TORONTO, March 7, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – In Toronto’s Catholic Register (Jan. 2012), retired law professor Ian Hunter has expressed the view that Christian morality will never win against the Canadian Charter of Human Rights. Is the future really this bleak? Consider the following:
The opposition parties all approve the killing of the unborn. Some of them are concerned about seal pups but not about human babies.
The supposedly Conservative Prime Minister refuses to open the abortion debate in Canada. He says that he will not invoke section 33 (the Notwithstanding Clause of the Charter) to override hostile legislation. Canada has no abortion law, just as there is no abortion law in atheist China and North Korea.
The judiciary is no help. Activist judges will not recognize lobbying, petitions or referenda in favour of the unborn. Meanwhile since 2005 the Charter re-interpreted, tells us that same-sex relations are a universal right. The Charter does not recognize the rights of the unborn. The definition of a human being in the Criminal Code is 400 years old. It says that human life begins when the baby is fully separated from the mother. Science tells us that human life starts at conception (fertilization) but Canadian leaders do not give a hoot.
The media call abortion “an emotionally charged issue,” a “collision of values” and do not want anyone to ever open the box and see what is inside.
Professor Hunter’s arguments foreclose any future hope for a peaceful, democratic, human restoration in Canada of a Judean-Christian culture which treasures the dignity and integrity of every individual and protects it in fact as well as in theory. Have the atheists, the relativists, the secularists, who have substituted the libertine state for the principles of Christian civilization in the Western world won? For the time being, the answer appears yes.
A contemporary Catholic American writer, George Weigel, recently observed that “what began as a movement to liberate sexuality from the constraints of moral reason, custom, and law, has become a movement determined to use the instruments of law to impose its deconstruction of human sexuality and its moral relativism on all of society.” He continued: “That is what drives those who urged the Obama administration to issue its “contraceptive” mandate. Weigel added: “It is all about Leviathan as enforcer of the sexual revolution.”
In Canada too, the State, whether federal or provincial, is the Leviathan which cannot be stopped with some accommodation here or there, but must be beaten and defeated. “The sexual revolution distorts everything that gets in the way, and in due course, it will persecute anything that gets in its way” (See George Weigel, “The Libertine Police State,” National Review Online, Feb. 13, 2012).
Ottawa has now joined President Obama in using foreign policy to make the world safe for practitioners of the LGBTQ lifestyles.
The federal Minister of Justice, Catholic Rob Nicholson, immediately responded positively when the lawyer of two non-Canadian lesbians, who discovered they could not divorce because their Canadian same-sex marriage was not valid in their domicile, sent out a press release and was given publicity in the Toronto Globe and Mail. (”Feds move to close legal loophole threatening same-sex marriages,” Toronto Star, Feb. 18, 2012. See also Andrea Mrozak.
Under Harper management, the Canadian delegation at the United Nations has faithfully supported the pro-abortion policies of the ruling U.N. bureaucrats over the last seven years, including the current U.N. drive to declare abortion and homosexual relations as “universal rights.”
In Ontario Premier McGuinty uses his bloated Department of Education, together with his enlarged witch-hunting provincial Human Right Commission, to bully all parents, teachers and education officials into submitting to a new curriculum which makes the libertine sexual revolution the new ideology.
Quebec has gone further. In 2008, after the province abolished the Protestant and Catholic School boards, secular bureaucrats exacted their vengeance. Agnostics devised a religion course for Grades 1.12 where all faith beliefs, from Catholicism to vodooism, have equal status and are treated as equally true or false. Needless to say, the earlier freedom of choice was abolished by the doctrinaire secularists who immediately made their course mandatory for all schools and all students.
Canada’s Supreme Court, supremely secular in its own eyes and hostile to religious rights of any kind, ruled on February 17, 2012, that no religious freedoms had been impinged upon and denied the request for exemptions. Added Toronto’s Globe and Mail mockingly: “They (the parents) wanted to go back to a Quebec, and a Canada that no longer exists” (Editorial, “The raison d’etre of public schools,” Feb. 20, 2012).
Hard times are ahead for God’s faithful.
Fr. de Valk is the editor of Catholic Insight. This article is re-published with permission from the March 2012 edition of the magazine.