Himself has called Himself Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To call God Mother is to presumptuously read contemporary egalitarian and inclusivistic ideas into Christianity at the risk of confusing our God with a contemporary rival deity, the Mother Goddess of neo-paganism. What we will end up with if we do so is a version of “Christianity” that bears about as much resemblance to traditional, historical, Biblical Christianity as neo-paganism bears to traditional, historical, pagan religions, i.e., almost none.

If I felt the compelling need to address a prayer to a female personage I would rather address a prayer to Mary, the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, than to the “Mother-Father God” of contemporary liberal “Christianity”. Although I am a Protestant I would consider it less blasphemous and it at least has the benefit of centuries of tradition behind it.

God the Father commanded us to honour our fathers and our mothers. We are not doing very well with that commandment these days. We have built nursing homes for our elderly parents, where the government pays strangers to look after them, while we go about our daily lives and forget about them. We have developed a culture that glorifies youth and refuses to honour the wisdom that comes with age. Within the last few decades children have developed the disrespectful habit of addressing their parents by their first names.

It is a good thing, therefore, that the Gestapo of contemporary, egalitarian, inclusivistic, multicultural, democratic liberalism has not yet gotten around to banishing Mother’s Day. We need that one day of the year to honour our mothers. We aren’t allowed to honour them any other day any more.

Lord have mercy upon us.


*Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan

(1) The problem is a few generations old already but if that sentence were adjusted to reflect that fact it would sound extremely awkward.