Equality and Justice

I recently wrote, as I have done in the past, that equality is an idol that Modern man has substituted for the good that the ancients called justice.  To this it should be added that equality is fundamentally an intellectual shortcut that reveals the laziness of the Modern mind by contrast with the rigour of the ancient.  Justice requires that we consider each person with whom we come into contact and behave towards him as he deserves or, if mercy and benevolence are called for, better.  It is far easier to apply a cookie cutter, one size fits all, standard to everyone and this is the temptation of equality.

 

It never ceases to amaze me how many of those who have no problem recognizing as evil most if not all of the evils spawned by the worship of equality nevertheless bow their knee to the idol itself.

 

One person I know is opposed to abortion, to the agenda of the alphabet soup of alternative gender and sexuality, and to all sorts of other similar things that deserve opposing, for he is an evangelical and whether or not he can identify the Scriptures condemning these evils or articulate the ethical or moral theological argument against them, he is against what evangelicalism is against. 

 

The demand for legal, easily-accessible, and taxypayer-funded abortion, however, arose because certain people thought that their whackadoodle goal of imposing the Procrustean bed of equality on the sexes took precedence over the lives of unborn human beings.  Men and women are not equal and cannot truly be made equal but even the pretense of equality cannot be maintained without neutralizing the huge difference between the sexes in terms of the burden reproduction imposes on each.

 

This same sexual egalitarianism spawned the alphabet soup agenda.  If men and women must be thought of as equal then they must be thought of as being the same for equality means sameness.  If men and women are equal and therefore the same, then why should men not choose men rather than women for their mates or women choose women rather than men?  Or for that matter, if men and women are equal and therefore the same, why can’t a man be a woman or a woman a man?

 

None of these imbecilic ideas could have gained the slightest bit of traction had Modern minds not first been duped into worshipping the idol of equality.

 

Then there is all the evil that has been done in an attempt to achieve economic equality.  Marxists – the bad ones, the followers of Karl rather than Groucho – believed that human unhappiness was caused, not by human sin as it is in reality, but by inequality which itself was caused by property which divided people into unequal classes of “haves” and “have nots” perpetually seeking to oppress and overthrow the other.  Eventually, they maintained, this would give way to a collectivist workers’ paradise in which everything is collectively owned, all are equal, each contributes to his ability and receives in accordance to his need, and everyone is happy.  In an attempt to put this hogwash into practice, totalitarian terror states which murdered 100 000 000 people were established throughout a third of the world in the last century.

 

There are those who would acknowledge all of this but maintain that there are good forms of equality as well as all these bad ones.  These all can be explained, however, and better, without having recourse to the concept of equality.  Take the idea of “equality under the law.”  All the merit in this concept is better expressed as “the law is the same for everybody under it” than as “everyone is the same in the eyes of the law.”  This is because the real point here is the unity of the law and not the sameness of those under it.

Then there is the idea of equality in the Church.  Some get this idea out of St. Paul’s words in Gal. 3:25-28.  The Apostle doesn’t say that all are equal in Christ, he says that all are one in Christ.  His instructions in other epistles on certain matters would be rather difficult to square with this passage if equality is what was intended here.

 

In “Democracy and Equality” I answered the claim that we are equal in “worth” or “value” by observing that these terms, which denote what one can get for a commodity in the market, are rarely applied to human beings in the Bible and never for the purpose of saying that we are all equal in value.  “Dignity” would be a better word than either “worth” or “value”, because it cannot commodify human beings when applied to them.  Rather than thinking of it as something in which we are all equal, however, it would be better to say that there is a kind of base level dignity attached to being human to which individuals add or from which they subtract by their personal merits and demerits.

 

Equality is a concept that is useless at best, dangerous and evil at worst.  It is time to ditch it and return to the good the ancients called justice.  After all “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Mic. 6:8)

Stanley, Chauvin, and the New Barbarism

 Three years ago, when Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley was acquitted of the charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter for having shot the twenty-two year old Colten Boushie when the latter with a posse of friends had invaded his farm, I spoke strongly against those who publicly denounced the verdict, including the Prime Minister and the  then Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, and, indeed, said that the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice ought to resign or be made to resign over their remarks.    That I disagreed with them about the case and the verdict – I thought and still think that the RCMP were wrong to charge Stanley in the first place, that the case ought never to have made it to trial, and that “not guilty” was the only sane verdict possible – was only part of my reason for taking that stance.   There was also the fact that for Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould to politicize the verdict in the way in which they did was an abuse of their office.   Ironically, less than a year after this, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould would find themselves on the opposite sides of a huge scandal about political interference in the affairs of the criminal justice system.   In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould accused Trudeau of inappropriately pressuring her to retroactively apply to an ongoing case certain changes that had just been snuck through Parliament by being tagged on to a spending bill so as to benefit a large corporate donor to the Liberal Party that was under prosecution for bribing a foreign government.    In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould was in the right in resisting Trudeau’s pressure but in the earlier incident, the two of them had both been guilty of political interference in the criminal justice system and in a much worse way.   As bad as politicians putting pressure on prosecutors to extend leniency may be it is far worse for them to denounce jury acquittals.   This is because doing the latter is a dangerous affront to the most basic principles of our criminal justice system, the very principles which distinguish civilized legal justice from tribal blood vengeance.   These principles prioritize the protection of the innocent over the punishment of the guilty by giving everyone the right to a fair trial when accused of a crime, placing the burden of proof upon the prosecution, and entitling the accused to a dismissal of the charges if the conditions of a fair trial cannot be met and an acquittal if the prosecution cannot meet the standard of proof.   Boushie’s family and several Native Indian organizations were taking the position that the acquittal was unjust because Native Indians were not represented on the jury due to the prospective jurors of this ethnicity having evinced prejudice against the defendant that disqualified them from performing that civic duty.   In their public display of support for this position, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould were basically saying that the system needed to be changed to make it harder for the accused to be acquitted by weakening his right to a trial by an unbiased jury.    

 

This week the verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin.   In this case the verdict was guilty.   Chauvin was found guilty of three charges – unintentional second degree murder, third degree murder, and manslaughter – despite there having been only one body.    As strange as that seems it might perhaps simply be the latest stage in the apotheosis of George Floyd.   When Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis last year he was at first proclaimed a victim of racism and police brutality but has since climbed the ladder to martyrdom and then sainthood.     If he has now been deified and made into a trinity that would explain his death being treated as a three-in-one.    

 

Greg Gutfeld of Fox News responded to the verdict by saying “I’m glad that [Chauvin] was found guilty on all charges, even if he might not be guilty of all charges”.   The exact opposite of this is the just and sane position to take – that Chauvin should have been acquitted of all charges even if he was guilty of all charges.

 

The reason this is the only just and sane position is because of the same principles discussed with regards to the Stanley acquittal in the first paragraph.   There was not the slightest possibility of Chauvin having received a fair trial, therefore the principles of justice say that he ought not to have been tried at all and that he is entitled to be cleared of all charges.

 

As it so happens, the evidence does not support the conclusion that Chauvin was guilty of any of these charges.  Floyd had committed a crime and resisted arrest, which was why he found himself on the ground being restrained.   The knee-hold restraint Chauvin used was a nasty looking one but it was not lethal.   The police bodycam video shows that his knee was not on Floyd’s neck as it appeared from the angle of the bystander video that went viral but on his shoulder blade.   It was clearly not the reason Floyd couldn’t breathe and at any rate the video shows that Floyd’s breathing troubles had started before he was on the ground and under this restraint.   There were at least three other factors that were more likely to have contributed to his breathing difficulties than the police hold.   One of these was Floyd’s heart condition, another was the amount of fentanyl in his blood – three times higher than the dosage that nobody has ever survived.    The third factor was his infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  A difficulty in breathing is one of the main symptoms of the disease this virus produces when it bothers to produce a disease at all.   For over a year now every death that occurred to someone infected with this virus was counted a COVID-19 death even if other morbidity factors included automobile accident injuries, gunshot wounds, or being eaten by wild animals.   George Floyd, who was experiencing symptoms at the time of death that actually correlate with those known to be caused by the virus, is the sole exception of which I am aware.

 

Even if none of this was the case however and Chauvin’s knee actually had caused Floyd’s death he still should never have been charged and tried.   I don’t say this because he is a cop.   I say it because the media, professional and social, had already tried and convicted him in their own forum within a day of Floyd’s death.   If this were not sufficient in itself to preclude his ever having a fair trial before an unprejudiced jury, the long hot summer of rioting and violence in Minneapolis and other major American urban centres constituted mass intimidation of prospective jurors.   Then there was the blatant interference in the outcome of the trial by American political leaders including the present occupant of the White House and, most notoriously, Californian Congresswoman Maxine Waters.   Unlike Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould in the Stanley trial, these did not wait to make their inappropriate remarks as ex post facto commentary on the verdict, but instead made them prior to the jury’s deliberation.

 

The trials of Gerald Stanley and Derek Chauvin were heavily politicized due to the racial aspect of the trials.  Stanley and Chauvin are white men, Colten Boushie was a Native Indian and George Floyd was black.   To the progressive commentators, activists, and politicians who politicized these trials, this was all that was necessary to come to the conclusion that racially-motivated murder had been committed.   All this demonstrates, however, is just how toxic the racist ideology of progressives has become.   When you politicize a trial in this way, refusing to allow the courts to do their job and decide the outcome based on law and evidence, but instead demand a guilty verdict for reasons of racial politics, the consequence of your own actions is that the only just outcome of the trial is dismissal or an acquittal regardless of actual guilt or innocence on the part of the accused.   A guilty verdict, under these circumstances, would amount to a lynching.

 

The principles that I have defended in this essay are the principles that underlie justice in civilization.   While those who have been demanding Chauvin’s head have been framing their demands in terms of “racial justice” this is not really justice in the civilized sense of the term at all, but a tribal blood vengeance that elevates blood and skin colour over law, evidence, rights and due process.   This is a sign indicating a rapid slide into barbarism, one of several that we have seen recently.  The insane drive to erase history (1) which kicked into high gear at the same time and in conjunction with the George Floyd riots is another.   Ironically, the institution that the Left, seizing the opportunity afforded them by George Floyd’s death, sought to indict alongside the man Chauvin, the police, is also indicative of the decay of civilization into barbarism.   In this case it is the slower, more gradual, decay over the course of the Modern era that is indicated.   The police in the modern sense of the term is a semi-military force employed by government to spy on its own people in order to terrorize them into obedience.   Like the near ubiquitous false equation of democracy – mob rule – with constitutionally restrained government, the police are an indication of how we have gradually moved from civilization towards barbarism in its totalitarian form in the Modern era.  (2)   What we are seeing now in the racialized bloodlust against Chauvin is a much faster move into barbarism in its anarchistic form.   Both forms of barbarism are equally undesirable with the paradoxical combination of the two, which the late Sam Francis dubbed anarcho-tyranny, being the worst of all barbarisms.   This is the barbarism into which we are rapidly descending.

 

(1)   While the past itself cannot be erased, history, as John Lukacs defined it, “the remembered past” can.

(2)   Totalitarianism is the idea that we, our lives, and our persons are the property of the state which has the right to do with us whatever it wishes.  It is a Modern idea, the reverse side of the coin of Modern democracy, the idea that the people are collectively sovereign and the state is the voice of the people.  The Modern concept of democracy is not compatible with the civilized ideal of constitutional limits or restraints on government.  Totalitarianism is its inevitable logical conclusion.   The civilized ideal is compatible only with the ancient, prescriptive, institutions of monarchy and parliament.   In practice, totalitarianism requires the Modern police to impose the “general will” of the people.   This is why totalitarian states are often called police states.   The police, by contrast with the civilized institutions of monarchy and parliament, is a fundamentally barbaric institution, which is one reason why it tends to draw bullies, thugs, and other low-life scum into its ranks, offering them a quasi-legitimate venue for indulging their violent and criminal tendencies.    Ironically, Derek Chauvin may very well be one of the few police officers who does not deserve to spend the rest of his life in gaol.

“Social” Injustice

I was a theology student back in the 1990s when I first noticed how many liberals or progressives seemed to think nothing of casually throwing the accusation of “racist” against other people. Even liberals or progressives who were also professing Christians and presumably acquainted with the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” At the same time I was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the label “racist” had the power to destroy a person. Being labelled a “racist” could cost a person everything – his livelihood, career, reputation, social standing, friends, and in some cases, family. It did not sit well with me that a word that had this kind of destructive power could be thrown around so lightly with little to no consequences to the person doing the throwing. Especially, since there was no acceptable defence against the accusation. Anything anyone might say in his defence, from a simple denial to making reference to friends of other races, was taken as being itself evidence of guilt. This was a disgusting repudiation of the idea of the presumption of innocence, similar to feminism’s demand that women who accuse men of rape or other forms of sexual assault should be automatically and uncritically believed.

If anti-racists had too much power and too little responsibility then, twenty to twenty-five years ago, it is much, much, worse today. This is true even though the only time that comes immediately to my recollection in which someone actually faced discipline for an unsubstantiated accusation of racism occurred this very week when Jagmeet Singh, the federal leader of the socialist party, was ejected from the House of Commons for calling a member of the Bloc Quebecois a racist. Sadly, his suspension was only for the rest of the day.

Despite Singh’s slap-on-the-wrist, the power mixed with unaccountability of progressive anti-racists is much worse today than it was when I was a student. Back then, most people still understood racism in terms of overt acts – calling someone a derogatory slur, turning someone down for employment because of his skin colour, outright stating that you don’t like such-and-such a race. The concept of institutional racism was around but for many the expression did not convey what the Cultural Marxists intended. Instead it suggested such things as slavery, segregation, and other laws and policies that had treated specific groups negatively in an overt way. What the Cultural Marxists had intended by the term, was a “racism” that was unconscious, that was built into institutions but not in an overt way like segregation, a “racism” in the guilt of which all the members of the race which supposedly benefits share whether they know and acknowledge it or not.

Like I said, that idea was already around when I was a student, although at the time it was largely contained within the campuses of academia. It has obviously become much more powerful since. Today anyone with any sort of civil or ecclesiastical authority is expected to confess the “systemic racism” of his country, and many have lost their position or been threatened with the loss of it for denying “systemic racism.” This is partly a matter of all the students whose heads were being stuffed with that drivel decades ago now being in positions of influence outside of academia. The change in terminology also likely contributed to it. “Systemic racism” does not as easily bring to mind the slain dragons of slavery and segregation as “institutional racism” and is thus easier to sell as a present day problem.

Whether it is called “institutional” or “systemic” however, it is still nonsense. It is parallel to the theory in feminism that argues that rape is not primarily a criminal act of sexual violence by a specific man against a specific woman but an instrument whereby men as a class dominate women as a class in the guilt of which all men share. No, I am not making that up. You can find it in Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975). A related theory reasons that because power is not equally distributed between males and females, and inequality of power apparently nullifies consent, therefore all heterosexual intercourse is rape. Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (1987) was widely interpreted as teaching a form of this theory, although she approached a similar conclusion through a much less syllogistic avenue of cultural critique. Clearly related to this last theory is the theory that women are naturally lesbians and that heterosexuality is itself a false social construct created by the patriarchy to oppress women.

Whether we are talking about the mental flatulence that feminism has produced in its rapid descent into total lunacy as outlined in the previous paragraph, or anti-racism’s equally kooky idea that all whites are guilty of a kind of unconscious “racism” because property rights, the rule of law, and every other fundamental element of Western Civilization supposedly have a built-in bias that favours them against other races, we are talking about theories that are fundamentally and deeply unjust, even though their proponents claim to be advocates of “social justice.” Feminist theory and the theory of systemic racism allow feminists and anti-racists to make blanket accusations of crimes of oppression against all men as a group and all white people as a group. Intersectionality theory compounds the guilt for those who are both male and white. Individual men, individual white people, and even individual white men, according to these theories are guilty, even though they may not be conscious of it. This, however, is to declare huge numbers of people to be guilty, in the admitted absence of mens rea.

Mens rea, which is literally translated “guilty mind”, is consciousness of committing a crime. While ignorance of the law is no excuse, criminal culpability requires mens rea. This, like the presumption of innocence, is a fundamental principle of Common Law justice. So, for that matter, is the principle that laws, especially those defining new offences, ought not to be applied retroactively. This principle is being torn to shreds by those who are presently demanding that we raze all monuments to the ground, erase all history, and start again from Year Zero, because they have judged the past to be guilty of failing to live up to their freshly coined standards.

These new standards, furthermore, are expressed in terminology coined by Cultural Marxists, whose modus operandi is to identify a group within society as being oppressed, coin a term, usually ending in –ism or –phobia, and assign it the meaning of an irrational and pathological prejudice against the group in question, and then apply it to any attitude, action, or even word that members of the group or even a single member of the group, claims to personally experience as the –ism or –phobia, and then heap tons of moral condemnation upon anyone and everyone, past and present, to whom those attitudes, actions, and words could be attributed. Since the experience of the “victim” is held to be incontrovertible, the extension of each of these neologisms is infinite. Anything a “person of colour” experiences as “racism” is held to therefore be “racism”, anything that a woman experiences as “sexism” is held to therefore be “sexism”, etc. Cultural Marxism is an outright assault on yet more principles of Common Law justice. It places the accuser beyond cross-examination and weighs the scales heavily in his favour and holds people responsible for what it itself claims to consider to be irrational pathologies.

Common Law justice is not perfect, nor has anyone ever claimed that it was. No human system of justice is ever perfect. It is far better, however, than anything that has gone by the name “justice” in any country that has been foolish enough to allow itself to be governed by a form of Marxism. Like all long-standing, traditional institutions, it corrects itself over time, which a rigid ideology like Marxism simply cannot do. It is far closer to true justice, than any form of Marxist justice, Cultural or otherwise, can ever be.

Therefore, when feminists, anti-racists, and the like tell you that what they are demanding is a form of justice, don’t believe them. It is injustice that they are demanding.

The Wrath of God

After the reading of the epistle and before the reading of the Gospel in the traditional liturgy for the Requiem Mass – the funeral service of the Roman Catholic and many High Anglican churches – comes a long hymn entitled Dies Irae, which means “The Day of Wrath”. The words to the hymn go back at least as far as the thirteenth century and it has been set to music by countless composers. The final two lines of the hymn are often sung independently of the rest. (1) For fans of Monty Python this is what the monks in Quest for the Holy Grail who kept hitting their foreheads with their books were chanting. The hymn in its entirety speaks of the Second Coming of Christ and the Final Judgement, pleading for Christ’s propiatory mercy apart from which no one shall stand on that day.

Nothing illustrates the difference between modern and pre-modern thinking like this hymn. To the modern way of thinking a funeral is not the time or place to be talking, let alone singing, about God’s wrath and judgement. Even fundamentalist churches do not typically include preaching on hell at funerals. Other forms of modern theology do away with the subject of the wrath of God altogether. Theological liberalism, which is always glorying in how much more advanced its views of God are over the “primitive” views of Christians of previous centuries, thus demonstrating that its faith is in a deity of its own construction, i.e., an idol, rather than the eternal and unchanging God Who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, regards the wrath of God as just such a “primitive” concept and consequently, has a similar attitude towards the propiatory, atoning, sacrifice of Christ upon the Christ. Others may not go as far as this but have problems with the idea of the wrath of God because they see it as being inconsistent with Christ’s teachings about God being a loving and forgiving Father. Some display their ignorance of the actual content of the New Testament by suggesting that the wrath of God is an Old Testament concept, imported into Christianity against the teachings of Jesus, by the ex-Pharisee St. Paul. No better answer to these can be found than the following words by that archnemesis of chronological snobbery, C. S. Lewis:

A most astonishing misconception has long dominated the modern mind on the subject of St Paul. It is to this effect: that Jesus preached a kindly and simple religion (found in the Gospels) and that St Paul afterwards corrupted it into a cruel and complicated religion (found in the Epistles).

This is really quite untenable. All the most terrifying texts come from the mouth of Our Lord: all the texts on which we can base such warrant as we have for hoping that all men will be saved come from St Paul. If it could be proved that St Paul altered the teaching of his Master in any way, he altered it in exactly the opposite way to that which is popularly supposed.
But there is no real evidence for a pre-Pauline doctrine different from St Paul’s. The Epistles are, for the most part, the earliest Christian documents we possess. The Gospels came later. They are not ‘the gospel’, the statement of the Christian belief. They were written for those who had already been converted, who had already accepted ‘the gospel’. They leave out many of the ‘complications’ (that is, the theology) because they are intended for readers who have already been instructed in it. In that sense the Epistles are more primitive and more central than the Gospels-though not, of course, than the great events which the Gospels recount. God’s act (the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection) comes first: the earliest theological analysis of it comes in the Epistles: then, when the generation who had known the Lord was dying out, the Gospels were composed to provide for believers a record of the great Act and of some of the Lord’s sayings. The ordinary popular conception has put everything upside down. (2)

Modern thinkers are not, however, the first to think that the concept of the wrath of God is out of sync with the God of love preached by Christianity. In the early centuries of the church many concluded that there was an inconsistency between the wrath displayed by YHWH in the Old Testament and the love of God proclaimed by Christ in the New Testament. This led them into Gnosticism, which maintained that the God of the Old Testament was not the Father God proclaimed by Christ but an inferior deity, the Demiurge. This was one of the earliest heresies to develop. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, whose primary surviving work is his late second century treatise against the versions of Gnosticism known to him, especially Valentinianism, (3) traced it back to Simon Magus, whom St. Peter encountered in Acts 8. The “antichrists” denounced by St. John in his first and second epistles seem to have been proponents of this heresy. Marcion of Sinope took this doctrine so far as to reject most of the New Testament as well as the Old. His “Bible” consisted of an abridged version of the Gospel according to St. Luke and ten of St. Paul’s epistles.

Gnosticism was nonsense, of course. In answering Gnosticism, with the Creedal affirmation that God the Father of Jesus Christ is the “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”, i.e., the God of the Old Testament Who created the material as well as the spiritual world, the orthodox, Apostolic, Christian Church simply reiterated what Jesus Christ Himself had taught regarding the authoritative Scriptures of the Old Testament and the God revealed therein. Furthermore, as noted by Lewis in the above quotation, there was plenty of wrath and judgement in Jesus’ own teachings. Indeed, as we shall see, far from it being the case that the wrath and judgement of God contradict the Christian doctrine of the love, mercy, and grace of God, it is rather the truth that the Gospel in which the latter are revealed is incomprehensible apart from the Law’s revelation of the wrath of God.

Before considering the wrath of God, however, let us take not of an important point about how we are to understand the Scriptures’ attribution to God of qualities that are possessed by humans and other created beings. These can be understood either univocally, equivocally, or analogically. If we understand them univocally, this means that we understand the same word to be identical in meaning when applied to God as applied to man. If we understand them equivocally, however, this means that we consider the qualities predicated of God to be entirely different except in name from those in man. Orthodox theologians have long rejected the univocal and equivocal views in favour of the analogical, which means that when the Scriptures ascribe to God a quality that is present in man, the quality so described is not identical to the one found in man, differing from it in both manner and degree, but with enough similarity between the two, that the term denoting the human quality provides an adequate picture of the corresponding quality in God, so that something meaningful and comprehensible can thereby be communicated about God. (4)

The reason this is important is because the word wrath means intense anger, particularly as expressed in retributive punishment against the object of wrath. In human beings anger is an emotion, a response in us prompted by something that has displeased us which, if we allow it to influence our actions without being itself governed and moderated by our reason, results in bad and inappropriate behaviour. To attribute wrath to God univocally, would be to say that His response to our sin is an emotional outburst. This is clearly not acceptable to orthodoxy because the suggestion that God is susceptible to emotional outbursts and that our actions can produce a change within Him, contradicts His immutability. An equivocal understanding of the wrath of God, however, would be meaningless and incomprehensible.

Therefore, when St. Paul writes that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18) this has to be understood analogically. God’s wrath resembles human anger in some ways but must not be thought of as an emotion. Like human anger, God’s wrath demands the punishment of its objects but, unlike human anger, is not an emotional response but the expression of an aspect of God’s immutable character. If you are tempted to find in this truth some sort of comfort for impenitent sinners seeking security in their carnality then you need to think over it more thoroughly. In human beings, punishment out of anger can be unjustly severe because anger clouds human judgement causing us to exact more than justice requires – which is why human civilizations build their justice systems upon the foundation of principles that place limits on the penalties that can be exacted from offenders. (5) Paradoxically, however, human anger, being a changeable emotion, is quickly exhausted. Wrath that is an expression of something that is immutable in God is not – hence the Scriptural imagery describing that wrath in terms of “their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched”, “the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” and “the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night.”

The immutable quality of the character of God that when directed towards sinners is expressed as what the Scriptures call the wrath of God is His justice. God’s justice is one aspect of His perfect goodness. God is perfectly good and righteous, and the Sovereign Lord over all He created. We, His creation, were created good and righteous, and we owe it to our Sovereign Lord to remain that way. God’s justice is the facet of His goodness that requires that we pay this debt. We, however, failed to meet our obligation, corrupted ourselves, and fell into sin, rebellion, and disobedience. The same justice that rightly requires righteousness of us now rightly demands a penalty from us for our sin. That penalty, the Scriptures speak of as death – the spiritual death that describes our condition of being spiritually alienated from God, the physical death that ends our earthly lives, and the second death which is eternal. The wrath of God is His exactment from us of the penalty that His justice demands for our sin.

The wrath of God is not an outdated doctrine to be done away with but is absolutely essential to sound theology. Without the wrath that expresses His justice towards sin, His justice and therefore His goodness, would be less than perfect and complete. If His goodness is less than perfect in this aspect, then the perfection of other aspects of His goodness, such as His love, are also compromised. Indeed, the fact that God’s love is so widely considered to be incompatible with His wrath, shows just how much the doctrine of His love has been compromised. What many, probably most, people think of today when they hear the expression “the love of God” is love in the watered-down modern sense of some sappy, sentimental, feeling. By contrast, the love of God spoken of in the Scriptures, is His benevolent good-will towards His creation, which is not simply an empty sentiment, but which translates into positive action.

If we reject the idea of the wrath of God, compromising the justice that lies behind that wrath, and so compromising the love of God by reducing it to an empty sentiment, than we strip the Gospel of its meaning and rob the forgiveness offered in the Gospel of its value. For many today, forgiveness means something along the lines of “letting it slide.” The person who forgives in this sense says to the person who has wronged him “forget about it” or “its no big deal”. In other words, he makes light of the offense and trivializes it. This is not the forgiveness spoken of in the Scriptures – either the forgiveness offered to us in the Gospel, or the forgiveness required of us towards others. The Scriptures make it quite clear that God “will by no means clear the guilty.” (Ex. 34:7, Num. 14:18) This means that He will not just dismiss our sin, pretend that it is not serious or of no consequence. God’s justice demands that sin be paid for and God never offers us any sort of forgiveness that just sets His justice aside. This is why forgiveness is only extended to us on the grounds that Someone else paid our debt for us.

In John 3:16, which is rightly the most familiar and loved verse in all the Bible, aptly dubbed “the Gospel in a nutshell”, we are told that “God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” The word translated “so” in this verse does not mean so in the sense of extent, as in “so much”, “so many”, “so large”, although undoubtedly the verse as a whole conveys a sense of that, but rather means “so” in the sense of manner, as in “thus”, “so” or “in this way.” (6) The verse is telling us that the way in which God loved the world was by giving us His Son that all who believe in Him will have everlasting life. St. Paul makes it clear to us how God’s giving us His Son accomplishes this end:

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. (Rom. 3:24-26)

To forgive someone in the truest sense of the word, not the watered down sense of trivializing the offence and “letting it slide”, means that the forgiver takes the burden of paying the damages caused by the injury he is forgiving upon himself. The words “redemption” and “propitiation” in this passage both have connotations of a price being paid for our being justified, i.e., accepted as righteous by God which includes the idea of our sins being forgiven. Redemption suggests the idea of payment for release from bondage. Propitiation, however, means the payment that satisfies the offended justice – the wrath – of God. (7) This, St. Paul explicitly declares, is the only way God could be just Himself while acquitting and justifying the sinner who believes in Jesus Christ – by voluntarily bearing the guilt of all of our sins upon Himself as He hung upon the Cross and allowing His Own wrath to be exhausted upon Himself, paying the debt that we owed, thus satisfying the demands of His justice against us once and for all.

Without an appreciation of the reality of the wrath of God against sin as the expression of His offended and infinite justice we cannot have even the most basic understanding of the significance of what Jesus Christ did for us at the Cross. Without the humble and contrite acknowledgement that the wrath of God is exactly what we deserve as sinners – not just a “sure nobody’s perfect” which really only means “I have my problems but I’m good enough” – that is produced in us by the Law, the Gospel, through which the Holy Spirit persuades us of the truth of Who Jesus is, what He did for us, and the grace – freely given favour – in which we stand because of Jesus, will bounce right off of us without forming in us the faith which is the only means by which we can receive that grace.

Perhaps the medieval Church got it right after all, in placing several stanzas of wrath and judgement just before the reading of the Gospel, in services for departed loved ones, whose deaths remind us of our own mortality, and of the coming Judgement.


Quærens me, sedisti lassus:
Redemisti Crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus.

Juste Judex ultionis,
Donum fac remissionis,
Ante diem rationis.

Ingemisco, tamquam reus:
Culpa rubet vultus meus:
Supplicanti parce, Deus. (8)


(1) "Pie Iesu Domine, Dona eis requiem." Which means "Holy Lord Jesus, grant them rest."
(2) C. S. Lewis, “Modern Translations of the Bible”, originally published as the introduction to J. B. Phillips’ Letters to Young Christians: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles (1947), later included as the tenth essay in Part II of God in The Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, a posthumous collection of Lewis’ apologetics essays compiled and edited by Walter Hooper and published by William B. Eerdmans of Grand Rapids in 1970.
(3) St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, (180).
(4) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.13.5. Note that in the Sed Contra, i.e., the part of the article where St. Thomas asserts his own view against the opposing view presented in the Utrum and supported by the Oportets, he seems to affirm the equivocal position. At this point in the article, however, he is using “equivocal” in a general sense that includes the analogous. Later, in the Respondeo Dicens where he fleshes out his argument he distinguishes between a “purely equivocal sense” and an “analogous” sense, affirming the latter rather than the former. Ever an Aristotolean, he describes the analogous sense as a “mean between pure equivocation and simple univocation.” See also John Theodore Mueller in Christian Dogmatics: A Handbook of Doctrinal Theology for Pastors, Teachers, and Laymen, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1934), pp.161-162.
(5) The much maligned Lex Talionis, understood properly, is just such a limitation.
(6) The word is οὕτως. For those who know Latin it was rendered “sic” in the Vulgate, not “tantus.”
(7) The Greek word ἱλαστήριον that St. Paul used here was also the word that denoted the Mercy Seat, i.e., the lid of the Ark of the Covenant upon which the high priest would sprinkle sacrificial blood on the Day of Atonement.
(8) “Seeking me, You sat tired, Having suffered the Cross, You have redeemed, Let so much labour not be in vain. Just Judge of vengeance, Make a gift of forgiveness, before the Day of Reckoning. I lament as a guilty one, with shame my face grows red, spare Your supplicant, O God.” – from the Dies Irae.

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.

Even More Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters

- We live in an age of idolatry, in which false gods have been substituted for the true God, and counterfeit goods for true goods. Our age has substituted human rights for natural law, equality for justice, and democracy for constitutional government, and we are the worse for each of these substitutions.

- True constitutional government requires the reign of a royal monarch.

- Friends don’t let friends eat vegetarian.

- As crude in their manner of expression, one-tracked in their thinking, and blasphemously anti-Christian in their idolatrous worship of their own race as white racial nationalists often can be, they are absolutely correct when they say that anti-racist is merely a code word for being anti-white. Anti-racism is the worst form of racism that can exist – racism against one’s own race.

- Only a complete horse’s ass would be a republican, democrat, liberal, progressive, socialist, pacifist, vegetarian, feminist, atheist, tree-hugging eco-nut, anti-racist, admirer of Justin Trudeau, pro-choice activist, government social worker or any sort of social justice warrior.

- Political correctness has so rotted the minds of our politicians that Parliament is seriously considering condemning as an irrational fear and prejudice the concerns of those who consider it imprudent to admit large numbers of immigrants or asylum-seekers who adhere to the religion that converted the Arabic peoples at sword point during the life of its founder, conquered the rest of the Middle East within twenty-five years of his death, was invading Christian Europe from both sides by the end of its first century, and has behaved in the exact same way towards Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and anyone else who had the misfortune to live in proximity to it ever since.

- There is nothing morally wrong with smoking tobacco. It takes a special kind of stupid to think otherwise.

- Isn’t it interesting how those who decry the mixing of religion and politics whenever a conservative evangelical, fundamentalist or traditionalist Catholic or Orthodox leader calls for pornography to be restricted, abortion to be banned, and public morality to be restored to what it was sixty years ago or otherwise expresses a right-of-centre view of public policy seem to have no objections to those wolves in shepherds’ clothing who devote all of their pulpit time to preaching the gospel of environmentalism, denouncing the evils of various sorts of prejudice and discrimination, and calling for more immigration and diversity.

- Liberals, socialists, and neoconservatives are all in favour of high levels of immigration and a lackadaisical approach to border security and the enforcement of immigration law. This is because each sees the immigrants as the means to some selfish end of their own. The Grits see a voting base that will keep them in power perpetually, the NDP sees a pathway to power in potential voters they can lure away from the Grits by offering more government benefits, and the neoconservatives see a supply of cheap labour. All three condemn as “racist” those who want lower levels of immigration, stricter enforcement of border security and immigration laws, and an immigration policy that is based upon our own country’s needs and interests and does not seek to radically transform our country. Yet it is only these “racists” who see immigrants as rational human beings who would not chose to come to our country if they did not see it as being attractive as it is, and that it is therefore as much in the interest of the immigrants we let in as it is of us who are already here that immigration not be the instrument of fast and radical transformation.

- All of the “values” that the Liberal Party identifies as Canadian come with a “Made in the USA” stamp. They are merely the values of the Hollywood left.

Speaking For and About Myself

It has been my tradition, for as long as I have been writing and self-publishing essays, to write an essay summarizing my basic convictions and positions for New Year's Day. This is a practice I picked up from one of my own favourite writers of opinion pieces, the late Charley Reese.

I am a conservative Christian. I came to faith in Jesus Christ when I was fifteen, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church as a teenager and later as an adult was confirmed in the Anglican church. I believe the Bible to be the inspired and authoritative Word of God and hold to the orthodox doctrines of Christianity as stated in the ecumenical Creeds - Apostles', Nicene-Constantinopolitan, and Athanasian.

I am a patriot of the Dominion of Canada, established 150 years ago in Confederation in 1867. I love my country, especially its British traditions and institutions, including our monarchy and parliamentary form of government, and Loyalist history and heritage. I hate everything the Liberal Party, falsely claiming that we needed "to grow up as a nation", has done to rob us of this rich heritage since the 1960s. They robbed us of the flag our soldiers fought and died under in the Second World War, sneakily and without the proper Parliamentary quorum required changed the name of our national holiday from the majestic "Dominion Day" to the lame "Canada Day", and worst of all seriously compromised our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms. This last thing was accomplished both by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which gave the government greater power to act in violation of the most basic of our traditional rights, and by introducing Soviet style thought police in the form of the Human Rights Commissions.

I am a Tory. By that I do not mean either a supporter of the Conservative Party, a neoconservative who is almost indistinguishable from an American republican, or a "Red" Tory who acknowledges the differences between the older British/Canadian conservative tradition and American republicanism but tends to distort that tradition to make it seem closer to the progressive liberal left and to reduce its noble principles to the ignoble "a larger role for the state." When I say that I am a Tory I mean first and foremost that I am a royalist, both a supporter of the institution of hereditary monarchy and one who loves and reveres royalty. It also means that I think of society as a living organism in which past and future generations unite with the present into an organic whole rather than a mere association of convenience for individuals, that I believe in the Platonic and Christian concept of justice as harmony in a hierarchical order rather than the modern, demonic, ideal of equality, and that, while I see church and state as being different institutions with distinct roles, I reject the liberal idea that the two must be seperated, holding instead that along with the family they make up the basic components of the organic whole of society and must cooperate harmoniously for society to enjoy even an imperfect, earthly, kind of justice. Which brings us back to royalism for it is in the institution of monarchy, in which the head of state is consecrated in an inherited office by the church that the family, church, and state come together in harmonious unity.

While I loathe pacifism on principle, I do not care for unnecessary war and regard most if not all of the wars of my own lifetime to have been unnecessary.

I believe that it is our responsibility to look after our environment and resources because we hold these in trust as stewards for the sake of future generations. Nevertheless, like all thinking people I can recognize the hoax of anthropogenic climate change for the pseudoscientific balderdash that it is and have nothing but contempt for hypocrites like David Suzuki and Al Gore who like to lecture the rest of us about how our habits are destroying the planet while raking in profits from investments in energy companies and consuming far more energy than the average person. I regard climate change alarmists, like most green, tree-hugger types, as seriously disturbed wackos who ought to be locked in a padded cell for their own protection and ours.

I believe in private ownership, private enterprise and economic freedom in the market but not at the expense of a country's common good. I hate the globalist, neo-liberalism that regards borders as mere lines on a map which should not be allowed to impede the flow of either labour or capital and which promotes the importation of workers through mass immigration and the exportation of factories and jobs through free trade and outsourcing. I also despise socialism, Communism, and social democracy in all their forms.

I believe in family, community, rootedness and tradition as the basis of the good and happy life rather than science, technology and the satanic illusion of progress.

I believe in the personal rights and freedoms that are part of our Common Law heritage under the Crown but reject the false, politically correct, rights manufactured by progressives which always seem to trespass on the long-established, time-honoured, real rights of others. I believe, for example, in the rights of all of the Queen's free subject-citizens to be informed of criminal charges against them when arrested, to be quickly brought before a magistrate to have the legitimacy of their arrest determined, and to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a trial conducted within a reasonably short time frame in which they are entitled to professional counsel and defence. I consider the limitations that Pierre Trudeau's evil Charter placed on these rights to be outrageous and indefensible. I think it is absurd, however, to say that each person has the right to decide his, her or its own gender, regardless of the facts of biological sex, and to impose acceptance of this decision upon the rest of us through anti-discrimination laws.

I believe than man is prone to turning away from the true God and the higher good and to making idols out of the lower worldly goods. While I recognize race and nation to have been among the darkest and most dangerous of the idols so constructed in the past, I believe that today the greater danger and evil lies in the opposite direction, in making an idol out of our common humanity, as progressive liberalism has clearly done in its determination to usher in a post-racial, post-national era. Liberalism has embrace mass immigration as the solution to the fertility problem in the West caused by its own anti-natalist agenda of materialist, me-first consumerism and complete sexual liberty backed by effective contraceptive technology and easily accessible abortion. The effect that this has been having on Western nations and the Caucasian race can only be described as autogenocidal. To anyone who still possesses a modicum of moral sanity to ethnically cleanse one's own people as liberalism is doing is a worse form of genocide than when an enemy tribe or nation is slaughtered in war and I condemn it as such. Liberals, progressives and other leftists will undoubtedly call me a lot of nasty names for doing so but I don't care because they are all unbearably stupid and my judgement on the matter is sane, intelligent, sound, righteous and true, even if I do say so myself.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen

Feminism is the Enemy of Freedom and Justice

The most insightful commentary that I have run across on the recent media attempt to torpedo the campaign of Donald Trump with crude and lewd remarks he was recorded having made ten years ago is by Dr. Stephen Baskerville the Professor of Government and Director of the International Politics and Policy Program at Patrick Henry College. His article, entitled “The Sexual Revolution Triumphant”, which was posted at the Daily Caller on the Monday after the second presidential debate, makes the observation that both candidates are “not only products but pioneers of the Sexual Revolution, and together they personify its political dynamic.” Trump, Dr. Baskerville goes on to explain, represents the hedonism of the earlier stage of the Revolution. The later, political side of the Revolution eventually morphed into “the more aggressive and authoritarian feminism.”

The feminists were at first allies of the hedonists, Dr. Baskerville points out, but they “replaced the old sexual morality, defined by religion and enforced by social disapproval, with new political definitions of sin, defined by state functionaries and enforced by gendarmes” eventually creating a “political dynamic that both encouraged unrestrained sex and then punished men for engaging in it.” The success of the political side of the Sexual Revolution can be seen in the fact that in response to the Trump tape scandal, the outrage even of conservatives has not been expressed in terms of traditional morality but rather those of “the political ideology that has replaced it: ‘sexism,’ ‘misogyny,’ ‘sexual harassment,’ and other new political jargon that no one fully understands because it can be expanded to mean anything.”

What the liberal reporters who broke the story about the Trump tape hoped to accomplish, as I pointed out in my last essay, was to divide the Republican Party and, more specifically, to turn moral and religious conservatives against Trump. What Dr. Baskerville’s insightful observation about how conservatives have been using the jargon of feminist ideology rather than of traditional morality to condemn Trump’s remarks means is that to the extent that the liberal attack on Trump has succeeded in achieving its ends it has also succeeded in enlisting the champions of traditional morality and sexuality on the side of their mortal enemy feminism.

That feminism is the mortal enemy of more than just traditional morality can be seen in the follow up to the tape scandal. After the second presidential debate, in which Trump wiped the floor with Clinton, the media began publishing allegations of groping and other sexual misconduct against Trump. The allegations, by contrast with those made against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, are of exceedingly low credibility. The accused is an exceedingly wealthy, high profile businessman and celebrity, and thus a goldmine for anyone who could credibly bring a lawsuit against him over something like this, yet the accusations pertain to events that supposedly happened as far back as thirty years. One of the accusers seems to have lifted her accusation verbatim from a Velvet Underground song. The question of Trump’s guilt or innocence, however, is not what concerns me here, but rather how liberals and feminists responded to those who questioned the credibility of these accusations.

Let us use George Takei, the actor, best known for playing Hikaru Sulu in Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek series and other versions of the franchise, as an example. Takei has a large social media following and is outspoken in his progressive opinions. On Friday, October 14th, at 7:22 am, Takei tweeted the following:

“If you ever wonder why sexual assault victims don’t come forward, just look what’s happening now to those who do.”

Let us now parse this interesting remark of Mr. Sulu’s and see what we can discover. Implicit in these snide and snarky words is the idea that we ought never to question the credibility of claims of sexual assault. If we question the credibility of those who make accusations of sexual assault, victims of sexual assault won’t come forward, therefore by questioning the credibility of accusers, we are preventing victims from obtaining justice. Shame on us.

Do you see where this kind of reasoning leads? To say that it is wrong to question the credibility of an accuser is to say that an accuser has the right to be presumed to be telling the truth. If that seems reasonable to you, then you need to recognize that giving accusers the right of presumption of truth is incompatible with another right long regarded as a bedrock principle of justice in Western Civilization and especially the English speaking world. That is the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

This principle, which goes back as far as the jurisprudence of the Roman Empire - ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (1) – has been fundamental to English Common Law for centuries. It is closely related to the principle that Sir William Blackstone, writing in the eighteenth century, formulated as “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” a principle that also has ancient roots. Socrates, in Plato’s Gorgias, famously declared that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one. In the Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis, Abraham pled with the Lord not to destroy the wicked cities if ten righteous men could be found therein and He agreed. In the event, not finding even that many, He sent His angels to rescue Lot and his family, before the fire and brimstone fell.

These ancient and traditional principles are fundamental to our entire way of doing justice which, whatever its flaws may be, for all earthly justice is flawed, is superior to any system that has ever operated on the opposite concept of a presumption of guilt. These principles are far too important to sacrifice to the idols of feminist ideology.

Yet that is exactly what feminism expects us to do. George Takei did not just beam his sentiments out of thin air. The idea that those who accuse others of sexual harassment, assault and rape have a right to be believed, because questioning their veracity discourages victims from coming forward, is part of what feminists have been brainwashing their victims into thinking in gender studies classrooms for years. The result, naturally, of teaching a particular kind of accuser that she has the right to be believed, has been an avalanche of false accusations which have ruined the education, careers, and lives of many. Just ask the Duke University lacrosse team or the poor sap that Mattress Girl got her five minutes in the spotlight for defaming. These are the sort of things that come from allowing an ideological movement, whose leading personalities in the 1970s and 1980s made the absurd claims that all heterosexual intercourse is rape and that rape is an instrument whereby men as a class oppress women as a class thereby making all men culpable to have this much influence over the minds of youth.

Dr. Baskerville, in the article that I referenced at the beginning of this essay, argues that the success of the Sexual Revolution in replacing the clear language of traditional morality with the malleable and expansive ideological jargon of feminism, so that even supposedly conservative politicians feel compelled to use the latter rather than the former when condemning Trump’s locker room talk, is ominous because it is the nature of the new terminology to create a rationalization for a power grab on the part of the kind of radicals who find their champion in Hillary Clinton. This, along with what I have pointed out above about how feminism’s insistence upon a right of presumption of truth for accusers in sexual harassment/assault and rape cases would mean the abandonment of the basic principle of the right of presumption of innocence for the accused, demonstrates how feminist ideology is a threat to the principles of freedom and justice that have been essential elements of the tradition of Western civilized societies for centuries.

(1) The burden is on he who asserts, not he who denies.

Discrimination and Justice

Imagine the following scenario. You are at a bar or a nightclub and someone comes up to you, expressing romantic interest, and asks you for your name and contact information. This person is of the same sex as you and you, not being into that, politely explain this and turn this person down. The next day, you are notified that you have been charged with discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation. You think the charge is absurd but find yourself dragged into a long, expensive, legal battle, at the end of which, a judgement is made against you, and you are slapped with a fine that exceeds your annual gross income and which you cannot possibly pay.

“Preposterous,” you say. “That could never happen!”

Why not?

“It is not discrimination for a heterosexual to turn down an advance from someone of the same sex.”

Actually, yes it is. To discriminate is to observe a difference or make a distinction and to act as if that difference or distinction mattered. A man, who turns down a sexual advance from another man, because he himself is heterosexual, is discriminating against potential sexual partners on the grounds of both their sex and their sexual orientation.

“That cannot be right. There is nothing wrong with a person rejecting an advance from someone he is not attracted to.”

That is my point precisely. There is nothing wrong with it. Furthermore, since there is nothing wrong with it, there is nothing wrong with discrimination qua discrimination.

It is a matter of basic logic folks. A heterosexual man, being attracted only to women, will turn down advances from other men. In doing so, he is making and acting upon a distinction between men and women, and therefore discriminating. If discrimination is wrong in and of itself, then it is wrong for him to do so. Since, however, everyone who is not crazy knows that there is nothing wrong with a man who is attracted only to women turning down another man, it must therefore follow that discrimination in itself is not wrong.

As impeccable as this logic is, the conclusion will still be resisted by those who, lacking all capacity for thinking outside of the “discrimination is wrong” box, will sputter in helpless rage at this demonstration of how everything that they have been brainwashed into thinking by the news media, popular entertainment and the Stalinist indoctrination camps that are our public educational system all their lives is wrong. To pour salt on their wounds, I will point out that logic brings us to the same conclusion if the scenario is altered so that it is a lesbian rather than a heterosexual man rejecting the advances of a male suitor.

“Not so fast”, someone might object, “to arrive at the conclusion that discrimination is not intrinsically wrong from that starting point would requires that the lesbian be right or at least not wrong in rejecting her male suitor, and does not traditional Christian morality teach that lesbianism is wrong?”

Traditional Christian morality does indeed teach that lesbianism is wrong but not in a way that would affect the outcome of our argument. It is not the lesbian’s rejection of men that traditional Christian morality condemns as sinful but her having sexual relations with other women. It is modern liberalism that runs into a problem here, because liberal ethics seeks to simultaneously affirm the goodness of homosexuality and the injustice of discrimination. The lesbian’s choice of sexual partners, however, is no less discriminatory based on sex than that of the heterosexual male – or for that matter those of the homosexual male and the heterosexual woman.

It is not wrong to discriminate. That does not mean that it is always right to discriminate, of course, but it does mean that the rightness or wrongness of an act of discrimination lies elsewhere than in the mere fact of its being discriminatory. This is one of the reasons why laws against discrimination are themselves unjust.

It is a little over fifty year since the first anti-discrimination bill, the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The United Kingdom followed suit with the Race Relations Act of 1965 and Canada with the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977. Other Western countries brought in similar legislation and the US, UK and Canada have all subsequently amended and expanded their initial anti-discriminatory bills.

Advocates of this sort of law point to injustices of the era in order to justify the introduction of these laws but the interesting thing to note about that is that the injustices in question consisted of laws and government policies whereas the anti-discrimination bills forbade private acts of discrimination. Segregation in the southern United States, for example, the justification given for the US Civil Rights Act, was the separation of the races by laws enacted by the state governments in the late 1800s, laws which were struck down by the American Supreme Court ten years before the US Civil Rights Act, which forbade discrimination on the part of businesses, employers, and those looking to sell or rent a house, was passed.

It is one thing to tell a magistrate, responsible for hearing and settling disputes between two parties, that he is required to base his ruling on the facts of the case and not on the wealth and social status of the parties in question. This has been recognized as a basic principle of justice from time immemorial and the violation of it is the classic example of a kind of discrimination that is also an injustice.

It is a different matter altogether to tell an employer that he cannot discriminate in his hiring practices. Imagine if the government were to pass a law that says to employers “if a member of group X comes to you looking for a job, you are required to hire him, and you must never fire him.” That such a law would be a grotesque injustice to employers is easily recognizable by all sane people but laws which forbid discrimination on the part of employers inevitably translate into such laws in practice. If the law says you are not allowed as an employer to discriminate against members of group X, and a member of group X applies to be hired and is turned down, he can then charge you with discrimination and you will be faced with the burden of proving that your decision was not based on discrimination. That is not something that can be proven to a human judge, however, because discrimination takes place in the heart and mind which the judge cannot see for himself and can hardly be required to take your word for it. Therefore, the only way to protect yourself as an employer from a false charge under a law that says “you cannot discriminate against members of group X” is to treat the law as if it said “you are required to hire members of group X.”

Laws that forbid discrimination by placing the onus of proof upon the accused rather than the accuser and by presuming to dictate what we can and cannot think or feel in our thoughts and hearts violate our civilization’s traditional principles of justice and are experiments in totalitarian thought control that would be right at home in kind of Communist hellhole that Stalin and Mao ran and George Orwell satirized. Which is why, unless these laws are revoked, we can expect that someday in the not so distant future we will see the absurd hypothetical scenario with which I began this essay, become an absurd reality. It is the fundamental nature of these laws to produce such an outcome.

Equality is not Justice and Justice is not Equality

Western civilization in its classical and Christian manifestations saw the Good as being the chief end for which human beings, individually and as a collective whole, were to strive. Goodness, like the closely related ideas of Truth and Beauty, was what it was in itself rather than whatever we decided it to be, and it was something we were to seek after and discover. Justice, the condition and act of being and doing what is right, was the particular aspect of Goodness that was the end for which man organized his societies politically, that is to say under law and government.

Today, Western civilization has passed through its Modern era into what is called the Postmodern age, although Übermodern would probably be a more apt term for it as it takes the traits of the modern and magnifies them to the nth degree. In these eras, Justice has been supplanted by a usurper. The name of this usurper is Equality although it sometimes tries to steal the name of Justice as well as its position. Whenever, for example, you hear “Justice” spoken of with “Social” as a modifier then you can be sure that it is this modern Pretender that is being spoken of and not true and legitimate Justice.

The superficial similarities between Equality and certain aspects of Justice are such that the differences between the two need to be made absolutely clear so as to avoid confusion. Equality is the idea that in some way or another people either are or ought to be all the same and therefore should be treated the same way. Justice is the idea that all people ought to be treated right.

It is easy to see how the confusion between the two concepts can arise. If we start with Justice’s assertion that all people ought to be treated right we can see that it is saying in a sense that all people ought to be treated the same way, that is to say, rightly. It is when we start with Equality’s assertion that all people ought to be treated the same way that a problem becomes apparent because we cannot from this assertion derive any sense of the idea that all people should be treated right. This is because treating people right and treating people the same are not identical concepts. Often to treat two people right means to treat each differently.

Allow me to illustrate what I mean by this. If you were to come across a stranger in need and welcome him into your home, treating him as if he were a member of your family, your actions would meet with widespread acclamation and you would find yourself toasted for your generosity, liberality, warm-hearted humanity, and countless other virtues. If, however, your own father, who begat you and lovingly raised you, who provided you with everything you need and gave you your start in life, were to come to you and you were to turn him aside and treat him as a perfect stranger, you would find yourself rightly condemned as a cold-blooded ingrate. In the latter instance as in the former you will have treated people the same way whether they were family members or strangers. In the second instance, however, you will not have done right by doing so.

This, by the way, is the difference between the image and the reality of Equality. Equality projects the image of treating strangers like they were family, but its reality is the treating of family members as if they were strangers.

Equality is sometimes confused with the idea that within a country the law should be the same for all people, governors and governed alike. This idea is a fundamental principle of our legal tradition. Although the principle is often spoken of as isonomy or “equality under law” there is an important difference between it and the concept of Equality. The difference is that whereas the latter asserts that all the people under the law are the same, the principle asserts that the law is the same for all people. This is not a matter of semantics. When we say that the law is the same for all people we are saying that the law is one and it is this, the unity of the law, that is the essence of the principle. To assert that it is the people, who are many, that are the same is to assert nonsense.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.” No greater statement of utter tripe and poppycock has ever been penned. To say that all men are created equal is to say that all men are created the same. Apart from the most peripheral and trivial of matters – that we are all born and all die, that we all have two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes, etc. - this is patently untrue. In matters of ability, both physical and mental, personality, quality, and character human beings are like the proverbial snowflake – no two are identical. Nor would any sane person want them to be.

“We are all equal”, those who have been conditioned to accept without question the doctrine of Equality might object to my reasoning above, “in terms of our worth or value.” While that sounds very nice and may give us warm, fuzzy, tingly feelings inside, it does not bear up under scrutiny. The words “worth” and “value” are marketplace words. They can refer to the amount that you are willing to pay for something if you are a prospective buyer, or the amount that you are willing to receive in exchange for something if you are a prospective seller. They can also refer to the intrinsic qualities of the objects upon which the buyer and seller base their decision as to how much they are willing to pay or accept. (1) To say that all people are of equal value, therefore, is either to reduce all people to the level of commodities for sale in the marketplace, which is hardly in keeping with the humanitarianism professed by most egalitarians who in other contexts would most strenuously object to the objectification of people, or to assert them to be equal in terms of some intrinsic quality that is unobservable to ordinary human beings for in all observable intrinsic qualities people are definitely not equal.

That unobservable intrinsic quality is sometimes further described as being our “worth in God’s eyes”. This is tautological, providing us with no new information about what that quality might be, for if it is unobservable to the human eye, who else can see it but God? More importantly, one would be hard pressed to find evidence for this concept in authoritative divine revelation.

The God Who revealed Himself in the words of the Christian Scriptures and in the Person of Jesus Christ is a God of Justice not of Equality. While He holds men accountable to the single standard which is His Law, He holds them accountable in varying degrees in accordance with whether they have received His Law in full or only partly through their consciences. (2) He has given men One mediator through Whom grace, mercy, and salvation can be received because it is only through the cross of Jesus Christ that He can be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” (3) In the Church which is His body, there is “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female”, not because these distinctions are unimportant or are to be eliminated but because “ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. (4) As with the concept of the “one law for all” in our legal tradition, it is unity – the unity of God’s Law, His Gospel, and His Church and, of course, of the One True and Living God Himself – that is taught in those passages and verses that are sometimes misconstrued as teaching egalitarianism. The God of the Christian Scriptures created people differently, giving each their own abilities, qualities, talents, and gifts, and while He holds all people accountable to one Law, He holds each person accountable for the use made of what was given him in particular. That is the difference between Justice and Equality.

(1) The difference between these two meanings of value is what Oscar Wilde alluded to in his famous quip about the cynic who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
(2) Romans 2
(3) Romans 3:26
(4) Galatians 3:28