No, Andrew Scheer’s “Social Conservatism” Did Not Lose the Election

In light of the public discussion that has taken place since the Dominion Election on October 21st, a point that I made in my reflections on the outcome of that election deserves reiteration. The views which Andrew Scheer, Conservative leader, was said to hold on abortion and same-sex marriage, are not the reason the Conservatives failed to win the election, nor are they even a significant contributing factor to the loss. The evasive, wishy-washy, manner in which Mr. Scheer handled these matters when they were raised during the campaign may have been a contributing factor, but the right-wing views attributed to him were not.

The vast majority of commentators in the mainstream media, being overwhelmingly progressive, maintain otherwise, of course, but in this, as in most things, they are completely wrong. Indeed, on some level they know that they are wrong, which is the very reason they insist so strongly and so frequently on their mistaken notion that social conservatism cannot be sold to the Canadian public. They want it to be true and believe that if they tell Canadians it is true often and loudly enough that will make it true. The principle they are operating upon is one famously spelled out by an infamous, Austrian psychopath in the tenth chapter of his memoirs, ninety-four years ago.

Andrew Scheer in an interview with the Canadian Press shortly after the election said that he believed it was possible for someone with conservative views on abortion and same-sex marriage to be Prime Minister of Canada. He was right, but it would have been better if he had been saying this firmly, strongly, and consistently prior to the election. A few days later, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh responded by saying “You cannot have Mr. Scheer’s beliefs and be the Prime Minister of Canada. It’s pretty clear.” One wonders if he was able to say this with a straight face. Of all the electable parties in Canada, Mr. Singh’s takes the position furthest to the left on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and they were the biggest losers in the election, dropping from third to fourth place in total number of seats, and going down four percentage points in the popular vote. Mr. Scheer’s party, by contrast, increased their number of seats and their percentage of the popular vote. If the election results say anything about social conservatism, and it does not, it is not what Mr. Singh thinks.

Let me put it to you plainly. Some people claim to believe that it is every woman’s right to terminate the lives of her children, at least prior to their births. Of these lunatics, the number that would have voted Conservative had someone other than Andrew Scheer been leading the party is miniscule. It is probably not enough to make the difference between the win or the loss of a single seat.

Conversely, there are sane people in our country, a lot more than the mainstream media would like you to think, who rightly consider it to be morally outrageous that in Canada women are legally able to obtain abortions right up to the moment of birth. This includes people with a wide range of differing opinion as to what legal limitations there ought to be on abortion. Some would like to see it prohibited only in the third trimester, others would like to see it restricted to the first, and others still would ban it altogether. There are those who would make an exception in cases where the pregnancy is the result of rape, while others would say that to do so is to punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. Some maintain that abortion should be permissible when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mothers, others would say that while saving the life of the mother is certainly a priority, termination of the pregnancy is permissible only as an unintended consequence, never as the intended outcome. There are also differences of opinion as to who bears the burden of criminal guilt over abortion – the doctor, the mother, or both – and what the penalty ought to be. Those of us who take the most hardline anti-abortion position possible and would ban any and all abortions from the moment of conception with no exceptions but with strict penalties for all involved are, sadly, a minority but those who think that there should be legal restrictions of some sort are much larger in number, almost certainly the vast majority.

Let us make two unwarranted and absurd assumptions about such people. The first is that these are all aware of the difference between their own position and the post-1988 status quo and therefore of the fact that Parliamentary legislation would be necessary to arrive at the place in which they want the country to be. The second is that they view everything other than abortion through the lens of ceteris paribus and so choose whom to vote for based solely on this one issue. How, given these assumptions, would Scheer’s campaign have appealed to such people in the last election?

The answer is that while Scheer’s pro-life and socially conservative background would not have driven them away, like it would all the hard-line pro-choicers who would never vote Conservative anyway, his insistence, in response to progressive badgering, that he would not re-open the issue, would have given them no incentive to vote Conservative. What Scheer was saying was that the Conservatives, under his leadership, would in practice, act no differently than the Grits or the Socialists. In which case there was no reason whatsoever for pro-life, socially conservative, people to vote for the party that has long taken their votes for granted, while doing nothing to deserve them.

The conclusion is inevitable – while Scheer’s stated views in the past on abortion and same-sex marriage were not a significant contributing factor to the Conservative loss his waffling on these same issues during the campaign was. The weasely, mealy-mouthed, evasive manner in which he conducted this waffling, did not help things much either.

For decades progressive politicians and pundits have been telling the Conservatives that they need to limit their platform to fiscal conservatism because social conservatism loses elections. For far too long, the leadership of the Conservative Party has been listening to them. The exact opposite is the case. How many people practice rigid, self-denying, austerity in their private lives? Of these, how many make it their political priority that the government do the same? Fiscal conservatism is rational, sensible, and responsible, but it appeals only to economic eggheads and not the public. For most people, the immediate benefit to themselves of government spending programs will always outweigh their portion of the collective cost of government. This is the obvious political application, perhaps even more valid than the original ecological application, of Garrett Hardin’s famous parable of the “tragedy of the commons.” Nobody has ever won an election on fiscal conservatism alone. It has to be packaged with other, more appealing, policies. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were no exceptions to this rule.

This is the lesson that Andrew Scheer and the Conservative leadership ought to learn from our last Dominion election.

What are the odds that they will learn it?

When do we get to Stop Clapping?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells in the Gulag Archipelago of a conference in the Soviet Union during the days of Stalin in which a tribute was given to the tyrant and the standing ovation went on for over three hours because the NKVD were watching to see who would be the first to stop. Eventually, the director of the paper mill sat down, thus relieving everybody else, but later that night he was arrested. At the end of the interrogation, before he disappeared into the Gulag for ten years, he was reminded “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.” The same held true for all the speeches of the Soviet dictator himself. Eventually a system was devised whereby a bell would ring letting people know when they could stop clapping.

Stalin’s Soviet Union was what is known as a hard tyranny – a state where the absolute rule of the tyrant is enforced by naked force such as making people disappear into hard labour camps or just outright shooting them. Today, in a Canada whose government is once more led by a Trudeau, the son of the Communist traitor who did everything he could to replace our beloved Royal Dominion with a People’s Republic, we have what is known as a soft tyranny. The enforcers wear smiles on their faces, speak softly, and use sweet sounding words like “compassion”, “tolerance”, “understanding” and the like. Rather than forced labour camps and bullets we have sensitivity classes, the loss of jobs and careers, and Human Rights Tribunals, the last mentioned of which should perhaps be classified as medium-soft, or medium-hard tyranny. The effect, however, is remarkably similar. People are afraid to be the first to stop clapping – not for the goofy, sappy, superficial, empty-headed, shallow little twit who is a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s First Minister – but for the causes he champions, foremost among them being that of the alphabet soup gang.

Twenty years ago the average Canadian, if asked, would say that what people did behind closed doors was their own business, that if it was two men or two women rather than a man and a woman it wasn’t hurting anyone else, and as long as they weren’t shoving it down everyone else’s throats, we shouldn’t care. In the Canada of the Current Year, it is no longer safe to take that attitude. Today, we are all expected to agree – in the name of diversity, no less – that if a man likes men, or a woman likes women, or a man thinks he’s a woman, or whatever, that it is wonderful, superb, marvelous, and of course, absolutely fabulous, that they are that way, and if your enthusiasm is detectably less than that of the next person, you might be suspected of being a horrible, homophobic bigot with criminal thoughts from which the public must be protected.

If you think this to be an exaggeration contemplate the words of Justin Trudeau during his recent visit to Auschwitz “Tolerance is never sufficient. Humanity must learn to love our differences.” Those differences which we must learn to love do not include, of course, differing in opinion with Trudeau and other progressives. Observe also the amount of pressure that is now being placed on public officials and politicians of all parties, to attend the ostentatious displays of depravity and bad taste that are now known merely as Pride parades, “gay” being too limited a designation to please the crowd that calls itself something like LGBTTQAEIOUANDSOMETIMESY.

As bad as it is that progressives like the Trudeau Liberals insist on bullying everyone into professing conformity with their “enlightened” way of thinking, it is even worse when this sort of thing goes on in the church. Which is exactly what has been going on in the Anglican Church of Canada. At the General Synod of the ACC, which convened this month in Toronto, a motion was heard proposing that the marriage canon be changed to allow for same-sex marriages. When the motion, which to pass required two thirds support from the bishops, clergy, and lay delegates each, was initially defeated by a small margin, the activists who have been agitating for this change despite its clear and obvious violation of the teachings of both Scripture and Church tradition and the fact that it threatens the ACC’s standing with the See of Canterbury and the larger Anglican Communion worldwide which, in contrast with the ACC and the Episcopal Church (USA) in North America, is overwhelmingly orthodox, demanded a recount, and several of the bishops declared that they would allow same-sex marriages within their dioceses with or without the canon change, on the grounds that it is not explicitly prohibited. One wonders how these bishops would react if one of their parishes were to justify holding a Black Mass, complete with human sacrifice, with the same reasoning (assuming this is not explicitly prohibited by canon law – I have not bothered to check). At any rate, the next day the vote was examined, it was determined that someone’s vote had been misclassified, and Archbishop Fred Hiltz declared the motion to have passed. It requires a second vote at the next General Synod before the change can take place, although the same bishops, with the same specious reasoning, have said that they will be going ahead and authorizing the ceremonies anyway.

I am not going to spend a whole lot of time explaining why the Synod had no business hearing such a proposal in the first place. The arguments I put forward in my essay “Why the Church Should Not Perform Same Sex Blessings” when my own Diocese (Rupert’s Land) approved the blessing of same-sex couples four years ago are as applicable to the fiction of same-sex marriage. It can be added that the Founder of the Christian Church, when asked about the lawfulness of divorce, pointed out that in the beginning God made mankind “male and female” and said that “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh”, concluding that “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Matt. 19:4-6) If man ought not to break up the union of marriage because God is its Author, how much less ought he to mutate it beyond recognition. The Anglican Church has considered itself since the Reformation to be both Catholic – a Church in organic and organization descent from the Apostolic Church in possession of magisterial authority to teach the Word and administer the Sacraments – and Reformed – acknowledging the revealed Word of God as the highest authority. The Church’s authority, therefore, does not extend to changing the truth of God, which is not subject to democratic vote, and to make this change makes complete mockery of the admirable canon of St. Vincent of Lérins, supposedly revered by Anglicans, in which Catholic orthodoxy is defined as holding to that which “has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.”

My point, rather, at least for the sake of this essay, is that the same kind of smiley-faced Stalinism that is the essence of the Liberalism of Justin “Sunny Ways” Trudeau, has been the tactic used by the Gaystapo to effect this transformation in the Canadian arm of the Church of Richard Hooker, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson and C. S. Lewis. As Dr. David W. Virtue reports:

VIRTUEONLINE has received word that intimidation and bullying took place behind the scenes at the recent Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada over the push for same sex marriage…Here is what VOL learned. When the Synod members broke up into small discussion groups, some members complained about being “intimidated” and “harassed.” Archbishop Fred Hiltz spoke against harassment tactics, but the victims weren't identified. It wasn't until later that the identity of the "harassed" was made public. Those bishops and their delegates from the orthodox dioceses of Caledonia, Yukon, and the Arctic, because of their opposition to same-sex marriage, were identified as the victims.

The same harassed and intimidated bishops have issued an excellent dissenting statement, which I recommend that you read in its entirety, drawing your attention in particular to the following:

The Resolution as carried does not provide adequate protection for the consciences of dioceses, clergy and congregations. We are concerned for all those of a traditional conscience on marriage within the Anglican Church of Canada.

There is plenty of reason for such concern. Intimidation, harassment, and bullying have been the tactics of the pro-homosexual activists within the Church all along, as anyone who has followed the sad story of how they have gotten their way over “same-sex blessings”, by hook or by crook, in diocese after diocese, beginning with New Westminster in 2002, is well aware. Now that they have a sympathizer in the Prime Minister’s Office, these bullying wolves-in-sheep-and-shepherd’s clothing, are even more emboldened and brazen about it.

It is somewhat ironic that these Social Justice Warriors claim to be motivated by the desire to protect the alphabet soupers from something called “homophobia”, when this term would seem to more accurately describe the fear and hatred that are sure to be generated by their tactics than that to which it is more usually applied, namely the orthodox doctrine that male and female were designed to be attracted to each other, that homosexual erotic relations are sinful, and that forgiveness and freedom from such can be found in Jesus Christ through faith and repentance. Stalin, was not exactly highly esteemed after his passing, except among idiotic liberal academics, and eventually, when the progressive regime falls, as all regimes that govern by fear do, Justin Trudeau and those marching under the banner of the Pride that precedes their inevitable fall, will be remembered in the same way.

In the meantime, kudos to the orthodox bishops who dared to sign their name to the dissent. One wonders when all other Canadians will get to stop clapping.

The Collective Madness of the Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Puritanism, Theocracy, and Social Conservatism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ends of Social Policy

A policy is a general principle that a person, business, or government seeks to follow when making decisions and acting upon those decisions. Every government has many policies each of which falls into one of two broad categories, foreign and domestic. Foreign policy includes the policies the government follows in its external relations with other countries, whereas domestic policy consists of government policies that are internal, that pertain to the government’s own country. Domestic policies fall into a number of smaller categories. Fiscal policy concerns government revenue and spending whereas economic policy pertains to the production and distribution of goods and services and all related matters. A government’s social policy consists of the principles which determine government decisions that affect how people interact with each other socially.




Policies, including social policy, have both ends and means. Ends are the goals that a government seeks to accomplish. Its policies are directed towards the achievement of those goals. Means are the methods and instruments which a government uses to achieve its ends. Among the means which government has at its disposal are its powers of taxation and legislation and the funding it provides for various projects out of the revenue it receives from taxes. Policy determines the means, the ends determine the policy. It is not the means by which government enacts its policies that is our subject of discussion but the ends to which those policies are directed.



What should be the ends, the goals, the purpose, of public social policy?



Public discussion of this question is usually framed as a debate between the conservative and the liberal position. This is a false dichotomy in more ways than one. First, the conservative and liberal position, while very different, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In the best of circumstances, they are complementary positions. Second, there is a third position, the progressive position, which since at least World War II has had more influence on public social policy than either conservatism or liberalism. It is because of the success of progressivism that conservatism and liberalism are no longer complementary positions.



What are the conservative, liberal, and progressive positions?



The conservative position on public social policy is that government and its laws should support and strengthen the traditional social order. The liberal position is that social interaction and cooperation should consist of the free choices of individuals with which government should not interfere. Interestingly, this can be stated in one of two ways. The first is that government should adopt a policy of laissez faire on social issues, the second is that government should have no social policy whatsoever. These sound like contradictory statements but they amount to the same thing. The progressive position is that government should actively seek to correct the “injustices” in the traditional social order by replacing it with a new, rationally engineered, social order built upon ideals of equality and fairness.



Progressivism has been very successful, not in the sense of having achieved its unachievable goal of eradicating evil and suffering from human existence, but in the sense of influencing public social policy so that it serves progressive rather than conservative or liberal ends. The success of progressivism has severely undermined and weakened the traditional social order.



To understand how progressivism has undermined the social order, we must first look at what the traditional social order is and how it emerges from the natural order of the family, after which we will look at a few examples of how government social engineering has damaged this order.



The traditional social order is part of a society’s inherited way of life. It is a complex set of relationships, responsibilities attached to those relationships, and rules governing those relationships, which slowly evolves as a society passes it down from one generation to the next. Although it varies from society to society and changes over the course of a society’s history it contains elements which are the same in every society in every time and place. This is because it is an expansion of the natural social order which arises out of human nature and can be found in the family.



The family is the most basic unit of social organization. It is not based upon a contract, an agreement between its members to cooperate together for their mutual benefit, but rather upon the natural relationships of its members. A natural relationship is a matter of who one person is to another not a matter of who two people chose to be to each other. All human children are born from a woman. They are her children and she is their mother. That is their relationship to each other. All children born from a woman were sired by a man. They are his children and he is their father. That is their relationship to each other. All people who have the same father and the same mother are siblings, brothers if they are male, sisters if they are female. That is their relationship to each other. The people who bear these relationships to one another make up a family.



It is the nature of human beings that these relationships come with responsibilities. Human children are born helpless and it is therefore the responsibility of the mother who conceived, bore and gave birth to them and of the father who sired them, to love and care for the children they brought into the world. This responsibility is not optional but is the binding responsibility that we call duty. A mother has a duty to nurture and watch over her children and a father has a duty to provide for and protect his children. Children, in turn, have a duty to love and obey their parents. Contrary to the claims of eighteenth century liberalism duties and authority do not derive their validity from personal consent. They arise in the family out of the essential nature of blood relationships.



There is one family relationship that is different in kind from all the others. The relationship between husband and wife is not like the relationship between father and son, mother and daughter, brother and sister. It is not a blood relationship. A man is not born a husband to a woman or a woman born a wife to a man. It is not an automatic relationship but one which must be entered into. This does not mean that it is an artificial, contractual relationship the terms of which we are free to define in whatever way pleases us. It too is a natural relationship, albeit one that lacks the intrinsic permanency of a blood relationship. We have seen how a father has a natural responsibility to protect and provide for the children he sires and a mother has a natural responsibility to nurture and care for the children she bears. Implicit within this is a shared responsibility on the part of both the father and the mother to cooperate with the other in looking after and raising the children they have brought into the world together. This shared responsibility creates the need for a relationship between a father and mother and it is to answer this need that the relationship we call marriage exists. A marriage is created by a set of mutual vows in which a man vows to take a woman as his wife and to be a husband to her and the woman vows to take the man as her husband and be a wife to him. In vowing this, the man and woman are vowing to live together and love each other for the rest of their lives and to raise their children together.



The relationship of marriage unites more than just a husband and wife. It unites families into an extended social network. The need for marriage generates the need for community. A family cannot survive beyond one generation in isolation from other families. Since human beings have an instinctual aversion to incest which manifests itself in a universal taboo against the practice, a man must marry a woman from outside his immediate family and vice versa. Therefore families must live in communities with other families so that when their children are old enough they can marry and perpetuate the family. This is not the only reason families form communities but it is the most important.



As network of human society expands outward from the essential relationships in the nuclear family it becomes more complex and therefore requires more complex social arrangements in order to function. These arrangements and the rules necessary to maintain them are not something that came about at a specific point in time when a group of people sat down and drew them all up on paper. They came about gradually as society became more complex and the need for them arose. They are neither fixed in stone nor infinitely malleable. They change over time as circumstances change and as the collected experience and wisdom of the community grows. Since the needs they meet arise out of human nature, however, much remains constant within these arrangements. The community passes them down from one generation to the next, making the necessary adjustments wherever necessary. This is why they are called the traditional social order, a tradition being something that is passed on from one generation to the next.



Government is not the source of a traditional social order, which can neither be rationally planned nor legislated into being. Rather it is the other way around, the traditional social order is the basis of the constitution (1) of a society from which government derives its legitimate authority. Just because government cannot create something, however, does not mean that it cannot affect it. The laws government passes can have either a positive or a negative effect upon the social order. When government does not respect a community’s social arrangements as they have been agreed upon, passed down, and slowly modified through time and when it introduces major changes to these arrangements to make them conform to a set of abstract ideals thought up by social planners, the laws it passes will have a negative effect upon the social order.



These are exactly the sort of laws which have been passed by Western governments since at least the end of World War II. In the 1960’s and 70’s, for example, Western governments amended divorce laws to make “no-fault divorces” available. A no-fault divorce is a legal dissolution of marriage that is granted without requiring that one spouse sue the other for violation of marriage vows and without legal penalty to either party. The result of the passing of these laws is that marriage is now less binding, less permanent, than a business contract.



The argument most often used by those who favour no-fault divorce and are glad that it was introduced by our governments to justify their position relies upon liberal presuppositions. It goes along this line that if a man and a woman marry and discover that they are not happy living together then we as a society should not force them to stay together in misery when they could be happy apart. Beneath this line of reasoning lies the idea that each person as an individual has a right to pursue his own happiness and that this right outweighs both his society’s need for stability and security in the family and his children’s need for a father and a mother who love and are committed to them and to each other. This idea comes out of the liberal notion that the individual comes first and is more important than the family, community, or society.



Yet, while no-fault divorce laws may rest upon an ideologically liberal foundation, they are manifestly inconsistent with liberal social policy. They are not an example of government taking a laissez-faire, hands off approach to social arrangements but of government actively intruding itself into social arrangements so as to radically transform an existing social institution and pervert it from its original purpose.



It is often difficult to get people with a strong belief in liberal individualism to understand this. Such people often look at no-fault divorce as an issue in which one side, the liberals, say that people should live with whoever they want to live with for as long as they want to live with them without outside interference, whereas the other side, the conservatives, want the government to force people intro particular living arrangements. This assessment is very superficial and shallow. Conservatives did not think up the idea that a man and woman should marry each other for life and then use the government to impose this idea upon everyone else. Marriage is a social arrangement that predates government. This is true whether one accepts Christian and Jewish Urgeschichte in which it was instituted by God in the Garden of Eden or the anthropological explanation that it began as an arrangement between families in prehistorical tribal societies. (2) That it was a binding covenant consisting of life-long vows was not something that government added to it. It is active government legislation that has reduced it to something less than what it was. (3)



The reason liberal individualists fail to grasp this because of their extremely limited understanding of voluntary human behaviour. They understand human arrangements to be voluntary only if they were thought up and agreed upon by individuals qua individuals. If individuals did not think up and agree upon their own arrangements for themselves, the liberal individualist thinks, they must have been thought up by some other group of individuals and imposed upon them by the government. He does not get that social arrangements arise out of a process called tradition that involves all members of a society, past, present, and future and therefore he does not see that government interference with these arrangements is at least as bad, and probably far more so, than government interference with the choices of individuals.



In the last two decades Western governments introduced a new round of progressive interference in the ancient social institution of marriage. This was the introduction of “same-sex marriage”. The public debate over this government initiative has reached new heights of absurdity. Conservatives who oppose “same-sex marriage” are accused by their opponents of trying to use the government to control the lives of other people. That “same-sex marriage” is a government invention created by state interference in a traditional social institution and is therefore itself an example of state intrusion into people’s lives never seems to dawn on such people. Instead they accuse everyone who wants the definition of marriage to be what it was twenty years ago of wanting to establish a theocracy.



These changes to marital laws are not the only way in which Western governments have been undermining the social order of their countries. By establishing bureaucracies which set and enforce universal standards of education throughout their countries, governments have wrested control of local public schools from parents and community. They then transformed those schools into indoctrination centres that program children with values that are often contrary to those passed on by parents in the home. Western governments have created vast networks of programs through which the government undertakes to look after people when they are sick, unemployed, impoverished, aged, etc. These programs are not temporary measures for helping people out in emergencies but permanent programs whereby the government undertakes to ensure that all needs are met from cradle to grave. This weakens the traditional social network by causing people to look to and rely upon government first rather than upon their families, churches and communities.



All of these are examples of a progressive social policy, a policy in which the government actively sets out to reshape the social order.



This influence of progressivism over social policy in recent decades affects our answer to the question of what the proper ends of public social policy should be. The basic conservative answer to that question is that public social policy, policy that determines government actions which affect society, should have as its end the support and strengthening of the traditional social order. In the days before all of this progressive meddling began the laissez faire policy of the true liberal would have been sufficient to serve this end.



Now that progressive meddling has weakened the social order and in many areas all but destroyed it the conservative answer must be amended. It is no longer a matter of strengthening and supporting an order that to a large extent no longer exists but of reviving and restoring it.



Here, however, the conservative runs into a dilemma.



What kind of social policy can possibly serve the reactionary end of restoring the social order progressivism has ruined?



This is a dilemma because of the very nature of the traditional social order as described earlier. It is not something that can be constructed from a blue print. It cannot be planned in the abstract and drawn out on paper. It cannot be legislated into existence. This is not how it came into existence in the first place and it is not how it can be recovered.



Does this mean that the liberal social policy of laissez faire would still serve the conservative end?



For it to do so it would have to be a true laissez faire policy, not social progressivism hiding behind the guise of social liberalism. The government would have to commit itself to no longer trying to bribe people’s loyalty away from family, church, and community, to no longer actively undermining the authority of parents in the home, to cease encouraging a socially and morally destructive culture of self-indulgence. It would have to commit itself to allowing other social institutions to grow strong again and not actively opposing those who seek, through non-governmental means, a cultural revival. It would have to reject the idea that a thriving, complex, social order is something that can be planned and enacted by itself, and return social arrangements to the hands of the time-honoured process of tradition.





(1) The title of the written charter of the American Republic is “The Constitution of the United States of America” and when Americans refer to their “constitution” they are referring to this document. A country’s constitution, however, is more than just its charter. All countries, even those that do not have charters, have constitutions. A country’s constitution is the way it is organized, the way it does things, and the most important part of its constitution – even in the United States – is always unwritten.

(2) These are not mutually exclusive explanations and could be regarded as the same explanation approached from two different starting points.

(3) This is true to a lesser extent of all divorce legislation, not just the “no fault” type. Government and law were not necessary for the creation of marriage, but they have the primary, if not the sole, means of its dissolution throughout history.

Love and Marriage

On August the fourth, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker struck down Proposition 8. Proposition 8 was an amendment to the state Constitution of California voted on and passed in the November 2008 elections which declares that only sexually complementary (man and woman) marriages would be recognized as valid by the state of California. Needless to say, the overturning of Proposition 8 has resparked the debate about so-called “same-sex marriages” which the passing of the Proposition ignited 2 years ago, and which will undoubtedly flare up again whenever SCUSA issues its final ruling on the matter.

The same-sex marriage debate seems on one level to be silly and trivial, to both sides. To advocates of same-sex marriage, the idea that two men (or two women) being united in a union called marriage and recognized as such, could harm society, is ridiculous. To traditionalists (in which camp I belong) the idea that government fiat could make a same-sex relationship a marriage is as ridiculous as the suggestion that if the government were to declare two plus two to be five it would therefore be so. What then are we arguing about? A hypothetical objective observer to the debate (no such person could actually exist, of course) might ask “Why don’t the same-sex couples who wish to consider themselves married, do so, and those who consider marriage to be an exclusively man-woman relationship disagree”?

One answer is that such a compromise is not acceptable to the same-sex marriage side. It is society’s acceptance and approval they are demanding, not just to be allowed to do their own thing and to think of themselves in whatever way they wish. For the advocates of same-sex marriage to accept anything short of full societal approval vested in recognition of the official status of “married” for same-sex couples who wish that status would be concession of victory to the traditionalist side.

Likewise, for traditionalists to accept a situation in which society recognizes non-sexually complementary unions as marriages, would not be a compromise but a concession of defeat.

No compromise is therefore possible on this issue for either side. It is a zero-sum game.

It is important that the traditionalist side of this debate understand what the real issues are. To understand this, we need to recognize that “same-sex marriage” is a symptom, and not the disease itself. We should not waste our time by arguing that same-sex marriage will bring civilization crumbling to the ground (it will not). What is eroding our civilization and will lead to its collapse is liberalism, modernism, and post-modernism, apart from which there would have been no movement for same-sex marriage.

Liberalism is the disease, same-sex marriage just one of many symptoms.

What are the grounds upon which the advocates of same-sex marriage base their claims?

Essentially that argument goes like this: A) Marriage exists to make life happier for individuals who participate in marriage, B) Everybody is equally entitled to all things which make for their individual happiness, therefore C) Same-sex couples should be as entitled to marry each other as sexually complementary couples and to restrict marriage to the latter is to discriminate against the former which is an act of injustice.

Both premises and the conclusion are false as we shall see.

Before demonstrating them to be false, however, we will look at how they reflect presuppositions that are an essential part of the attack on the foundations of Western civilization that is liberalism, the spirit of the Modern Age since the so-called Enlightenment.

In the context of discussing abortion, George P. Grant said of Pope John Paul II:

I have some sympathy for him in what he is trying to oppose, something which is absolutely central to modernity: the emancipation of the passions. I don’t mean by the passions only the sexual passions. Modern politics is taken up with the passion for power, capitalism is taken up with the emancipation of the passion of greed. I’m not sure that this has been a great step in human history. (1)

Grant was right, in describing the emancipation of the passions as being central to modernity. The Modern Age began when philosophers came to the belief that through the application of reason and/or science they could construct a superior civilization to that which had been built upon the foundations of classical philosophy and Christianity. The so-called Enlightenment, and the liberalism which grew out of it rejected Aristotelian ethics and secularized and universalized Christian ethics beyond all recognition.

Plato and Aristotle both taught that virtue and happiness were only possible when reason ruled the passions and the appetites. Plato in the Phaedrus depicted reason as a charioteer who must control the chariot of the soul being drawn by two horses, one of whom, representing the unruly appetites or passions, is always trying to pull the chariot off course. In The Republic, he uses the relationship of reason ruling the appetites, the passions, as a model for the utopian city Socrates and his companions were hypothetically constructing. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, divides the soul into rational and irrational parts, and the latter into parts completely independent of reason and parts which while irrational themselves can be influenced by reason. The passions fall into the latter category, and the virtuous man, according to Aristotle, is the man who cultivates the rational habit of choosing the middle path regarding his passions, leaning neither to excess or deficiency.

The modern rejection of classical/traditional Western ethics in favor of the “emancipation of the passions” is perhaps most clearly seen in Sigmund Freud. His division of the mind into the passions (id), governed by reason (ego), with both being subject to the mores of civilization (superego) was neither original nor the basis of Freud’s fame. Freud attributed neurosis to the repression of the id, and in so doing laid the foundation for the idea of mental well-being through liberation of the passions. While Freud himself has long been dismissed, his idea that traditional morality’s restraints on the libidos is harmful to the individual psyche continues to bear fruit. In many ways, however, Freud was simply expressing in psychological terms, the goals of Enlightenment liberalism in which the happiness and liberty of the individual is the highest good.

A civilized society, as Plato and Aristotle knew, must have the good as its end, its purpose. In the Christian era, the idea of the societal good came to be moderated with recognition that the individual person has valid rights and freedoms, but these were envisioned as existing within the framework of society and traditional authority. Enlightenment liberalism made the rights and liberties of the individual the enemy of traditional society, traditional morality, and traditional authority. Those who think this is a good think, a positive step towards freedom, should consider that in the same period of centuries in which liberalism triumphed and authority declined, was a period of unprecedented growth of the central state, and concentration of power into it. The emancipation of the passions, is as Aldous Huxley warned, a cover for the loss of political liberty, as the state grows more and more powerful.

The institution of marriage, does not exist primarily for the happiness of individuals. That is not its function. It exists to bind society together, by tying parents of children to each other, as closely as they are tied to their children or their children are tied to each other, and to make of the two basic divisions of mankind, male and female, a one combing both complementary parts. As an institution it is foundational to the family, which is the basic building block of society, prior to and more important than the individual. The relationships between a father and his child, between a mother and her child, and between siblings are permanent relationships. They are based on ties of blood which cannot be untied. Marriage exists to make the relationship between father and mother as binding and permanent as these. The security that comes, from one’s father and mother being permanently tied to each other, is of immeasurable importance to the well-being of their children. Marriage is by nature, a sacrifice. It is about giving of oneself to another and to their possible offspring. It is about giving up one’s rights and liberties and taking burdens and duties upon oneself. It is a step towards maturity and responsibility.

In 2003, just as an earlier round of the same-sex marriage debate was heating up in Massachusetts, Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese delivered three lectures on the subject of marriage at Princeton University. She was in the process of expanding those lectures into a book when she died in 2007. The work was subsequently completed by her former student and editor Sheila O’Connor Ambrose and published posthumously by ISI Books in 2008 under the title Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die. The first of the lectures became Chapter One “Male and Female Created He Them”, which is not, despite its title, a sermon from the Book of Genesis, but a history of the institution of marriage, as a social, economic, and political institution, and it’s evolution into modern marriage.

Dr. Fox-Genovese writes:

Having originated more as a relation between families, tribes, or clans than as a relation between individuals, marriage has gradually been transformed into an exclusively personal relation—a matter of an individual’s “right” to specific benefits and privileges and, perhaps above all, community recognition and approval. Thus, the institution that anchored and transmitted legitimate authority has emerged as the frontline target of a comprehensive attack on any notion of legitimate authority, natural or divine. (2)

A significant contributing factor to this transformation, which Dr. Fox-Genovese focused on, was the concept of romantic love as the basis for companionate marriage. She notes that this idea goes against much ancient wisdom in the Western tradition, warning against the dangers of passionate love. For the latter she points to examples in Shakespeare, Arthurian Legend, the legend of Tristan and Isolde, and even Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Countless other examples could be pointed to. The first great epic poem of Greece was Homer’s Illiad. While the poem’s theme is a different passion, manis (wrath), specifically the wrath of Achilles against Agamemnon and its destructive consequences, we cannot miss the fact the background setting of the story is a war whose roots lay in passionate love (of Paris and Helen). Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is essentially an updated version of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. How many of the most famous classic stories of passionate love end very badly for one or both of the lovers? In addition to those already mentioned think of Dido and Aeneas, Troilus and Chriseyde, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra – the list goes on and on. Note that the love St. Paul eulogizes in the famous 13th chapter of his First Epistle to the Church in Corinth is agape – selfless, giving love, and not eros – passionate desire.

These countless cultural warnings were not to tell us that passionate love is a bad thing per se, but to warn us that it must be ruled, that we must rule our passions rather than let them rule us. This is in stark contrast to the message of Hollywood, television, popular music, and every other cultural drug mass-produced in this decadent age.

Liberalism, in seeking to free the individual and his passions, from the restraints of traditional moral society, allied itself with modern, centralized government, and secured the passing of legislation aimed at transforming marriage from the traditional institution into something like a business contract, albeit with less of a legal penalty if the contract is broken. The purpose was to make marriage about the individual rather than about the society. A young couple are in love and want to get married to “complete their happiness”. Instead of being told about responsibility, and sacrifice, and “til death do us part”, a compact breakable only by severe betrayal on the part of one of the spouses, now marriage comes with government benefits and can be dissolved by government at will at the request of one of the partners, no reason necessary. Same-sex marriage is only the latest step in this process, itself part of the larger liberal project of freeing the individual of all duties to traditional moral society (while enslaving him to modern collective power in government and big business).

People do not have a “right” to whatever they think will make them happy. They have a right to what is their own. Justice lies in seeing that everyone gets that which is due him – not that everyone gets to be “equal” with everyone else. Teaching people that they have a “right” to whatever they think will make them happy, i.e., whatever they want, and that they are or ought to be equal with everyone else, is the recipe for turning people against society.

The traditionalist side of the same-sex marriage debate needs to understand that our battle is not primarily against same-sex marriage, but for traditional marriage, which means more than just sexual complementarity. It means marriage that is more than just a contract, marriage that is demanding, marriage that cannot be broken at the whim of government or a spouse. Our fight is for traditional society, which respects the rights and liberties of individuals, while placing just demands on them in pursuit of he good of the whole.

(1) David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation (Concord: Anansi Press, 1995) , p., 156 (This is an edited collection of interviews Grant gave to Cayley on CBC Radio)

(2) Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Marriage: The Dream That Refuses To Die (Wilmington, ISI Books, 2008), p. 4.