OTTAWA, February 28, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Michael O’Brien, the Canadian Catholic novelist and social commentator, describes the classic signs of a growing totalitarianism: the imposition of a national ideological orthodoxy with state coercive power to ensure conformity. The Canadian government, he proposes, in a guest editorial exclusive to LifeSiteNews.com, is using the homosexual movement to create this kind of state. In Canada, a person is free to hold opinions contrary to those official party lines, but only in his home and only cautiously.
There are now criminal penalties for public disagreement. Michael O’Brien is well known to Catholic readers as the author of the novels “Father Elijah,” and “Eclipse of the Sun,” both about the establishment of ‘soft’ totalitarianism. Notable among his non-fiction books are “The Family and the New Totalitarianism” and his examination of the paganization of children’s literature, “A Landscape with Dragons.”
In the current essay, “Same-Sex ‘Marriage,’‘Hate Crimes,’ and the New Totalitarianism,” O’Brien writes that hundreds of new laws are proliferating a climate of legalism that is “directed not at criminals but at the moral structure of private life.” The new laws, far from protecting citizens against unjust discrimination, are to be “wielded as a cudgel to intimidate those who simply disagree with (the ideology) and to punish those who are outspoken about it.”
O’Brien writes, “In just over one generation we have been shifted from a society in which homosexual acts were a crime under the then existing law, to a society in which homosexual acts have become a government-protected and fostered activity, while voicing criticism of it ‘publicly’ has become the crime. Call it by any name you like, but this is Thought Crime.”
O’Brien warns that this shift has less to do with homosexuality, than with the imposition of thought control and total state authority. This shift is inevitable in a society that abandons religious absolutes, which he defines as, “fundamental, ultimate, unqualified truths, independent of the ebb and flow of cultures, fashions.” A totalitarianism will inevitably replace these with absolute control by the state. In an ideological tyranny, he says, “There may not be brown-shirts and jackboots marching in the streets… only a system or a social philosophy which permeates and controls everything.”
“Are we there yet?” he asks. “The social revolution is far from over…The abortion and euthanasia issues are the most ugly of these crises, but they are symptoms of something deeper, and that ‘something’ is no less than the auto-demolition of a civilization, beginning with the eradication of its moral foundations.”
The homosexual revolution is only one step in the process says O’Brien. Artificial contraception, divorce and abortion came before it, and, he says, polygamy, paedophilia and euthanasia are next in line.
O’Brien speculates as to what is next for Canada. “We must ask ourselves if, in a few short years from now, the uncooperative Christian or Jew or Muslim (or, for that matter, the non-religious classical democrat) will be considered ‘an enemy of the people.’”
When the re-engineering of society is complete, he asks, “Will we look back upon the present as the last brief period in which it was still possible to reverse the tide?”