Condemn Captain Airhead – But For the Right Reason

Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as unimaginative types like to call him, has received a lot of much deserved criticism this week. As was the case in the notorious “blackface” scandal of last year’s Dominion election, in which it was revealed that on at least three occasions he had worn skin-darkening makeup which, had any of his subordinates or opponents done, would have resulted in him requiring that they resign and be sent in permanent exile to the land of perpetual shame, a hypocritical double standard was the problem.

Captain Airhead, like his Communist father before him, hates the rights and freedoms of Her Majesty’s free subjects in Canada and the Common Law tradition from which they arise. C. S. Lewis in The Horse and His Boy has the Tisroc of Calormen utter these words to his Grand Vizier and to his son Rabadash “It is very grievous…Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free.” This is very similar to the sentiment of Captain Airhead, except that he is the Grand Vizier, which is another name for Prime Minister, and it is his own country’s freedom that he hates.

In what used to be called Christendom, but is now called “Western Civilization”, people who hate freedom tend to hate Christianity. Christianity teaches that God, after liberating Israel from literal slavery in Egypt, made a Covenant of Law with them, and promised that one day He would make a New and better Covenant, which promise He fulfilled in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, events which took place on the anniversary of the original Passover, and which brought spiritual liberty to the entire world. St. Paul, especially in his epistle to the Romans but in many of his other epistles as well, emphasizes that through our union with Christ in His death we die to the sin which enslaved us and that through our union with Him in His Resurrection we are raised to the new life, which is a life of liberty. This is the reason why totalitarians have always hated Christianity above all other religions.

Needless to say, the Christian Passover, known as Easter in countries with Germanic languages, and Pascha everywhere else, which commemorates the liberation of the world from spiritual bondage in the death and Resurrection of Christ, is not the favourite holiday of freedom haters.

With all the necessary apologies to Dr. Seuss, the following is what I suspect went down in the Prime Minister’s residence as Lent drew to a close and Holy Week approached. Captain Airhead, whose heart and whose brain are at least two sizes too small, was stewing away and saying to himself “I’ve got to stop Easter from coming, but how?”

So he consulted with Hajdu, he consulted with Tam, he called on his Cabinet to think up a plan.

Then Captain Airhead, he had an idea – a terrible, monstrous, horrendous idea.

Said Captain Airhead:

“I know what I’ll do, I’ll frighten them all with catching bat flu. The virus from China is now over here, I’ll shut down the country for over a year. I’ll close all the churches, I’ll close all the schools, I’ll close all the libraries, malls, parks and pools. I’ll close all the businesses, except grocery stores, I’ll clear out the sidewalks, and lock all the doors. I’ll scold them and nag them and boss them around, I’ll bully, I’ll badger, I’ll act like a clown. After eighteen months straight of only TV, they all will forget that they ever were free. And then when Easter is just round the bend, I’ll tell everybody ‘Stay home this weekend!’”

He’s a mean one, that Captain Airhead.

Well, we all know what happened. After telling Canadians to sacrifice their Easter plans, he then took off from Ottawa to Harrington Lake, Quebec to be with his family at their cottage for the weekend.

Did Captain Airhead’s heart and his brain grow three sizes that weekend?

Sadly, I’m afraid not. He still insisted that the rest of us give up Easter, put our lives on hold, and surrender our freedoms to the total control of the public health officials.

He has not escaped criticism in the press for his double standard, but that criticism, or at least the portion of it that I have read, has all been rather wrongheaded in my opinion. It has taken the form: Trudeau told all the rest of us to sacrifice our Easter plans, therefore he should have sacrificed his own. It should have taken this form instead: Trudeau was not willing to sacrifice his own family plans for Easter weekend, therefore he should not have told all of the rest of us to do so.

The problem is not that he spent the weekend at the cottage with his family. That at least is a human thing to do. The problem is that he has been bullying and threatening and scolding the rest of us into giving up our lives and our freedoms. That is a despotic thing to do.

Should the fourth estate finally start criticizing Trudeau for piling on rule after rule on top of an already excessive heap of rules, this will be the first sign of our recovery from our true affliction, which is not some batty coronavirus from China but a lack of appreciation of our fundamental rights and liberties.

Only Morons Try to Flatten Curves

Straightenin' the curves
Flattenin' the hills
Some day the mountain might get 'em
but the law never will.

- Waylon Jennings as "The Balladeer" in the theme song to the Dukes of Hazzard. This quote has absolutely nothing to do with what I am discussing in this essay and is thrown in merely for my amusement.

In most – not all – countries, public health authorities have responded to the Wuhan Flu pandemic by issuing “shelter in place” or “stay at home” orders to the entire population, closing public facilities, shutting down all businesses and services that they declare to be “non-essential” and requiring that people stay at least six feet from each other when they must go out to buy groceries, get medical attention or the like. The end to which these are the means is expressed in that ubiquitous phrase, one of many that I wish never to hear again in my life after this pandemic is over, “flattening the curve.”

The curve that they are trying to flatten is that of the graph indicating the projected pattern of numbers of persons infected with COVID-19 from when the coronavirus first enters a population – or at least when it is first detected there – to when the pandemic peters out and ends. As is usual for an epidemic/pandemic the numbers infected are small at the beginning, then as it begins to spread faster they rise, at some point reaching a peak, before dropping back down again. Plotted on a graph, it forms the familiar bell shaped curve that statisticians use to represent a normal distribution in probability theory.

To “flatten the curve” means to alter the pattern by slowing down the spread of the virus so that the peak is much lower. This does not necessarily mean that the total number of people infected will be any less – just that the largest number of people who will be infected at the same time will be less. The point of doing this, is to prevent the medical system from being overburdened all at once and collapsing.

It should be observed that this strategy is designed to save the health care system rather than to save lives. It is important that we remember that, as much as our public health officials would prefer that we believe otherwise, these things are not synonymous. When it comes to saving lives, the big question with regards to flattening the curve is which is most likely to produce the most fatalities – a short-term, temporary, overload of the health care system during which treatment will not be available to everyone who requires it or an artificial extension of the duration of the pandemic and the lifespan of the virus giving it more opportunities to mutate and do more harm. To flatten the curve is to produce said artificial extension of the duration of the pandemic.

Our governments are being rather less than honest with us about the fact that the absurd time frames – up to two years - that we are seeing in their projection models are the result of the strategy of flattening the curve rather than the reason for it. The only way to push the peak of curve down is by slowing down the rate of infection and thus extending the duration of the pandemic long past the virus’ natural cycle. Even if doing this were to prove to be less fatal in terms of those who ultimately die from the virus it is an incredibly stupid and insane thing to do because it maximizes the myriad sorts of other damage that will be done by the shutdown.

Shocking as it will be for the many Canadians who worship at the altar of Tommy Douglas to hear this, the collapse of the health care system would not mean the end of the world. The hospitals would recover from such a collapse a lot quicker than the economy will recover from the shutdown, our social and communal lives will recover from our being brainwashed into fearing ordinary human contact, and our heritage of Common Law rights and freedoms will recover from our having willingly surrendered all of our most basic freedoms the moment some Hitler with a stethoscope told us to do so to avoid catching and spreading a bad bug.

The long-term negative consequences of the means being employed to flatten the curve of the coronavirus pandemic so outweigh the benefit of saving the health care system that those who for whatever reason have decided upon this strategy have been trying to sell it to the public by pretending that it is the only option for dealing with this pandemic that is available. Consider, for example, the way in which our Dominion and provincial governments have released over the past couple of weeks the projection models that they have been working with. In the press conferences where these models were released contrasts were drawn. On the one hand, we were given the numbers of those that these models predict will be infected with the virus and die under the measures currently being taken. On the other hand, we were given the numbers of those that according to the model would have been infected and died had we done nothing at all.

All of this is, of course, an obvious example of bifurcation, of the logical fallacy of the false dilemma. It is hardly the case that the only options available to us were to do what we are presently doing or to do nothing. A strategy of protecting the most vulnerable, while letting everybody else go about their daily lives, would reduce the number of deaths expected from the pandemic without the numerous ill effects of flattening the curve. The Kingdom of Sweden is following such a strategy and it appears to be working for them. It has not been often in the last century that Sweden has been a model of sound and sane public policy. It figures that after following their bad example on any number of other issues, usually having something or the other to do with gender politics and political correctness, that when they actually get something right we would ignore them.

Dissenting epidemiologist, Dr. Knut Wittkowski, who was the head of Rockefeller University’s Department of Biostatics, Epidemiology, and Research Design for twenty years, has argued that there is no good reason to extend the duration of a respiratory disease’s run through the population and that the present regime of extreme social distancing and shut down, far from being the best or only response to the pandemic, is the worst. He is far from being the only epidemiologist to think this way and to disagree with the strategy being pursued by most public health authorities. As is generally the case, when the mainstream media claims that a consensus of scientific experts is behind a policy which they and the government support, they are lying through their teeth.

That there is a great deal of uncertainty about this virus and pandemic is acknowledged by all. That the measures being taken to combat it will have devastating effects of their own, which will only get worse the longer they are kept in place, is a certainty. Yet the strategy which underlies these measures, requires that they be kept in place for a very long time. This is hardly grounds for the blind confidence in our public health authorities that they are demanding from us at this moment.

Indeed, they are starting to give the impression that we would have been better off seeking the advice of that alternative medicine practitioner whose answer to everything is “ooo eee ooo ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang.”

Life and Choice

Not that long ago - indeed, it is a matter of mere months - there was a consensus at all levels of Canadian government, Dominion and provincial, regardless of which party actually held the reins of power, that choice was more important than life. Today, it is the consensus of all levels of the Canadian government that life is more important than choice.

In neither case was the consensus one that was arrived at legitimately through informed and open discussion. In both cases this writer did not merely dissent from the consensus but condemned it as being monstrous and evil.

So what is going on here? Has some diabolical mad scientist from an extra-terrestrial world targeted our planet with a mind reversal beam powered by interstellar radiation?

Not exactly.

What is meant by “life” and by “choice” in the one consensus was radically different from what is meant by these terms in the other. In the first consensus, the choices that were valued over life were very specific choices. The choice of an expecting mother to terminate her pregnancy and kill her unborn child was one such choice. The choice of somebody – usually a person with an irreversible condition that causes intense pain and suffering – to end his own life with medical assistance was the other. In short, the choices were abortion and euthanasia. The lives that were considered less important than these choices in the previous consensus were specific lives – the lives of the unborn children of the women who chose abortion and the lives of those who chose euthanasia. That the termination of these lives would ensue as the outcome of these choices was certain. Furthermore, these deaths were the deliberate and intentional end of these choices for which reason these choices cannot be made without incurring moral culpability.

The reverse of all of this is true about the “life” and “choice” of the second consensus. Although certain demographics are more susceptible than others to die from the severe pneumonia that the Wuhan Flu aka COVID-19 produces in a minority of those who contract it, the disease does not target specific individuals, nor is death certain in any particular case. With the exception of acts like coughing and spitting in someone’s face, which were already considered to be unacceptable behaviour long before the pandemic, the choices that have been curtailed by our fascist public health officials do not deliberately, intentionally, and willfully spread the virus, much less cause the deaths of the small fraction of those who eventually die from it. Barring the discovery of any hard evidence for the conspiracy theories that claim this virus was created in a laboratory there is no moral culpability here.

At the end of February, only a couple of weeks before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals tabled a bill in the Dominion Parliament – Bill C-7 – which, if passed, would remove most remaining legal roadblocks to euthanasia. It would also take a huge leap down that slippery slope from physician-assisted-suicide to physician-with-power-of-life-and-death that opponents of euthanasia such as this writer have been warning about all along. It allows for the euthanizing of those who have lost their ability to consent to the procedure provided that they have indicated their willingness at some point in the past.

The segment of the population that is likely to be euthanized overlaps to a very large extent the demographic that is most susceptible to die from pneumonia from the coronavirus. What kind of warped logic reasons that we must indefinitely cancel the most basic freedoms of everyone in society in order to protect people from dying from the Wuhan Flu in order that their physician might terminate their life deliberately, with or without their consent?

Note also that while each province in the Dominion has ordered its hospitals to cancel or post-pone most surgeries and procedures that do not involve saving lives, abortions remain accessible during the lockdown.

Now consider the kind of choices that the public health bureaucrats have taken away from us. The choice to go for a walk or jog in the park. The choice to get together with friends and family to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and the like. The choice to meet up with somebody for coffee. The choice to shake somebody’s hand, clap him on the back in congratulations, or cheer him up with a hug. The choice to pay our respects and mourn together for loved ones we have lost. The choice to assemble together with others of our faith and worship our God as He commands us. The choice to go outside and get some fresh air. The choice to go to the library and take out a few books. The choice to go to a gym and get some needed exercise. Unlike abortion, these and the thousand other similar choices that are now forbidden us, do no intentional harm to anybody.

It is choices like these that make up what we, until quite recently, used to call “living our lives.”

What is the point of protecting our lives if we are not allowed to live them?
The kind of choices that the Trudeau Liberals – and all the so-called “conservatives” in the provincial governments – believe should be protected at the expense of human life, do not deserve the protection of law. The kind of choices that our health authorities, Dominion and provincial, have taken away from us in order to protect our lives from the Wuhan Flu, are the choices that make up everyday life and which constitute our basic freedoms. Health authorities should not be able, under any circumstances, much less a media-hyped, flu-type virus, with a fancy name, to take these freedoms and choices away from us. Only Communists, Nazis, and others of that general type would ever wish to do so.

George Grant in an essay entitled “The Triumph of the Will” written in response to the decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, with the new powers given it by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to strike down our laws against abortion in R v Morgentaler, quoted Huey Long’s famous remark about how when fascism comes to America it will be in the name of democracy. Our Supreme Court, like that of the Americans in Roe v Wade the previous decade, Grant said “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought - the triumph of the will.”

I wonder what Grant would have had to say could he have seen the way in which the same people who show a disregard for human life in the name of choice, when that choice is abortion, have turned around and criminalized the most everyday of human choices in the name of life. Since it is happening all over the world, and Grant liked to remind us of the ancients’ warning a universal, homogeneous, state would be one of tyranny, I doubt that it would surprise him much.

Failing the Test of Civilization

It is quite evident that the idea that the best response to the COVID-19 pandemic was to shut down society and the economy except for the bare bones minimum, order everybody to “stay at home” and to maintain “social distancing” on the exceptional occasions when they are allowed out for some necessary reason, was thought up by people who have large enough homes that being required to stay in them for months on end will not feel like a prison sentence, where they live with their immediate families, who can afford to have everything they need delivered to them, who can work from home, and who assume that what is true of them is true of everybody, or at least the vast majority of people. It was thought up by pampered fools in other words.

What do these morons think “stay at home” could possibly mean to people who have no home?

It is currently estimated that in the city in which I reside, Winnipeg, Manitoba, there are anywhere between three to fifteen thousand such people. Even the smaller estimate exceeds by far the capacity of all of the city’s homeless shelters combined. The numbers of homeless are much larger in cities like Toronto and it is estimated that in the Dominion of Canada as a whole, there are approximately thirty five thousand homeless on any given night, and over two hundred thousand who will experience homelessness in any given year.

While the shut down orders do not apply to homeless shelters, the social distancing laws have greatly restricted the number they can take in. Meanwhile, the closing of restaurant dining rooms, libraries, and most other public places, has taken away from them the places where they go to find warmth and respite from the elements in winter. It was still winter when these measures were put in place and even now we are hardly past the point where really cold temperatures and large snowfalls would be considered extraordinary, as the huge two-day snowfall of last week demonstrates.

As part of the ill-conceived “flatten the curve” strategy, our governments have been encouraging businesses to switch to debit and credit transactions only. While this undoubtedly makes sense from their narrow point of view – physical currency, which is constantly exchanging hands, is notorious as a means of passing on germs – it is very hard on those who do not have bank accounts and whose only means of exchange is hard cash. It is also, of course, objectionable from a civil libertarian point of view. A cashless society is the totalitarian’s dream, for it means that the government can monitor and record all market transactions. St. John’s Apocalyptic description of the ultimate totalitarian, the Satanic false messiah who will deceive the world and become global despot prior to the Second Coming of the true Messiah, includes the famous detail that he will require people to receive a mark bearing his name or the number of his name – six hundred, threescore and six – on their right hand or forehead in order to buy or sell. Not a few people have drawn the obvious link between this and the totalitarian nature of a cashless society. Some of the supposedly “Christian” supporters of the “flatten the curve” strategy and its extreme measures, in their almost total disregard for the threat to civil rights and liberties during this universal government power grab and their haste to condemn anyone, but especially other Christians, who dissents from their point of view as “selfish” and “ideological” give every impression of having taken the Mark of the Beast in their hearts already.

Just as there are large numbers of people for whom “stay at home” is meaningless because they have no home to stay at, so there are large numbers of people for whom “stay at home” is the equivalent of a sentence of solitary confinement. This is because such people live in small, cramped, quarters with very little space. Such people will be especially vulnerable to “cabin fever” during this period because, unless they are extreme introverts, they depend upon getting out of the apartment and into the neighbourhood to avoid a sense of confinement.

Similarly, people who are single and live by themselves rather than with a spouse and children, depend upon social events and gatherings to avoid a depression-inducing sense of loneliness. These social events and gatherings have now been stolen from them by these vile, power mad, despotic, health bureaucrats who think that flattening the curve is the only acceptable response to this pandemic and that any and all means to that end are justified, which is a truly diabolical point of view.

Obviously, a response to the pandemic that involves shutting down most of society and the economy, will have a disproportionately hard impact on people who depend upon their paycheques to pay the rent, their grocery and utility bills, and other necessary expenses and have little to nothing left over after doing so, and therefore little to no savings. Shutting down the so-called “non-essential” sector of the economy, is far more likely to put such people out of work, than it is to put people with high figure salaries, who can work from home, like the overpaid bloody twits who thought up the “stay at home” strategy, out of work. It eliminates their existing jobs and makes it virtually impossible to find new ones. Government programs to assist such people can only ever be a very short term solution to this problem. Placing such a huge percentage of the population on government assistance at the same time that you are killing the source of government revenue is simply not sustainable for the kind of time frame that the models the “flatten the curve” strategy is based upon require.

Samuel Johnson is quoted by his friend and biographer James Boswell as having said: “Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization."

The new programs being enacted by the Trudeau Liberals in Ottawa are not what “a decent provision for the poor” looks like. They are at best an attempt to lessen the incredible evil that our governments, Dominion and provincial, are doing to the poor through their ill-advised strategy for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. We are failing Dr. Johnson’s “true test of civilization.”

Government Hubris

Last December, at the annual pre-Christmas open house at the Manitoba legislature, I shook Premier Brian Pallister’s hand, congratulated him on his re-election, and told him to keep up the good work. Today, I wish I could take all of that back. Pallister is the leader of the Progressive Conservative party of Manitoba. I voted Progressive Conservative in the last provincial election, and have voted Progressive Conservative in every provincial election since I was old enough to vote. I do not think that I will be voting for them again for as long as Pallister leads the party. Indeed, I am contemplating actively and aggressively campaigning against their re-election. It is not that I think any other party would govern better. I do not. It is not that I wish to see Wab Kinew become premier of Manitoba. The very thought of that happening turns my stomach. I regard Kinew and the socialist party that he leads with greater disgust and contempt than anything that ever fell to the ground from the backside of a horse. It is rather that in my opinion the way Pallister has been talking and behaving over the last three weeks demands punishment. I am getting really, really, sick and tired of the arrogant, drunk-with-power, threatening tone of Brian Pallister and of his chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin

Pallister ought to have listened to Her Majesty’s marvelous speech on Sunday and learned from her how to speak to the public in a time of crisis. Indeed, all of our provincial premiers and the Dominion premier should have done so. That, of course, assumes that they have the capacity to learn. This is a very big assumption indeed. Our Sovereign is a lady of class and breeding, whereas our politicians, at the risk of unfairly insulting livestock, all give the impression of having been raised in a barn. I have many times written about the distinction between authority and power. Here we have that distinction perfectly illustrated. The Queen in her address to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth spoke with authority. Brian Pallister and Brent Roussin, who never open their mouths without bossing us around, slapping further restrictions down on us, and threatening us, only understand power.

Brian Pallister declared a provincial state-of-emergency at a much earlier stage of the COVID-19 outbreak than his counterparts in most other provinces. This occurred on Friday, March 20th, at which point in time Manitoba had seventeen confirmed cases of the virus, all of whom were people who had contracted the virus while travelling out of province. In declaring the state of emergency Pallister and Roussin limited gatherings to fifty people, required businesses to impose an one to two metre gap between patrons, limited the number of people theatres and dining facilities could seat, and closed all bingo and gaming, as well as gyms and other “wellness centres.” Roussin threatened everyone who did not obey these rules with fines up to fifty thousand dollars – five hundred thousand for corporations – and six months in prison. Pallister, in a truly odious press interview, in which he acknowledged but brushed off concerns that these measures were draconian, encouraged Manitobans to spy and snitch on each other.

Since then, the number of confirmed cases in the province has climbed slowly. It is only very recently at the beginning of April, that Roussin announced that the early stages of transmission within the community, as opposed to bringing it in from the outside, had been detected. At that time there were one hundred and twenty seven confirmed cases. It was before that, however, that he and Pallister had begun tightening the existing restrictions and imposing new ones. Indeed, that very day a two week order for all businesses and services that the provincial government deemed “non-essential” to close came into effect. The order had come down a couple of days earlier. Even prior to that, the government had decreased the number of people allowed to gather to ten. This took place about the time that the first death from COVID-19 in the province occurred – there have been two as of the time of this writing. The first death was of an elderly woman who had been in Intensive Care since the first phase of the provincial shut down. Her death would not have been prevented had Pallister and Roussin imposed the ten person limit on March 20th. Her death would not have been prevented had “non-essential” businesses been ordered to close on March 20th. Tightening the restrictions was not a rational act, but rather a sign that the exercise of absolute power had gone to the chief public health official’s head.

By the first day of this week the confirmed cases in Manitoba had risen to two hundred and three. On Monday, one additional case brought the number to two hundred and four. Eleven people have been hospitalized, seven of whom are in Intensive Care. The very same day, Roussin’s tone jumped to a whole new level of arrogant, totalitarian, bossiness. Issuing threats of police enforcement, this Grinch-like creature stole Easter and the Passover from Christians and Jews. Having already closed the Churches and synagogues, he now ordered the faithful not to have “family dinners and get togethers.” “Everyone needs to adhere to the public health orders” he said “and that includes faith-based organizations.” Which is simply another way of saying that he thinks that his commandments overrule those of God.

That doctors, in the sense of physicians, think they are God has long been a stereotype and, like most stereotypes, contains a great deal of truth. For this reason, it is dangerous to give them any sort of civil authority. It goes to their heads a lot quicker than it does other people.

To those, like this writer, who grew up reading novels by George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Anthony Burgess, and others warning us against totalitarianism, as well as the non-fictional accounts by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest of the very real totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, it is hugely offensive that today, Her Majesty’s free subjects in this province of Manitoba, in the Dominion of Canada, cannot go to the grocery store without being forced by authoritarian goons to wait, six feet apart, in a line outside the store until they are told to enter. Once inside the store, their every move is policed by the store Gestapo, until they enter a similar line at the checkout. These conditions belong in Communist countries like the former Soviet Union, not in a Commonwealth realm.

Dr. Roussin’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is furthermore a huge violation of medical ethics. The fact that everyone else is doing it in no way excuses him. What principle of medical ethics could be more fundamental than primum non nocere, which principle is enshrined in the vow to abstain from harm in the famous oath attributed to Hippocrates of Kos? (1) Yet every conceivable form of harm – psychological, spiritual, ethical, social, civil, and physical, including death itself - is the inevitable result of a lengthy, enforced, universal shut down of society.

The tighter the restrictions become, the more rules are imposed upon us, the longer we are kept from our friends and family and Churches, and forced to violate our nature as Aristotle’s “social animal”, the greater the harm caused by the anti-COVID measures will be. There will be this significant difference, however, between the deaths from COVID-19 complications that these measures might be preventing and the deaths from domestic violence, suicide, and murder that these measures will cause if maintained for too long. Nobody, except perhaps the government of Red China, could be legitimately blamed for the former. The blood of the latter will be upon the hands and heart and soul of Dr. Brent Roussin and Premier Brian Pallister forever.

(1) The principle, in the familiar wording, comes, interestingly enough, from another work of Hippocrates entitled Of the Epidemics. In the Oath, of course, it is turned into a vow: ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν

The Queen Has Spoken

On this Palm Sunday, as Holy Week begins, our Sovereign Lady, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, has addressed the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, regarding the dark times in which we live. She thanked, on behalf of us all, all those, especially the health workers, who are struggling to get us through this crisis. When speaking of the difficulty of the isolation measures, her words and the tone in which she spoke them, contained nothing of the shrill, hubristic, authoritarian, bossiness of the arrogant politicians whom we, her subjects, the citizens of her realms have foolishly chosen to be her unworthy government ministers, but were rather calm and sober, ending on a note of inspiration, assurance and hope. It was exactly what we have come to expect from her, a lady of deep and devout faith, and true public spirit.

While Her Majesty's speech spoke to the coronavirus pandemic and the hardships directly arising from it, it was indirectly inspirational to those, such as this writer, who have been far less concerned about the virus itself, than about the threat to our basic rights and liberties posed by a populace in panic that is demanding that government protect them from the virus, and governments that take a "nothing is off the table" approach to what they are prepared to do to give the frightened populace what it wants.

It was inspirational in this regard because of who the Queen is and what she stands for. In each of her realms, the Queen is the one who represents the country as a whole - not just those who live there at the moment, but those who have gone before, and those who will come after, which is something only a hereditary head of state can do. As such, she is also a symbol of the heritage of rights and freedoms that have come down to us from a past that included such significant events as the Magna Carta Libertatum, which we hope to pass down to future generations.

The Queen's role in our day and age has been likened to that of the king on a chessboard. The king, who never moves more than one space at a time, is not an offensive piece, but as long as he holds his space against all that would take it from him, the game is not over. Similarly, as long as the Queen and her heirs are on the throne reigning over us and our descendants, the flame of freedom cannot be extinguished entirely. In this day of arrogant, power-grabbing politicians, and physician bureaucrats who often give the impression that they want to trade the serpentine staff of Asclepius for Orwell's grim image of a boot stomping on a human face forever, this is more important than ever. For in Canada, the United Kingdom, and throughout the Commonwealth, "freedom", as the title of John Farthing's book puts it, "wears a crown."

God save the Queen!

What Would the Non-Jurors Do?

Rodney Howard-Browne is not exactly my idea of a sound theologian. Those who would have recognized his name prior to the events of this week would have remembered this South African born evangelist-pastor primarily as a leading figure in the “Laughing Revival” of the 1990s. A Canadian manifestation of this, the so-called “Toronto Blessing”, began in January of 1994, during my last semester of high school and was the subject of much discussion that fall when I began my theological studies in Otterburne. My attitude towards the phenomenon at the time could have been summed up in the words of Shania Twain “that don’t impress me much.” It has not changed much since.

That having been said, I must say that I felt a certain degree of admiration for Howard-Browne this week when I read about his having been arrested and charged with “unlawful assembly” for holding services in defiance of Hillsborough County, Florida’s “safer at home” order.

Note that I said “a certain degree of admiration”. It is not an unqualified admiration. I am not a believer in Henry David Thoreau’s doctrine of civil disobedience, nor do I hold in high esteem those practitioners of the same that have been elevated to sainthood if not apotheosized in the last generation or two, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

That having been said, the state has no legitimate authority to suspend worship services and tell Churches to close. Some might point to the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, in which the Apostle enjoins us to be “subject unto the higher powers”, meaning the civil authorities, because they are “ordained of God” and the “minister of God to thee for good” as saying otherwise, but to do so would be to twist the meaning of the Scriptures. Does anyone seriously believe that St. Paul was telling the Church in Rome that if Emperor Nero ordered them to renounce their faith, disband, and never meet together as a Church again that they were to obey? Obviously that is not the case.

All across what used to be Christendom, Churches and sects are closed because an insane mass panic over the flu’s bigger, tougher, second cousin, twice-removed on its mother’s side has persuaded everyone to blindly trust politicians and public health officials, both of which groups are at the present high on the biggest power trip that I have witnessed in my entire life, and hence are completely unworthy of the trust they demand from us. Those politicians and public health officials have decided that to save us from the big, bad, coronavirus, they need to lock us in our houses, take away our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion, and dehumanize us by conditioning us to fear human contact and non-virtual social interaction. They are, in other words, doing evil of the kind and on the scale that is only ever done by those who are convinced that they are doing good.

There have been some “Christian” commentators who have spoken out in favour of the – hopefully – temporary closing of the Churches and sects. Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option, who blogs at The American Conservative, has been commenting on the coronavirus for a couple of months now. His way of looking at the whole thing is very different from my own. He describes his approach as one of prudence rather than panic, although he has failed to convince me that the line between the cardinal virtue and the irrational, fear-driven, mob mentality falls where he thinks it does. Two weeks ago he expressed relief when his Eastern Orthodox Archbishop ordered the laity to stay away from the Liturgy, offering a justification from Eastern Orthodox theology that seems a bit bizarre when we consider that the lit in Liturgy comes from the same root as the word laity. I wonder if this was something like how the Anglican Church of Canada gave us a theological justification for Communion in one kind prior to the closing of the dioceses altogether even though this flatly contradicted Article XXX of the Articles of Religion. More recently he expressed his support for his Archbishop’s essentially cancelling Easter. Needless to say he does not think very highly of those pastors who have continued to hold services. He castigates Christians who argue that to refrain from our duty of coming together to worship as the Body of Christ during this pandemic is to allow ourselves to be governed by fear rather than to walk by faith, accusing them of being selfish and judgmental towards their brethren who support the anti-COVID measures, apparently without any sense of the irony of his own shrill, hysterical, self-righteous, and judgmental tone.

Dreher, who believes that “social distancing” and the other measures being imposed upon us to fight COVID are necessary, views the entire question as being that of a choice between human lives and the economy. Framed that way, the only moral answer to the question is to choose human lives. As I argued in my last two essays, however, this is the wrong way of framing the question. The non-economic cost of the anti-COVID measures needs to be factored into the equation. Instilling in people a fear of meeting with each other, shaking hands, hugging, and human contact in general is a way of killing social capital, robbing us of our sense of community. One would think that Dreher of all people, whose first book was very communitarian, would understand this point. The telephone, Skype, live-streamed liturgy, and other technological replacements for community are not adequate substitutes, especially not over extended periods of time. Conditioning the entire populace to look upon them as if they were is an extremely dangerous thing to do. Especially when this conditioning goes hand-in-glove with a request that we give up our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion. Moreover, it is quite evident that Dreher hasn’t got a clue about what the real cost of sacrificing the economy would be. As true as the words in the title he borrowed from Flannery O’Connor are, this is not a choice between poverty and death. It is a choice between the death of billions, which will be the Malthusian consequence of shutting down all but the “essential” sector of every national economy for too long, overloading that sector, causing it collapse under the strain, and creating a worldwide depression worse than that of the 1930s, and the death of the thousands or, at worst, millions who might die from COVID-19, apart from these measures. It is the choice, in other words, between what is potentially another Spanish flu and what could potentially be a global-scale Holodomor.

Given his point of view, it is perhaps understandable that Dreher has been taking the stance that Christians should regard the forsaking of Church assembly, voluntarily or involuntarily, as a self-denying sacrifice for the sake of others. I cannot help but wonder, however, what he would be saying if some world leader were to arise and tell us that the COVID-19 pandemic can be contained, but to do so we will all have to stay at home, except for essential purchases such as groceries, and that to ensure we do this everyone will be required to receive a mark on his right hand or forehead authorizing him to take part in permitted market transactions. Would he tell us it is our Christian duty to submit to the mark as a sacrifice to save lives or would he tell us, as St. John does, that anyone who submits to the mark will be permanently cut off from the Covenant of Grace?

Earlier this week, the Manitoba Public Health Officer ordered all “non-essential” services to close from April 1st to April 14th. The Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land in a directive on March 31st, remarked that “While several social service agencies were exempt, Churches specifically are not exempt.” Services had already been suspended as of March 16th by an earlier directive from His Grace. Some parishes, including my own, had switched to online services, either live-streamed or pre-recorded until the lifting of the interdict. Whether even this, inadequate, substitute for gathering together and worshiping will be available during the next two weeks under the limitations of the new directive remains to be seen.*

I bring this up not to criticize my bishop but to draw attention to what is implied by the Manitoba provincial government’s order. If “non-essential” services must close, and Churches are not exempted from that, then Churches are clearly deemed to be “non-essential” by the government. This is not a point of view which orthodox Christians are allowed to share. In my last essay I pointed out that the government’s distinction between “essential” and “non-essential” when it comes to businesses is a fraudulent one and that it is even worse that the government is treating our fundamental freedoms as if they were “non-essential.” If it is not the state’s place to tell anybody that the business he depends upon for his living is “non-essential”, and it is not, and it is not the state’s place to tell us that our freedoms of assembly, association, religion, belief, etc. are “non-essential”, and it is not, it is certainly not the state’s place to tell us that Christ’s Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is non-essential.

We live in an age in which our thinking about the proper authority of the Church and the state within their own spheres and in relation to each other has been fogged by the triumph of liberalism and its presuppositions derived from a secularization of the heretical view of Church and state held by the Anabaptists and the disestablishmentarian branch of Puritanism. This was not the case four, or even three, centuries ago.

In 1688, the Right Reverend William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, was imprisoned in the Tower of London by the order of King James II, along with Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wales, John Lake, Bishop of Chichester, William Lloyd, Bishop of St. Asaph, Jonathan Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol, Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, and Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough. The issue was that these prelates had refused to publish the king’s 1687 Declaration of Indulgence and had sent a petition to the king, explaining their opposition to it.

There were two elements to their opposition to the Declaration, its content and its legality. The Declaration relaxed the strictest of the Church establishment laws in two ways, first, by allowing private worship for Roman Catholics and Non-conformist Protestants, second, by suspending the Test Act, which required that all who hold public office belong to the Church of England. Today, most would find it difficult to understand why this was problematic, and regard it in a positive light, as moving towards freedom of religion. The second part, the suspension of the Test Act, was the reason why they viewed it so differently in the seventeenth century.

James II was a Roman Catholic. His father, Charles I, had been falsely accused by the Puritans in the English Civil War, of trying to bring the English Church back under the jurisdiction of Rome, as Mary Tudor had done. This, ironically, led to James becoming a Roman Catholic, because when the Puritans murdered his father after an illegal trial, he spent the interregnum in France where he was first exposed to and attracted to Romanism. He “crossed the Tiber” as the saying goes, during the reign of his brother Charles II. As king, he had the right to set aside the Test Act requirements for individuals. Suspending it entirely, however, was regarded as a step towards packing the government with Roman Catholics, as well as an illegal infringement on the rights of the Parliament that passed the Act.

The bishops were tried and acquitted. Parliament then invited William III, Prince of Orange, who had married James’ daughter Mary, to come over, depose his father-in-law, and take his place as king. This accomplished, Parliament then required the clergy of the Church of England to swear an oath of allegiance to the new king.

For five of the seven bishops – Lloyd (1) and Trelawney are the exceptions – as well as four other bishops, and over three hundred priests, this was a problem. If the king had overstepped his divine right by trying to overturn an Act of Parliament, Parliament had overstepped its authority by deposing the king. Furthermore, it had no right to command the clergy to commit an immoral act – to swear an oath, which contradicted the oath they had already sworn to James II and his heirs. They refused to swear the new oath, for which reason history remembers them as the “non-jurors”, and were deprived of their livings.

New bishops were appointed to their sees, turning what was already a political and a moral dilemma, into a theological one. The non-jurors maintained, and they had the weight of the consensus of Catholic antiquity behind them, that Parliament had no legitimate power to depose a bishop, that a bishop so deposed remained the legitimate bishop, and that the bishop put in his place was illegitimately consecrated and schismatic. George Hickes, who as a priest had refused the new oath, was later consecrated a bishop by the non-juring bishops, and become the de facto leader of the group after the death of Archbishop Sancroft, explained these principles at length in a posthumously published book entitled The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Consequences of Schism. Briefly summarized, it was that the Church and the State were two distinct realms, whose membership overlapped, in the former of which the bishops were the governors and kings as members were subject to them, in the latter of which kings were the governors and bishops as members were subject to them, each government having its own sword to enforce its authority, the bishops having the power of excommunication, the king’s sword being somewhat more literal, but neither had the right to depose the other, or to intrude into the other’s sphere of authority.

The non-jurors had a much clearer understanding than the vast majority of people today, of the distinction between Royal authority, Parliamentary authority, and Ecclesiastical authority, and stood up for the rights of each when infringed upon by one of the others at the cost to themselves of prison, deprivation and poverty. What would they think of today’s totalitarian health bureaucrats ordering Churches to close and “Christian” writers like Dreher who cheer them on?

(1) There were two bishops named William Lloyd. The Bishop of Norwich by that name did become a non-juror, but he was not one of the seven who had signed the petition against the Declaration of Indulgence.

* Update: On April 1st, His Grace updated this directive. He began by saying "In light of further information received from Minister Friesen’s Office and interview on CHVN Radio, it is clear that live-streaming celebration of worship is permissible. I therefore encourage you to continue the practice of live-streaming as you were, because they offer a much needed pastoral response and relief to our people."