I denounce this in no uncertain terms

An abortion doctor has been murdered in the United States. Hat/tip The Corner. I unequivocally denounce this violence. And so does Operation Rescue, one of the more visible pro-life organizations:

"We are shocked at this morning's disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down," anti-abortion group Operation Rescue said in a statement on its Web site. "Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller's family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ."

Protesters blockaded Tiller's clinic during Operation Rescue's "Summer of Mercy" protests during the summer of 1991, and Tiller was shot by Rachelle Shannon at his clinic in 1993. Tiller was wounded in both arms, and Shannon remains in prison for the shooting.

The clinic was bombed in June 1986, and was severely vandalized earlier this month. According to the Associated Press, his lawyer said wires to security cameras and outdoor lights were cut and that the vandals also cut through the roof and plugged the buildings' downspouts. Rain poured through the roof and caused thousands of dollars of damage in the clinic. Tiller reportedly asked the FBI to investigate the incident.

No arrests were made in the 1986 bombing.

Sgt. Bart Brunscheen of the Wichita Police Department said there has been no activitiy today at Tiller's clinic, although security crews were being brought in to make sure the building was secure. Officials also were going to check the clinic's security cameras to see whether there was any activity over night.

Tiller and his clinic have faced continuous threats and lawsuits. A Wichita jury ruled in March that he was not guilty of illegal abortion on 19 criminal charges he faced for allegedly violating a state law requiring an "independent" second physician's concurring opinion before performing later term abortions. Immediately following the ruling in this criminal case, the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts made public a similar complaint against Tiller that was originally filed in December 2008.

Whoever did this act, you do not speak for me or for any of the pro-life people or organizations that I know of.

Laureen Harper and me at 24 Sussex

After the big Shakedown event in Ottawa, I tagged along with a smallish group of Ezra Levant's friends for pizza and conversation at 24 Sussex with Laureen Harper. I had an extra copy of The Defilers with me and brought it in as a hostess present. She said to give it to her husband, who loves mysteries, and just passed his 50th birthday and she asked me to sign it. He was out of town that night, though. Then she suggested she have a photo taken with me and look what she's holding!

Jill Propp of the Prime Minister's Office took the photos.

Laureen Harper is a terrific, down-to-earth person. Lots of fun. And I thought, awfully gracious, too!

Read what people are saying about The Defilers here. An excerpt here.


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A very dangerous time, indeed

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

This is a very dangerous time-somewhere there is a nutty cadre of Islamists who in their twisted minds collate the Obama apologies, the al Arabiya interview, the serial denunciation of Bush, the airing of the interrogation processes, the demonization of Guantanamo, the constant evocation of Abu Ghraib, and conclude that this particular government either cannot or will not unpredictably strike back at Islamic extremism, and therefore this is now a moment of opportunity not to be missed. I worry we are in for some very dangerous times, as we begin to get a glimpse of a world in which the U.S. allows natural forces to work their way to the surface.

On matter of race, one detects beneath the therapeutic calls for inclusiveness, an unfortunate renewal of identity politics with a new harder edge-we saw that in the campaign with the slips about reparations and oppression studies, the clingers speech, Rev. Wright, and the ‘typical white person’ put down. Then with Eric Holder’s blast about Americans as “cowards” and now with the Supreme Court nominee’s somewhat derogatory remarks about the proverbial white male judge. We are not hearing praise of the melting pot ideal of intermarriage, assimilation, or integration-even if such elites in their private lives do not predicate their daily regimens in terms of racialism. I spent 21 years in a university in which quite affluent elites sought any multicultural patina possible for an edge in professional advancement and general leverage–the hyphenated name, the addition of the accent mark on the name, the non-American accentuation, occasional ethnic dress, the relabeling of one as a designated minority who otherwise had not previously emphasized race, etc.—that would suggest they were not part of the popular capitalist culture-supposedly centered on the white male-around them. Yet I left sensing the industry of race was doomed, due to the power of popular culture, the unworkable labyrinth of racial identification due to intermarriage, the laughable contradictions (the jet-black immigrant from India got no favored treatment, the light-skinned Costa Rican name Jorge piggy-backed onto the Mexican-American experience), the son of the Mexican father who used his name Gomez was authentic, the son of the Mexican mother who carried his non-Mexican father’s name Wilson was not. And on and on with this ridiculous neo-Confederate practice of adjudicating percentages of race to the sixteenth, and drops of targeted minority blood—a racist enterprise to the core. The only constant? The white male was fair game. It mattered little that more women were graduating than men, that under the racial spoils system we were beginning to see white males in less percentages than those found in the general population at the university; instead, it was sort of OK to trash, as in the manner of Sotomayor’s comment, the proverbial white male, as if we are collectively ashamed of everyone from the Wright Brothers to Lincoln to John Wayne to JFK.

I am part of the human race.

Obama as plastic surgeon

We who follow human rights commissions know about labiaplasties.

But "Spengler" takes plastic surgery to a new level in his analysis of the Obama administration:

The television cartoon South Park offers a useful allegory for the administration's flight from realism. In one episode the children's teacher, Mr Garrison, gets a sex change, little Kyle gets negroplasty (to turn him into a tall black basketball star), while Kyle's father undergoes dolphinplasty, that is, surgery to make him look like a dolphin.

Looking like a dolphin, of course, doesn't make you one. Sadly, the Barack Obama administration hasn't figured this out. Out of the confusion of its first 100 days, we can glimpse a unifying principle, and that principle looks remarkably like the sort of plastic surgery practiced in South Park.

Like dolphinplasty and negroplasty, it has given us cosmetic solutions that we might call civitaplasty, turning a terrorist gang into a state; fiducioplasty, making a bunch of bankrupt institutions look like functioning banks; creditoplasty, making government seizure of private property look like a corporate reorganization; matrimonioplasty, making same-sex cohabitation look like a marriage; and interfecioplasty, making murder look like a surgical procedure.

Honoring Dr. Allen Churchill and his faithfulness in proclaiming the true Gospel

Usually I'm on the other side of the podium or pulpit, taking notes and reporting on other Christian speakers. Last Sunday night, I had the rare opportunity to speak at Dominion Chalmers United Church to people gathered to celebrate Dr. Allen Churchill's 50 years of Christian ministry.

I have posted my speaking notes at The Daily Offices. Here's an excerpt:

I don’t remember exactly when I first met Allen, but I first heard about him in the 1990s when I was a CBC television producer. The United Church was going through the crisis that would soon hit the Anglican Church and other denominations and he was in the thick of it.

The news media have misnamed this as a crisis about homosexuality and same sex blessings and gays and lesbians in ministry. But that’s just tip of the iceberg. It is really a crisis over the authority of Scripture and the true identity of Jesus.

Do we believe in a therapeutic Jesus who loves everyone they way we are? A kind of Dr. Phil with long hair and a beard who helps us with our self-esteem issues? Or do we believe in the Jesus of the New Testament, who is the promised Messiah of the Old Testament?

This Jesus is God the Son, who became man and died on the Cross to save sinners so we can live forever with Him as adopted sons and daughters of God the Father.

I needn’t tell you which Jesus Allen Churchill has consistently proclaimed throughout his ministry.

He has been steadfast in preaching the real Gospel and that hasn’t always made him popular among the powers that be.

This was a wonderful event. Kanata Baptist Pastor Doug Ward also spoke, as did Alma Churchill, Allen's lovely wife. She gave an overview of her husband's 50 years, including a goosebump raising incident that set him on the road to ministry. Allen was working as an RCMP officer in a Manitoba detachment and he heard an audible voice telling him it was time to turn in his badge and his gun and serve Jesus Christ in full time ministry. He thought his colleagues were playing a joke on him, so he looked around the precinct and no one was there. He told the elders of the church he was attending and entered into a process of discernment. So began the 50 years of ministry that has so blessed Ottawa and the surrounding region.

One of the most touching elements of the evening was hearing CFRA morning talk show host Steve Madeley talk about the impact Allen has had on his life. Ten years ago, Allen began broadcasting Good News in the Morning at 6:30 a.m. on CFRA, the only radio station among 15 that Allen applied to for hosting the program. Madeley said he first started listening to the program for the music, because he had grown up in the United Church and loved the old hymns and the other ecclectic offerings on the program. Then the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Madeley said that event represented a major turning point for him and set him on a spiritual search. He was so dismayed, however, that the attacks were not mentioned at all on the following Sunday at his church that he stopped going. But he continued to listen to Allen's program and soon he was hungry not only for the music but the message as he set his alarm every Sunday for 6:30 a.m.

Then when his dear wife began treatment for a second bout of cancer, the program and his conversations with Allen became all the more deep and meaningful. Allen's first wife Helen died of cancer, so he knew something about the journey Steve Madeley and his wife are on. When Allen would come in on Tuesday's to tape his Sunday broadcast, he and Steve would engage in conversations about why God allows suffering, especially that of innocent people. Steve Madeley is one of my favorite radio personalities, so it was great to hear this message.

The pictures show Dr. Allen Churchill, Allen and his wife Alma cutting the cake, and Steve Madeley and Doug Ward.

What is happening to the United States?

This is amazing. Sounds more like some Communist country busting a house church.

A local pastor and his wife claim they were interrogated by a San Diego County official, who then threatened them with escalating fines if they continued to hold bible studies in their home, 10News reported.

Attorney Dean Broyles of The Western Center For Law & Policy was shocked with what happened to the pastor and his wife.

Broyles said, "The county asked, 'Do you have a regular meeting in your home?' She said, 'Yes.' 'Do you say amen?' 'Yes.' 'Do you pray?' 'Yes.' 'Do you say praise the Lord?' 'Yes.'"

The county employee notified the couple that the small bible study, with an average of 15 people attending, was in violation of county regulations, according to Broyles.

Gagdad Bob's most interesting take on liberty

He writes at One Cosmos:

For the vast majority of human beings, liberty is not a particularly important value, much less the most important one. They would just as soon barter it away for security, as they have done in western Europe.

Once you understand this, then much about the left begins to make sense. In Europe, we can see how the welfare state puts in place a system of incentives that creates a new kind of enfeebled man, but that's not exactly correct. In reality, it simply reveals man for what he is -- a lazy, frightened, selfish, superstitious, instinct-loving and lowdown rascal. Leftism aims low and always reaches its target.

H/t Dr. Sanity, who writes:

At any rate, his words got me to thinking about why it is that the left, whose policies as Bob suggests, always end up enabling and exposing the worse aspects of human nature, are the same people who are always coming up with these utopian schemes that promise a veritable paradise of human love, compassion, kindness and brotherhood and deliver a toxic brew of hate, envy, and discord? How can they be so completely clueless about something as obvious as the reality of human nature?

Perhaps, the best answer to that question is that, when it comes to themselves, the left is constitutionally unable to understand or accept the dark side of their own natures with any degree of clarity, let alone honesty.

The squalid utopian fantasies of socialism, communism--or any variant of Marxism for that matter--appeals primarily to people who refuse to acknowledge their own human imperfections, and hence their own capacity for evil. They don't want to admit it, but those who are drawn to the leftist view of the world, tend to see themselves as superior; above all the boring, ordinary human beings around them; more virtuous, more compassionate, smarter; and of course, much better qualified to decide what's best for lesser beings like you and me.

It is extremely ironic, considering the left's rhetoric to the contrary, to realize that it is conservatism and its underlying priniciples that fundamentally embrace the truth about human nature; and understand that nature is closer to the "lazy, frightened,s elfish, superstitious, instinct-loving, lowdown rascal" than to the utopian "ideal man", promoted in the rantings of communists, socialist, or any collectivist or totalitarian (whether from the left or the right side of the political spectrum). And, as a consequence of understanding that reality, conservatism and its economic policies (i.e., capitalism) are able to harness even the most negative aspects of human nature to bring positive good both to the individual and to the larger society as well.

Conservatism and capitalism are both ideas that have worked amazingly well for one reason: they do not pretend that human nature is something it is not. Leftism of any stripe fails miserably and catastrophically because they routinely pretend that human nature can be changed and perfected.

Ravi Zacharias at the National Prayer Breakfast

World-renowned evangelist and Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias addressed the Canadian National Prayer Breakfast this morning here in Ottawa. What a privilege to be there.

This morning, he told a version of this story that he told to the American National Prayer Breakfast last year.

But the last day, I saw one of the leaders of Hamas, one of the four founders. I went there for one reason; I had one question for him. He gave us a great meal, told us of eighteen years he’d served in prison, some of his children had been lost in suicide bombings, and this and that. And I had a question. I said, “Sheik, I may never see you again and forgive me if I’m asking you the wrong question. Please tell me, what do you think of suicide bombing and sending your children out like that?” I didn’t like his answer. I couldn’t say much. The room was full of smoke.

After he finished his answer, I said, “Sheik, you and I may never see each other again, so I want you to hear me. A little distance from here is a mountain upon which Abraham went 5,000 years ago to offer his son. You may say the son was one; I may say it’s another. Let’s not argue about that. He took his son up there. And as the axe was about to fall, God said, ‘Stop.’” I said, “Do you know what God said after that?” He shook his head. I said, “God said, ‘I myself will provide.’” He nodded his head. I said, “Very close to where you and I are sitting, Sheik, is a hill. Two thousand years ago, God kept that promise and brought his own Son and the axe did not stop this time. He sacrificed his own Son.”

I said, “Sheik, I just want you to hear this. Until you and I receive the Son God has provided, we’ll be offering our own sons and daughters on the battlefields of this world for many of the wrong reasons.”

It was quiet. We walked out and the Archbishop just put his arm around me. As I was about to get into the SUV, the Sheik came over and he just patted me on my face. He kissed me on both sides. He was a strong man; he pulled me to him. He said, “You’re a good man. I hope I will see you again someday.” That’s all he said.

Wow. While Googling around for information about the Sheik's name, I found this about another Hamas leader's son who converted to Christianity. Thank God for people like Ravi Zacharias who have the courage to share the Gospel.

This was the 44th Canadian National Prayer Breakfast. And it keeps growing in size. This year it had to be held off the Hill because they needed a hotel-sized ballroom. Even then it was packed.

Multiculturalism and immigration

I am an immigrant to Canada. So is my husband. So, obviously, I think immigration is a good idea. But neither of us believes in hyphenated Canadians.

I oppose the relativistic doctrine of multiculturalism that in effect allows new comers to Canada to settle here and colonize this country the way European settlers colonized North America and that treats our own Western cultural heritage as uniquely evil and worth apologizing for and setting aside to accommodate even some appalling practices among newcomers.

I think immigrants should integrate into the variant of Western Civilization that Canada represents and graft themselves onto its history and its founding stories. While I think there should be lots of room for religious freedom and unique cultural expression, it should not be a kind of "anything goes." Practices like honor killings, widow burnings, genital mutiliation, cannibalism (even if the victim volunteers on E-Bay) should be circumscribed by reason founded on Judeo-Christian principles that form the bedrock of everything that is good about the West.

Hmmmm. I wonder how differently things might have gone if the Aboriginals in North America were more unified (instead of fighting each other tooth and nail) and had jointly insisted the settlers integrate to their culture and not vice versa. But I digress.

This piece about the effects of multiculturalism in Europe and how, instead of forming a happy, integrated society where differences don't matter, has created enclaves that amount to colonies on European soil. And oddly enough, governments are paying for this to happen, changing the laws to help it go faster, and the powers that be threaten anyone who objects with hate crimes prosecutions.

"Here an immigrant no longer has to struggle, study, work, he can live at the expense of the state," Spruyt tells us. "We have ended up creating a parallel society.

It's interesting as well, that this piece on a Catholic website, reveals the tremendous danger posed to homosexuals in this not-so-subtle transformation of Holland.

The modern welfare state, the Savior State as Douglas Farrow calls it, is euthanizing itself.

Want to know why I'm concerned about Obama?

David Solway has a litany that pretty well sums it up over at Pajamas Media. (H/t FFoF). It's pretty alarming to see all the reasons in one place, but there they are.

And interestingly, he doesn't even include some of the worst things---Obama's support for partial birth abortion and infanticide of babies born as the result of botched abortions; his support of embryonic stem cell research; his funding of abortions overseas with American taxpayers' money; and his apparent willingness to trample on the conscience rights of medical practicioners and the policies of Catholic hospitals.

Solway writes:

To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., I have a nightmare. I sense that the political and electoral temper of America has been “revolutionized” and that millions of young, poorly educated but successfully indoctrinated Americans may bring their country to its knees. I suspect their efforts will be abetted by the approximately 40% of Americans who do not pay taxes, living off the rapidly melting fat of the land. And I’m afraid the situation will get worse before it starts to get even worser — at least for the next several years. The best we can anticipate is an unlooked-for series of events that may bring “hope and change,” given a different acceptation from the original resonance of the phrase.

We can hope against hope, for example, that a sufficient number of Americans will rethink themselves and rally to ensure that Obama, like the lamentable Jimmy Carter before him, will prove to be a one-term president.

And yet one term may be enough for Obama to remake and subvert the country so profoundly — recall his campaign countdown that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” — that it may not be able to recover, or at any rate not in our lifetimes. Despite his soaring approval rating and the media’s starry-eyed love affair with their mesmerizing paramour, it must be said that almost everything Obama does is either actually or potentially destructive.

But the cohort I am most concerned about is the educated, liberal elite, including the news media, that are still starry-eyed about this man.

Also, I like Rod Dreher and David Frum, but I wish they would stop attacking people on the Right. Isn't there enough to criticize in the Obama administration? But hey, I guess it drives traffic to their sites.

I don't like Mark Levin's screaming or insults either. He has an awful voice. But on the balance, the ideas he puts forward, the fact that he reads from people like de Tocqueville and our founding documents, makes him an ally in the cause for liberty and civil rights.

Funny, I share similar reactions

Dr. Sanity writes the following about her reactions to Obama and Bill Clinton.

Frankly, I can barely stand to listen to the man. I have to read transcripts of most of his speeches because my reaction to his style is so negative. I don't like the sensation of being manipulated; nor do I like being lectured to by someone who instinctively believes they are far more virtuous than I am-- and intends to show me the error of my ways.

Understand that I listen to people for a living. I hear various degrees of honesty, sincerity, and real emotional pain being expressed on a regular basis. I also hear some of the most self-serving, dishonest and completely irresponsible utterings that it is possible to imagine. Yet, in my professional career, I have to freely admit that I have heard nothing like the deceitful and self-aggrandizing utterings of Barack Obama, which seem to get more and more pathological with every speech he gives. His most recent scam, in the National Archives in front of a fake copy of the U.S. Constitution just about takes the cake. This is not irony, so much as it is the grandiosity of tyranny.

Bill Clinton--who I actually liked for the most part; even his amusing narcissism, which seems so childishly innocent in retrospect--was completely harmless compared to the sociopathic statist that is our current POTUS.

I liked Clinton, too. He was the archetypal charming "bad boyfriend," a loveable rogue who acted out of neediness and though he left a lot of hurt and harm in his wake he didn't intend it.

I too prefer to read transcripts of Obama rather than listen to his strange pauses and clipped delivery. And yes, there is a sanctimoniousness that I find grating. For example, lecturing Americans about "torture" when he has no problems with leaving newborn babies born as the result of a botched abortion to die without comfort or medical care is the height of hypocrisy.

More on Obama at Notre Dame

From the Litany, which we have been saying up until today, Ascension Day:

From all sedition, conspiracy, and rebellion; from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and Commandment,
Good Lord, deliver us.

And now, Fr. Landry explains why Obama is a bad theologian and manipulated Christian terminology and Biblical phrases to promote relativism:

In his commencement address on Sunday, President Obama, rather than vindicating the university’s decision against its countless critics, reinforced the validity of the critics’ arguments and the wisdom of the U.S. Bishops’ policy. For beneath his ever genial tone, uplifting images and eloquent delivery, President Obama made several major points contrary to the Catholic faith. Packaged as they were, however, in mellifluous pseudo-Christian phrases enunciated in front of applauding Catholic priests by a man adorned with newly-bestowed doctoral garments, many failed to realize what he was doing.

The most audacious part of the address was when the President tried to change the meaning of the Christian faith and draw erroneous conclusions from the false notion. “The ultimate irony of faith,” the president declared, “is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen.” He seemed to be quoting from Hebrews 11:1, one of the most famous definitions of faith found in Sacred Scripture, but, whether intentional or not, he got its meaning completely wrong. The passage reads, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is not a “belief” in things not seen — which would be tautological and nonsensical — but the “substance” or “evidence” of things not seen. Faith leads not to doubt, nor merely to subjective conviction, but to objective truth discoverable through revelation and grace.

In a challenging part of his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, Pope Benedict described the real meaning of the passage the President failed to cite properly. Faith, the Pope said, is the“‘hypostasis, the ‘substance’ of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.’ … The concept of ‘substance’ is therefore modified [by the words ‘proof of things not seen’] in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say ‘in embryo’… there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty … [and] constitutes for us a ‘proof’ of the things that are still unseen.”

So, according to the triple witness of the Letter to the Hebrews, Pope Benedict and the consistent teaching of Christianity, faith does not “necessarily admit doubt,” as the President claims. In fact, true faith and doubt cannot coexist. We cannot believe in the Resurrection and at the same time doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. We cannot simultaneously believe that God is a Trinitarian communion of love and doubt his existence.

Read the whole thing.

Then read Fr. Z on the new golden calf (both of these posts via the Anchoress)

A great goal has been held up for us. Gaze with wonder upon the new calf. Our new goal is dialogue. Common ground is our promised land. There we will find healing from divisions and lots more talk. Endless dialogue and then more dialogue. Our side might not be able to say very much, but that is neither here nor there. It’s the goal of dialogue which is important. But this dialogue must not be allowed to become mean-spirited. Forefend! We must not "demonize" – a favorite new word – anyone with their past records or the Church’s clear principles about the sanctity of human life.

In an era when emotion trumps reason, facts are just plain mean.

The progressivist side knows they will not win by arguments. They win by projecting the image of deep-caring, of brow-furrowed nuance, of struggling with those hard decisions.

Remember: If you will have first "struggled" you are thereafter justified in anything you chose.

Dr. Sanity weighs in on the torture debate

I think what she has to say is most interesting.

Our uncertainty about our own values is what is destroying us already. Value by value, we are ceding morality to an enemy that joyfully destroys life; laughs at liberty; and mocks our entire historical tradition. Look how willing much of the West has been to compromise our cherished freedoms in order to accommodate the enemy's threats.

Soon, we will have compromised away all that matters to us; our civilization and all its values chipped away, little by little, as it is taken over by the barbarians who love death more than we love life.

If the cost of this war must include acknowledging the horrific reality of the kind of death and terror the enemy will bring to us if we allow it; if we must dishonestly and cunningly conduct an intelligence war and be willing to obtain victory knowing that it will require sacrifice; then so be it. I love to read fantasies as much as anyone, but in the real world, the good and virtuous whose cause is just do not always automatically win.

When America is finally cornered or down to the wire; when it comes down to the scenarios outlined by Krauthammer and others; then we must allow our own barbarism to surface to combat theirs head to head; AND, we must be prepared to live with the consequences, including even guilt and remorse. Otherwise, everything we hold dear, everything we aspire to become and all that we have achieved, will forever perish from this earth.

These barbarians we fight--who do not let reason or life interfere with their jihad; who abide by no treaties, follow no rules, and scorn the very values upon which western civilization is founded--must be defeated. We could have lived with them they did not insist that we must become what they are or die. They are the ones who have defined the ground rules (or the non-rules) of this conflict; and eventually, we will have to meet them at their level--or they will win. We should hold tight to the thought that it is they who have set up the playing field on which the war is being waged.

Physicians and the Conscience

I recently attended an excellent conference on Physicians and the Conscience. I see Western Catholic Reporter has posted versions two of the stories I wrote.

OTTAWA — Efforts to protect the most vulnerable members of society are being hampered by a lack of shared moral norms in society, says the head of the U.S. National Catholic Bioethics Centre.

“If we try to protect the most vulnerable in our midst, the unborn, the dying, we are told that we cannot impose our moral beliefs on anyone else,” said John Haas, president of the Philadelphia-based centre.

Haas was one of a roster of speakers at a May 8-10 conference inaugurating the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Societies (CFCPS) and focusing on threats to conscience rights of physicians.

and:

OTTAWA — If euthanasia or assisted suicide is legalized, do not allow it to be practised by palliative care units, said Ottawa’s palliative care director Dr. Jose Pereira.

Otherwise, people will think physician assisted suicide (PAS) is part of palliative care and a gateway to it, he warned.

Pereira told a conference of Catholic physicians in Ottawa May 8-10 the separation must be “crystal clear,” based on his experience working in Switzerland where assisted suicide (AS) is legal.

He also said AS or euthanasia must not be called “death with dignity” in any upcoming debate in Parliament, because “it implies there is no other form of dignified death.”

Alas, one of the drawbacks of being a reporter is my stuff often gets cut to fit the limited space the editors have available. Oh well.

Jamie Glazov's United in Hate is a profoundly insightful book

Jamie Glazov's book United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tryanny and Terror tries to answer the questions I and many others have had about the silence and even complicity on the part of the West with Islamist terrorists. Why the silence on the part of feminists about the gender apartheid in places like Saudi Arabia? Why the silence from gay activists about the hangings of gays in Iran, the beatings inflicted on gays in cities like Amsterdam?

Glazov has dug into a mother lode of insight that is so rich and so vast that this book can only serve as substantial first course. And in some ways, because his critique seems to come from a kind of Enlightenment-version of Western civilization that does not refer too deeply to the West's Judeo-Christian roots, he may not even realize the full depths of what he has uncovered.

Glazov documents, with extensive footnoted excerpts, the Left's romance with dictators from Hitler, to Stalin, to Castro, to Mao, to the North Vietnamese commununists, to the Sandanistas, showing that this romance is the strongest at the height of the terror unleashed by each regime and falls off when the terror is abated. The new darlings of the Left are the barbaric jihadists of radical Islam that he shows has elements of western-style tyranny borrowed from Hitler and Stalin and mixed with religious texts advocating Islamic supremacy and death to the infidel and to the Jews.

But don't let the footnotes and the quotes from primary sources deter you. This book reads like a thriller. I could not put it down. I want everyone I know to read it.

Glazov writes:

Just like religious folk, the believer espouses a faith, but his is a secular one. He too searches for personal redemption--but of an earthly variety. The progressive faith, therefore, is a secular religion. And this is why socialism's dynamic constitute a muted carbon copy of Judeo-Christian imagery. Socialism's secular utopian vision includes a fall from an ideal collective brotherhood, followed by a journey through a valley of oppression and injustice, and then ultimately a road toward redemption.

Later in the book, he shows how this redemption is built on the blood of those killed for the sake of the new society and calls up a suicidal longing in true believers on the Left. He also points out the parallels between the socialist utopia and that of the reign of Islam. In other words, profound insights into the old Leftist phrase of having to break a few eggs if you want to make an omelet--so what you purge society of the intellectuals and the bourgeois, and those who refuse to sink their individuality into the collective.

Glazov writes:

In rejecting his own society, the believer spurns the values of democracy and individual freedom, which are anathema to him, since he has miserably failed to cope with both the challenges they pose and the possibilities they offer. Tortured by his personal alientation, which is accompanied by feelings of self-loathing, the believer craves a fairy-tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible. The believer fantasizes about how his own individuality and self will be submerged within the collective whole."

These assertions come relatively early in the book and some might have a hard time accepting them at first, because they so go against the grain of progressive thinking that's like a miasma arising from a cauldron of toxic ideas. But he provides the proof, over and over again, from diaries, from writings of prominent leftists who turned a blind eye to the Stalinist purges etc. etc. and romanticized the blue pajamas that obliterated sexual distinctions and individuality at the height of China's cultural revolution. He even makes a convincing case for why the burka holds such allure for western feminists.

Back in my radical days I recall someone saying the personal is political. I don't think they realized how right they were, but not in the sense the phrase-coiner meant. Glazov has hit the nail on the head about how personal dysfunction leads to certain political views (which is not to say all people who are progressive have this pathology, some really do strive for equality and to help the poor, but are not doing so as the result of a death wish).

I confess I used to hate my father and hate men, white men especially. I resented the authority my father had over me and my dependence upon him, and I resented the privileged place men had in society. But after my religious awakening, when I realized profoundly how wrong it was to resent and blame, and I started to resist those tendencies and forgive, as I forgave my father and stopped resenting men, low and behold, I no longer felt inferior or felt imaginary barriers to my being treated as an equal and with respect. And my politics started changing as well. But of course, none of my blame game and politics of resentment and its relationship to self-hatred and self-destruction was conscious. And when it became conscious, it was a difficult, humbling journey of recovery. Thankfully, as I changed, I realized my father was a good man who was doing his best to raise a difficult, rebellious daughter.

What struck me were the yearnings for utopia, for immersion in some embracing collective, for heaven, for what Douglas Farrow calls "the savior state." It makes me think of the argument from desire for the existence of God and of heaven. We have thirst, therefore something must exist like water to quench it. We hunger, therefore food exists to satisfy it. We long for a Supreme Being, therefore God exists to satisfy what Blaise Pascal called that God-shaped abyss that only God can fill. But to settle on anything but the living God, is to settle on a deception thrown up by the evil one, who perverts those impulses and longs to destroy us body and soul.

I'm reading a thriller by a friend of mine called "Mohamed's Moon" that I will write more about later--in the meantime, I'm utterly enjoying this great read---and he uses a deftly written novel to get across the big differences between Islam and Christianity in story about twin brothers separated at birth. One is raised by the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt to flawlessly penetrate western society to advance the Caliphate. It's a timely contemporary novel and it dovetails perfectly with what Mark Steyn writes about in Lights Out and Jamie Glazov writes about in United in Hate.

We long for a Savior. There is a Savior. We long for heaven. There is a heaven. But it is not here on earth. In the meantime, we do the best we can for the common good, in what Farrow describes as a "modest" way that does not grant the state or some modern day Pharoah savior status.

I think it is mega cool that someone who bought United in Hate also bought my book, according to Amazon.com.

Oh the delights of listening to Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn guest hosts Wendy Sullivan's program on Brass Balls Radio, with "shaved legs" no less.

He even does a little singing and platter spinning. All in all delightful, funny, and sobering when he talks about the threats to liberty.

And he talks about his desire to put together an album of Songs for Swinging Sexists.

Update:
By the way, I think his album would be great.
I am all for getting rid of this unisex claptrap and to allow some romance back into our popular culture, instead of "Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips" garbage. I mean, that has to be the most repulsive song out there, save for 50 Cent's disgusting Candy Shop.

When we were at 24 Sussex a few weeks back, I tried to muster up the courage to ask Mark to play something on the piano, recalling how one Christmas a bunch of us journalists were singing in four part harmony to Rosemary Thompson's piano playing. Now I am kicking myself that I didn't just barge right in and do it. What fun we would have had.

I am not for the rigid sex distinctions found in Islam, but I do think there is a nice complementarity of the sexes that is lost in present day political correctness and so is a wonderful buzz from the old romantic songs that recognized the beauty of courtship.

I love old-fashioned sexists of the kind that treat you like a lady, open doors for you, tell you you are beautiful, and would protect you from leches and louts. I love men who know how to flirt without being fresh. Men who know how to take the lead. Men who love women, but remain faithful to their wives and families at the same time because they keep their promises out of a sense of honor.

Too bad the present progressive crop of males is so effeminate and resentfully egalitarian. And these men are often resented by the very women who push them around the empty the dishwasher and change diapers with equal frequency. Ugh.

A patriarchal, loving man is a beautiful sight to behold. Men who love women and children---
my heart melts. At the March for Life the other day, there was a handsome young man with an infant girl in his arms. He was making googly eyes at her, adoring her, and whisked her out when she started to cry. Without men like this there is no future.

More parsing of the Obama Notre Dame speech

Rush Limbaugh:

George Orwell wrote 1984, and in the book he created Newspeak: using language to mislead, to confuse and control. Some of the examples from 1984: War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. This is Newspeak in 1984. Now we have a real life addition to this given President Obamas speech at Notre Dame yesterday, and it is this: Morality is immoral. That's the message Obama delivered yesterday, morality is immoral. Pro-life is a moral position. Pro-life is the extremist position, rather instead of being a moral position. Pro-life is an extremist position, according to President Obama. The entire abortion debate is manipulated. There are two manipulations of the language. It's not about abortion. It's about choice. That's one manipulation of the language, and morality is not morality. It's extremism. Pro-life is the extreme position; pro-choice is the moderate or normal position. This is how the liberal mind works, this is how they do it, and the treachery here is spreading.

And there's more. You go! Rush.

Now, I have two thoughts about this. I have often asked, "Where is the middle ground between good and evil? Where do you compromise, where's the compromise between life and death? Where's the compromise between killing and birth? Where do you compromise on that?"

So the assumption here is, find ways to respect one another's basic decency. Well, what's decent? Language still matters to me. What the hell is decent about abortion? What's decent about it? This is the first time I've ever heard abortion categorized as a form of decency. Even the pro-choice crowd in trying to justify it, has tried to say that pregnancy is a disease, or that pregnancy is a sickness that can threaten the life of the mother, or a fetus is an unviable tissue mass. But I've never heard them say that abortion is decency. But Obama has now just said that both sides of the argument feature people who are advocating decency. And then he said we need to work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. This is right out of Bill Clinton's mouth back in the nineties where abortion needs to become safe but rare, or something like that. Now, my question is, if President Obama at Notre Dame yesterday says that everybody on this debate is decent and we gotta work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, is he not admitting there's something wrong about it, then? If there's nothing wrong with an unwanted pregnancy and if there's nothing wrong with abortion, why do we have to limit them?

Why do we hope it's rare, if there's nothing wrong, if it's really nothing more than an issue of liberty and freedom for women, then why do we have to make liberty and freedom rare for women? So I think he bastardizes his own argument here, while trying to sound triangulated, above the fray, understanding both sides.

Powerful analysis of Obama's speech

I watched some of Obama's speech at Notre Dame yesterday and, well, he sounds so eminently reasonable about people agreeing to disagree and so on. But the problem is he talks a good game, but who is actually doing the demonizing? I'm sorry that a few people heckled Obama in the audience. I don't like that kind of uncivil behavior. Those who objected could have found other ways to show their opposition. But interestingly, this speech of Obama's was crafted to marginalize Catholics who actually hold to the teachings of the Church.

I dunno, I'm also really uncomfortable with Obama's blessing the graduates. As if he is the Primate of the Catholic Church in the United States or something. Will he not only take communion in Catholic Churches, but find a way to distribute it as well?

George Weigel writes:

What was surprising, and ought to be disturbing to anyone who cares about religious freedom in these United States, was the president’s decision to insert himself into the ongoing Catholic debate over the boundaries of Catholic identity and the applicability of settled Catholic conviction in the public square. Obama did this by suggesting, not altogether subtly, who the real Catholics in America are. The real Catholics, you see, are those like the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who are “congenial and gentle” in persuasion, men and women who are “always trying to bring people together,” Catholics who are “always trying to find the common ground.” The fact that Cardinal Bernardin’s undoubted geniality and gentility in bringing people together to find the common ground invariably ended with a “consensus” that matched the liberal or progressive position of the moment went unremarked — because, for a good postmodern liberal like President Obama, that progressive “consensus” is so self-evidently true that one can afford to be generous in acknowledging that others, less enlightened but arguably sincere, have different views.

Cardinal Bernardin gave a moving and powerful testimony to Christian faith in his gallant response to the cancer that finally killed him. Prior to that last, great witness, however, the late archbishop of Chicago was best known publicly for his advocacy of a “consistent ethic of life,” in which the abortion issue was linked to the abolition of capital punishment and nuclear arms control. And whatever Bernardin’s intentions in formulating what came to be known popularly as the “seamless garment” approach to public policy, the net effect of the consistent ethic of life was to validate politically the intellectual mischief of Mario Cuomo’s notorious 1984 Notre Dame speech and to give two generations of Catholic politicians a virtual pass on the abortion question by allowing them to argue that, hey, I’m batting .667 on the consistent ethic of life.

The U.S. bishops abandoned the “seamless garment” metaphor in 1998, substituting the image of the “foundations of the house of freedom” to explain the priority to be given the life issues in the Church’s address to public policy — and in the consciences of Catholic politicians. The foundations of the house of freedom, the bishops argued, are the moral truths about the human person that we can know by reason. Those truths are embodied in law in what we call civil rights. Thus, the life issues are the great civil-rights issues of the moment. This powerful argument did not, however, sit well with Catholics comfortable with the Cuomo Compromise (“I’m personally opposed, but I can’t impose my views on a pluralistic society”), for these good liberals and progressives had long prided themselves on being — like Father Hesburgh — champions of civil rights.

So the “seamless garment” went underground for a decade, only to be dusted off by Douglas Kmiec and others in the 2008 campaign; there, a variant form of the consistent ethic was used to argue that Barack Obama was the real pro-life candidate on offer. As casuistry, this was risible. But it worked well enough that Catholic Obama-supporters on the Notre Dame board saw their chances and took ’em, arranging for the president to come to Notre Dame to complete the seamless garment’s dust-off and give it a new lease on life by presenting the late Cardinal Bernardin — “a kind and good man . . . a saintly man” — as the very model of a real Catholic in America. Not the kind of Catholic who would ever criticize Notre Dame for bestowing an honorary doctorate of laws on a man determined to enshrine in law what the Catholic Church regards as a fundamental injustice. Not the kind of man who would suggest that, with the life issues, we’re living through the moral equivalent of the Lincoln/Douglas debates, with Barack Obama unhappily choosing to play the role of Stephen A. Douglas. Not a man, in other words, like Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, Cardinal Bernardin’s successor, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and one of the most articulate critics of Notre Dame’s decision to honor a president who manifestly does not share what Notre Dame claims is its institutional commitment to the Church’s defense of life.

Read the whole thing.

The picture shows Cardinal George and me when the cardinal was in Ottawa last September to receive an Alumnus of the Year Award from his alma mater Saint Paul University.

This is laugh out loud funny

Congressman's Son Won't Shut The Hell Up During Hearing

Enjoy.

Upcoming lecture to put on your calendar

The Centre for Cultural Renewal does some excellent work and usually their annual Hill Lecture is a good event. So here's some information about this year's:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 15, 2009

Dr. Leah Bradshaw to deliver The Eighth Annual “HILL” Lecture:
“Ties of Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World"
Hosted, and Opening Remarks, by the Hon. John McKay, PC, MP
Parliament Hill, West Block, Room 308, May 26, 2009.
7:00pm Registration Confirmation 7:30pm Lecture 8:30pm Reception

The Board of Directors of the Centre for Cultural Renewal (Ottawa based think-tank), and Mr. Iain Benson, Executive Director, are proud to announce this year’s speaker:
Dr. Leah Bradshaw.

Dr. Bradshaw teaches and writes on the history of political thought, as well as on contemporary issues in political theory. Much of her career has evolved from the study of the work of Hannah Arendt, and has been preoccupied with understanding the break between classical and modern theory. Publications include a book on Hannah Arendt, articles and book chapters on canonical figures in the tradition of Western thought (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau), and articles and book chapters on themes such as the relationship between emotions and reason in making judgments, the difference between philosophy and narrative, and the dissonance between polis and empire.

EXCERPT: Ties of Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World
“In a globalized world, in which individual rights take moral precedence over ties of territory and belonging, economies are intertwined, and in which democracies are the refuge for peoples of varying religious and ethnic commitments, what is the true meaning of citizenship? Can we defend citizenship as friendship in such a world? The paper argues that Aristotle’s original definitions of politics still hold true. Democracy and citizenship are fragile and relatively rare phenomena in Western history, and we are in danger of losing our contemporary democracies to over-reaching ambitions of universal rights and economic empire. The paper will situate the dyad of citizenship and friendship within contemporary debates in political theory, and draw upon recent political experiences in Canada.”

Admission is free, however, voluntary donations are welcome (cash or cheque only please) – tax receipts will be issued for donations of $20.00 or more. Please Note: because seating is limited and because of security reasons, pre-registration is necessary. To register, please provide your full name along with some contact information by email at info@culturalrenewal.ca or by phone at (613) 567-9010. Media Passes are also available.

The Centre for Cultural Renewal is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan charitable organization that strives to produce an enriched analysis of the role that beliefs (including religious beliefs) play within pluralistic culture. In all its work, the Centre seeks to focus on the complex connections between public policy, culture, moral discourse and religious convictions.

The tide is changing

This is good news:

In other polling news... Gallup said that a new poll, conducted May 7 to 10, found “51 percent of Americans calling themselves ‘pro-life’ on the issue of abortion and 42 percent ‘pro-choice.’ This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.”

This also won't help Barack Obama or the democrats. Obama is the most radical pro-abortion and infanticide president in history. One of his first actions as president was to lift a ban on funding for foreign abortions. He's also voted 4 times during his political career to support infanticide.

What can a celibate priest counsel on sex?

Kathy Shaidle writes today:

No, Father: it's 'Sex As YOU Don't Know It'

I hate it when Catholic priests write about sex.

No, he does NOT know about sex just because he's "counselled married couples," anymore than Tom Wolfe "knows" how to fly the Challenger because he's interviewed a lot of astronauts.

Reader discretion advised if you follow the link. It's to a post about a Polish priest who has written a book about sex and "married love" that sounds to me like he's been listening to far too many men complaining about how their wives aren't interested in wearing sexy lingerie and turning themselves into pretzels to provide interesting sexual positions so as to put a little more zest into their sex lives and women complaining that their husband never bothers to "satisfy them."

I dunno. I do think it is rather unseemly for a priest to be offering this kind of advice and, frankly, that he is even allowing himself to dwell on thoughts like this for more than a flashing, unbidden momentary temptation, strikes me as immodest and unchaste. But I think a celibate, heterosexual, fatherly priest has a great deal to teach both a husband and a wife about the nature of sacrificial love out of which a properly ordered, meaningful, loving and chaste married sexual life flows.

For quite some time, in evangelical circles some have argued that whatever happens on the marriage bed is sacred. And that includes oral sex. I remember getting into a strange argument with an evangelical pastor about this matter when I mentioned at a small prayer gathering that as I was beginning to understand how important it was not to divorce procreation from marriage, I was also coming to see the importance from a natural law standpoint of not divorcing sex from procreation and what Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae called the "unitive significance" of the marriage act.

Paul VI wrote:

11. The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, "noble and worthy.'' (11) It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile. For its natural adaptation to the expression and strengthening of the union of husband and wife is not thereby suppressed. The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws. The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. (12)

Union and Procreation

12. This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.

The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman.

What I was coming to see was that if Christians or anyone pro-traditional marriage argued that "anything goes" in the bedroom, then we were undercutting our arguments against homosexual marriage. Because if, as gay erstwhile Catholic blogger Andrew Sullivan famously wrote: "We are all sodomists now" , then really, what arguments other than prejudice can we possibly have against gays marrying?

The pastor became quite dogmatic about the "anything goes" thing to the point where it was pointless to say anything else. I was up against a brick wall, like I have found with people who defend abortion.

What I have come to see is that chastity is tough, whether one is single, a priest or religious who has taken a vow of celibacy, or married. Just because one is married does not give one a pass to "anything goes."

I have also come to see that holy chastity whatever one's state in life is impossible without the help of the Holy Spirit. And I also recognize that often we will fail to live up to our ideals in the level of sacrificial love we hope to give in all aspects of our lives, but that does not mean we revise down the requirements of holiness.

In a conversation with some friends yesterday, we spoke about the sacrificial love that family life requires and the ways the demands of children force one to grow and to become less selfish and more loving in the sense of caring for the good of another person.

The conversation reminded of some things an Opus Dei priest said to a small group of us in Rome last September about family and married love, because in my Anglican Catholic faith, we have married priests and often a family at the heart of the parish. He said that the life of a priest can be very pleasurable and that it would be easy to become quite content and satisfied with the lifestyle. He said the example of the kinds of sacrifices of love that must be made within the family provide a good example for those who have been called to celibacy to remember to also make those sacrifices as priests, to be with those who are less popular, the more needy and the less lovely in ways that demand a dying to selfishness.

But the selfless giving and love of a chaste priest is also something that married couples --especially men---need to look at and take as an example. Because a celibate priest sacrifices his sexual love for the sake of His Bride, the Church, the love that he offers does not use the other as an object--that is if the priest is living this out properly. A wife yearns to be loved by her husband for who she is, to be honored and cherished. She hopes her husband might exercise self-sacrifice and willingness to put his sexual desires under discipline for her sake, and not to have him expect her to dance around in some stupid bustier and garter belt, kama sutra-ing around the house for his use and pleasure. Or on the other hand, for a wife to turn her husband into an object or a performer for her gratification and to be self-sacrificing in understanding that it's not all about her either.

There is something extremely beautiful about an obviously heterosexual man who could easily have experienced the goods of a beautiful wife and many loving children who sacrifices that good for the sake of the Church. And the Church, in her earthly institutional form often seems a critical, nagging, rebellious, unthankful and unattractive spouse for these men at times, I imagine. Yet for those men who are able to cultivate serenity and express the love of Christ because they see the image of God in the disguises of the sinners in their midst, well, that love transforms lives.

That kind of priest I would think might have a great deal to say about human sexuality, but it would never devolve to positions or techniques. Instead it would focus on Jesus and a call to holiness and to loving the way Christ loves us. Most wives would be so grateful to have their husbands love them that way. Christ's love puts everything in its proper place and always puts the dignity of the whole human person at the forefront.

The Archbishop outblogs me on the March for Life

Archbishop Prendergast already has a detailed post about yesterday's March for Life!

Here's an excerpt---go over and read the full account:

Last night I picked up Cardinal Marc Ouellet when the last flight from Quebec/Montreal arrived at 11:30. He was weary from a full day visiting the retired priests' residence in his diocese.

But His Eminence had bounced back by morning as we headed over to the Centre Block on Parliament Hill for an off-the-record conversation with MPs and members of the Knights of Columbus on Pro-Life issues.

Our meeting over, we headed back to Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica for the Feast of St. Mattias and the Pro-Life Mass: the church was "blocked" as Newfoundlanders would put it--filled to overflowing (1100 capacity) and with an additional 200-300 seated in the parish hall where a giant screen allowed these faithful to view the Liturgy (the same was true at St. Patrick's Basilica).

Before the Final Blessing, Cardinal Ouellet and Toronto Archbishop Collins gave us brief encouragement to marshall the faithful to the cause of overcoming the ills of abortion and the justice of this cause.

The speeches from 12:30-1:30 on Parliament Hill were done in dripping, sometimes heavy rain--but this did not deter the 12,000 demonstrators who marched the parade route in good cheer: not troubled in the least by the pro-abortion counter-demonstrators on Elgin Street (the high school students behind me clearly outdid them in energy and joy).

I got home so beat from running around in the rain taking photographs and trying to take notes that the last thing I thought about was firing up my computer and writing about the day's events. I watched a little of "the Factor" and CTV News, but when nothing about the March was high up in the newscast I gave up.

I can't find anything on the March in my National Post this morning. I had to dig deep to find a short, slightly snarky article in the Ottawa Citizen. Michael Coren warned about the likely lack of coverage in yesterday's Post.

It was an amazing day. Two "blocked" basilicas in Ottawa in the morning, and the Protestant prayer service tripled in size. Despite rain and high winds, the March, dubbed Exoduc 2009, saw a 50 per cent increase in the size of the crowd on the Hill than last year. Campaign Life Coalition's Jim Hughes stands on a corner and counts the crowd with a clicker as people pass by. He counted 12,300 people. They reached a record 8,000 last year.

About 25 MPs and 13 or more bishops participated in the days events.

The Socon has lots of pictures and video, including the incredible speech of a young girl.

LifeSiteNews.com reports here:

Eyewitnesses at the Catholic masses said that both churches were filled to, and beyond, capacity. Approximately 900 people squeezed into St. Patrick's Basilica, while over 1,100 overflowed Notre Dame. As well, an additional 200 or so at each location had to watch the mass on a screen in the basement of each church, due to the lack of space.

Hughes said he was especially pleased by the unprecedented show of support from the Canadian Catholic bishops, with at least 12 bishops celebrating at the masses. This was the first year in the history of the march that the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has thrown its official support behind the event.

At 3 p.m., after the rally on Parliament Hill and the march, representatives of Silent No More Awareness Campaign began delivering powerful testimonies about their personal experiences with abortion, repeatedly moving their listeners to tears. Just as the clock on the Hill was striking 3:00, many in the crowd marvelled that the sun suddenly broke through the clouds for the first time that day and soon afterwards the sky cleared with hardly a cloud in sight. Also, some pointed out that as each of the Silent No More Awareness speakers was introduced, as if on cue a strong wind would blow, with the strongest occuring when the Canadian leader of the group, Angelina Steenstra, was introduced.

Want to contact me or buy a signed copy of my book?

Go here.

And by the way, not only is my picture on the dust jacket of Mark Steyn's latest book, inside he quotes me.

How cool is that? More on Mark's book later.

It's a joy to read and reread, especially for sentences like this:

A while back it was a local government council telling workers not to have knick-knacks on their desks presenting Winnie-the-Pooh's porcine sidekick, Piglet. As Martin Niemoller famously said, first they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character and, if I was, I'm more of an Eeyore. Soon then they came for the Three Little Pigs, and Babe, and by the time I realized my country had turned into a 24/7 Looney Tunes, there was no Porky Pig to stammer, "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" and bring the nightmare to an end."

Order your signed copy of Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West through the SteynStore

Mitchell Raphael`s pictures from the Shakedown event last week

Go here.

Check out the comments. My goodness, what odd preoccupations leftists have.

If you would like to look at all the pictures I took that night, go here and follow the links.

Remember, this blog works best in FireFox. Explorer will make you navigate away from the blog and back in order for links to work.

In search of the Ezra Levant of the pro-life movement

Andrea over at ProwomanProlife.org interviews Ezra (my bolds):

PWPL: When the Ontario College drafted “Physicians and the Ontario
Human Rights Code” many doctors in Ontario became concerned about being
forced to refer for abortion. The policy was subsequently redrafted, but
should Ontario doctors still remain on alert? How real do think the threat is?

E.L.: Quasi-judicial tribunals and other outside-the-public-consciousness
forums are the preferred battleground for radical social engineers. They know
they can’t win in the court of public opinion, and often not even in the court
of law. So they’ll try it through agencies and boards and commissions — places
where scrutiny is lower, rules of procedure are weaker, and the ability of
radicals to hijack the process is higher.

PWPL: The debate on abortion has
become so polarized it is, often, called a dialogue of the deaf. We could try
shouting louder and see if our voices get noticed that way (doubtful), or we
could try something else. Do you have thoughts on what this “something else”
might be?

E.L.: It’s not my forte; I’m not well briefed on the state of the
debate. I’d agree that simply turning up the volume — such as shock tactics —
probably won’t work, and might even turn people off. I think that approaching
the subject from creative and counter-intuitive points of view, such as focusing
on sex-select abortions, might be more productive. I also think that the simple
visual of that fetus, in utero, holding on to the finger of a doctor doing
surgery, is very powerful.

PWPL: Finally, I’m looking for an “Ezra Levant” for life: someone who would bring your spunk and vigour to Canada’s pro-life scene. Any thoughts on taking up the cause after you finish up with the whole
HRT thing?

E.L.: Thanks for the offer. But after working for free for a year
and a half fighting against HRCs, I think I have to earn a real living
now!

Nausea-inducing story from Sweden

Via The Corner:

Doctors expressed concern over this and brought it to the attention of Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare. They asked how to handle requests where doctors felt “pressured to examine the [fetus’s] gender” without a medical rationale.

The Board came back and said that requests to for abortions based on a child’s gender cannot be refused.

What's worse? The "jokes" or the reaction

I agree with David Frum on this one:

What draws gasps is not the comedian's description of Rush Limbaugh as a traitor, wishing him dead, etc. What draws gasps is the president's laughter and pleasure in these words.

As experienced a television performer as the president knows that there will be a reaction shot after jokes like these. Suppose he had frowned and shook his head? That would have done more to cement his reputation as a post-partisan uniter than anything he has done to date. Instead, his expression and the motions of his body betrayed his real feelings - and betrayed his promises.

And just as it's not about Sykes, it's not about Rush. That Rush Limbaugh has said harsh things about the president is no excuse for either Sykes or the president. Barack Obama is president in large part because he persuaded Americans that he stood above petty name-calling. Now we see that he may not do the name-calling -but he's sure not above it.

President Obama diminished himself. Very possibly he did something even worse and more self-damaging: very possibly, he revealed himself.

But I thought the president revealed himself here, too, when he giggled and laughed about the dire economy that has put thousands out of work and reduced the life-savings and retirement nest eggs of North Americans by 25%.

Dr. Sanity diagnoses Mark Steyn!!!!

"Bitingly brilliant," she says of his piece about Colin Powell and whether conservatism is over.

Amnesty International in financial trouble--hmmmm

Mark Shea wonders why.

"We are faced with a severe crisis here at Amnesty International," goes the pleading donation appeal.

Yes. Well. I have no doubt you are, Mr. Cox. That could have something to do with the fact that you are no longer about helping political prisoners subjected to torture and death, and have instead dedicated yourselves to expanding the abortion license worldwide? When you mutate into another garden-variety promoter of the culture of death, it rather stands to reason that people who think you should be doing what you were founded to do and not the exact bleedin' opposite will find other places to send their money. Somehow your appeal letter neglects to mention this salient fact.

Klees or Hillier?

Joseph Ben-Ami says Hillier. Campaign Life says Klees.

Me? I'm voting Hillier on the first ballot, with Klees as second choice to register my concerns about run- amok- 'human rights' commissions, religious freedom, freedom of speech and conscience rights. (My bolds).

Ben-Ami writes:

Late last week Canada’s largest anti-abortion lobby group, Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), issued a public statement endorsing Frank Klees’ bid to replace the recently departed John Tory as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. The endorsement raises a number of important questions regarding both the criteria that is used by CLC to determine who is – and who is not – pro-life, and the process whereby that determination is made.

Full disclosure on three matters; First, I am a consultant to Klees’ opponent Randy Hillier, who is also running for the leadership of the Ontario PC Party; second, I am a personal friend of several senior officials in CLC; and third, I too recently sought out the support of CLC and its members on behalf of Hillier.

I reveal these three items to preclude any criticism that I have a hidden agenda in raising these questions, as well as to blunt any accusation of “sour grapes” which may be directed against me – I am motivated by neither.

Obviously I believe that Hillier makes a better pro-life candidate than Klees. This is because, unlike any of his rivals in the race – Klees included – he is prepared to take concrete action to defend the right of doctors and other health care professionals to decline, as a matter of conscience, to participate in or to facilitate abortions.

Hillier plans to accomplish this by first, abolishing the province’s corrupted Human Rights Commission, something all freedom-loving Ontarians can and should support. He then intends to introduce legislation that would prohibit the government from forcing private individuals to act in a manner they consider to be morally wrong.

What about the issue of whether or not abortion should be against the law in Canada and if so, at what point during the pregnancy?

On this Hillier’s position is crystal clear. Whatever his personal views, constitutionally, this question can only be decided by the federal government and the courts, not the provinces. For the provincial government to become fully embroiled in the controversy would at best be irrelevant; given the full slate of problems the government must confront in the present economic crisis, it could be regarded as irresponsible as well.

Read the whole thing.

Are we emasculating our police forces?

I have a soft spot in my heart for police officers because in researching my novel about an RCMP constable, I had to spend some time around them researching the book. Most of the officers I have met are upright, honest people who care about justice and got into police work because of that.

Yet I wonder if we have emasculated our police forces with all kinds of so-called "human rights" codes and affirmative action policies and tiptoeing sensitivities about not offending this group or that. Of course, police have to respond to the desires of their civilian political masters, but isn't that part of the problem? The weak, appeasement-oriented responses. Then of course there is the harsh criticism that descends with all the benefits of hindsight on even the slightest transgression.

So, we get this---

And we get this, where a couple of harmless, middle-aged pro-lifers get hassled by the police. Maybe it's out of frustration, kind of like the man who kicks his friendly dog because he can't take out his real anger at the boss who could fire him.

I feel bad for the police, because it is the weakness of our civilian leaders that is sending a message to every illiberal group that they can take over our streets and disrupt civil order and nothing is going to happen to them.

I would think it is a Canadian value not to use your children as human shields, no? Where is Children's Aid? Probably looking for some Christian family that gently spanks their child.

The Archbishop is out-blogging me!!!!!!

I often run into Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast in the course of my duties as a journalist who writes mostly for Roman Catholic papers. Often he's making the news while I'm covering it, or blogging about it.

Well, the archbishop started a blog on Good Friday and lately he's been outblogging me! Some readers who check out both our blogs noted that he had material up on his blog about the same events I wrote about first!

This week he really outdid me.

First we both attended Bishop Carl Reid's vernissage on Thursday night. Well, the archbishop got in many more details about where and how long it's going to run and so on. He writes:

This evening I took the Ottawa River Parkway to the Island Park exit and headed for Westboro where Bishop Carl Reed (Ontario suffragan bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, with whom I have become acquainted through the Pro-Life cause) was holding the vernissage of his exhibition of photographs taken in his garden, on his pastoral journeys, recent vacations and overseas travel.

The exhibition at the Ottawa Bagel Shop (1321 Wellington Street) will run for a few more weeks. Sales will assist with the costs of his cathedral and be used in his charitable works. I purchased a few cards to send to folks for special occasions: my only concern--will the label on the back, "Photographs by the Bishop" give recipients the wrong impression?

Then we both attended a conference for Catholic physicians over the weekend, and he's been blogging on that too, when I've been too tired out to do more than mention I was there and blogging would be light.

He does at least two posts on it!

In one he writes:

I was able to attend most of the major presentations at the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians' Societies General Meeting:

9:30 Douglas Farrow (McGill U.), "Doctors without Borders: Excising the Conscience, Emasculating Medicine"

1:30 Francois Pouliot, O.P. (U. Laval), "Conscience et Cooperation"

4:00 Jose Pereira (U. Ottawa), "Working Under the Shadow of Legalized Assisted Suicide: Experience and Lessons from Switzerland"

As well, at 11am and 3pm, there were concurrent workshops on Family Practice, Geriatrics, Medical Education and Pediatrics.

The festive dinner was at 6 o'clock, after which I spoke briefly a word of encouragement--on the role of doctors and medical personnel in building today's needed civilization of love.

He received a standing ovation for the encouragement he provided.

It was an eye-opener for me to see the many ways Catholic physicians and other health professionals are being challenged in ways that aim to violate their consciences and thus their integrity.

One of the consistent themes of the conference was the relationship of conscience to an objective moral order, to the law written in our hearts by our Creator, and the importance of reason and natural law. Now that western nations have lost this sense of an objective moral order, the conscience is viewed as subjective and morals as relative, and no one is supposed to impose their morality on anyone else---unless, of course, you are a patient demanding a certain medical service or procedure or drug--and then the health provider has to provide, regardless.

So, if euthanasia becomes legal, then health providers may be punished if they refuse to provide the means for people to kill themselves or actually do the act themselves at a patient's request.

Douglas Farrow told the group they should not talk in terms of being forced to violate one's conscience, but instead of being punished for remaining true to one's conscience. I think he's right that the issue needs to be framed in this way. We either choose to violate our conscience or not and the price required of us may be stiff--a fine, a lost license, a prison term or worse.
What are we doing to prepare ourselves to stand firm if the time comes? Though there was advice that no one go out and seek confrontation with the authorities, there was attention paid to helping to prepare oneself spiritually to courageously handle a confrontation should it occur.

There was one medical student who told me he worked for a while with an ear, nose and throat specialist, thinking to himself that this was one area where one was unlikely to run into problems. There was some concern that whole specialties, such as obstetrics and gynecology, were being abandoned because of demands for abortions, sterilization, and referrals for in vitro fertilization. Medical students and residents face the possiblity they wil not get a license if they do not peform an abortion as part of their training. Well, this medical student said that he found out about an ear, nose and throat specialist who was asked to alter the vocal chords of a man to make him sound like a woman. Ooops.

I sat in on a session for family doctors---and for Catholic doctors who want to be faithful to their religion and their consciences, they cannot prescribe contraceptive pills, or refer for abortions, or in vitro fertilization, sex change hormones or operations and so on. I imagine it's pretty scary wondering if you are just a human rights complaint away from losing your license to practice medicine after that huge investment in training.

Obama is not funny

George W. Bush used to make even his enemies laugh.

Obama can barely make his fawning fans laugh. Except he gets whoops and cheers when he tells the journalists "all of you voted for me."

And Wanda Sykes was a disaster. Her jokes about wishing Rush Limbaugh's kidneys would fail is beyond the pale.


See for yourself at Breitbart TV


Jonah Goldberg was there:

As for the dinner itself I thought Obama was fairly good for most of his talk, though I have my quibbles. I thought Wanda Sykes had some funny lines, but was generally pretty bad. Yes, I thought the Limbaugh stuff was particularly awful, not just because it was offensive, but because it was unfunny. Biting humor is fine at events like this, so long as it's humorous. Sykes' schtick was a cliche wrapped in a lefty talking point. There are funnier lines in lefty blog comment sections. Moreover, the contrast with Stephen Colbert's gig was striking. I was there for Colbert's performance, which I thought went too far the other way. But here was a guy who was immediately lionized by the left as a brave truth-teller who did what the "lapdog" media was afraid to do. Here comes Sykes who makes some harmless cutesy jokes about Obama and then delivers a spiel that could have been written by Axelrod. Recently, the worst thing in the world you could do was "question" someone's patriotism. But calling Limbaugh a traitor and a terrorist and hoping he dies is hilarious?

The Socon makes the case for Randy Hillier

I think he makes sense. I hope my socially conservative Ontario readers will take heed. John has information on how you can sign up for a membership card before the deadline May 14.

He writes:

I would prefer to fight the central question of abortion itself, but that is not the hand we are being dealt right now. While we are fixated on being politically pure in our pro-life position, our opponents are lining up pro-life, pro-family doctors to haul them before the human rights commissions as we speak.

Therefore, our support must be with the candidate who most loudly and boldly speaks to this issue.

The question today for this leadership race is not outlawing abortion. The question today is stopping the State from forcing us to participate in it.

And to that end, today, the best man for the job is Randy Hillier.

Tomorrow, it could be someone else.

Speaking of conscience rights, I am attending the Conscience and the Physician conference in Ottawa that marks the first annual general meeting of the Canadian of Catholic Physicians Societies. Find out more here. In other words, I better get downtown and blogging will be light.

Republicans and moderation

I think people like Dick Cheney and David Frum might be like the proverbial blind men describing the "Elephant" from their different vantage points in the debate about whether the Republican Party needs to moderate and reflect some new ideas or become true to founding principles.

For example, Cheney said on a radio program recently:

“I think it would be a mistake for us to moderate," Cheney said. "This is about fundamental beliefs and values and ideas … what the role of government should be in our society, and our commitment to the Constitution and constitutional principles. You know, when you add all those things up, the idea that we ought to moderate basically means we ought to fundamentally change our philosophy. I for one am not prepared to do that, and I think most of us aren’t. Most Republicans have a pretty good idea of values, and aren’t eager to have someone come along and say, 'Well, the only way you can win is if you start to act more like a Democrat.'"

I basically agree that a conservative message needs to be articulated and defended because it is based on principles.

Frum has been arguing that for strategic reasons more appeal has to be made to those swing voters in the centre of the political spectrum. That's an argument for moderating the message.

I'm of two minds. I think strategically an appeal does need to be made to those in the centre, but I don't think that abandoning basic philosophical principles is the answer. I think there is a need for those principles to be expressed. But that's why we need folks like Rush Limbaugh who are not beholden to partisan politics and for people like Frum to think in terms of strategy and finding a message that is big-tent-enough to appeal to a wide spectrum of people.

As for new ideas, we conservatives have to face the facts that America is steeped in progressive thought and both parties have been purveyors of statism. I think everyone should read Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" to see how deeply embedded we are.

So, given that we are no longer the society of Jefferson's time, of agrarian, independent landowners, but people variously addicted to entitlements of the state, how do we come up with ideas to wean ourselves off this stuff? Ideas like school vouchers, introducing some free market principles into the publicly funded school system is one that realistically recognizes where we're at, but tries to change it gradually by letting the money follow the choices of parents who want the best for their children.

In Canada though you would not believe how much resistance there is to introducing competition into the medical system, even if the single-payer, government funded Medicare remains. Even allowing some privately-run operating theatres or clinics or MRI outlets are deemed a threat to the public system, even if your provincial insurer picks up the tab. And yes, they are a threat because if they break the hold of unions and bureaucratic thinking rampant in government-run projects, they might break the hold of the statist thinking that the Savior-State-Knows-Best.

Conservatives have to make a strong case for the rebuilding of civil society and this is not something that partisan politics can do except for making sure that government policies do not shrink it further. Obama's plan to cut charitable deductions was an example of a civil-society-killing measure. Civil society, made up of self-governming individuals, families, churches, synagoues, charities and other social organizations, also needs a moral glue that is eroded by relativism. We can't have a free market society without honest individuals who abide by their contracts and consider it dishonorable to cheat even if no one's looking. Governments can't make us good, though. They can do a lot though to make us weak, dependent, and worse than we would otherwise be if we are not forced to take responsibility for our own lives.

Conservative principles are going to win out in the end, merely because they are based on reality. And unfortunately, if we do not wake up gently by listening to the watchmen in our midst and girding our loins to be upright and independent ourselves, we will wake up through suffering.

North America is still living off the capital of conservative ideas and our Judeo-Christian heritage. But as a new generation of kids is growing up that doesn't even know what the Tower of Babel is, that capital is rapidly running out. No wonder people then flock to the Obamessiah and the latest version of the Savior State, as if he can magically grow money on trees.

Republicans need to recognize that there is room for Rush Limbaugh and there is room for David Frum and Sarah Palin and Michael Steele and Mitt Romney and Rudy Guiliani and John McCain.
The task is huge. As Frum rightly pointed out, even Ronald Reagan couldn't touch the growing entitlements of his time. Things are worse now. We need the whole Elephant in the room.

"Spengler" aka David Goldman and the LaRouche connection

Fascinating confession. Having been caught up by 60s radicalism myself and then my own foray into different forms of Gnosticism, I find this most interesting. My bolds.

We were all about thirty, and most of us were Jewish. The question, of course, is what were a group of young Jews doing in the company of a cult leader with a paranoid view of the world and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic streak.

Here is one answer: We were all long-in-the-tooth student radicals. LaRouche’s organization was the flotsam washed up by the wave of the collective madness that had swept through the youth of the world in 1968 and left many of its participants maladapted to ordinary life for years afterward.

During the 1960s, LaRouche was a one-man Trotskyite splinter group, teaching free-lance courses on Marxist economics at whatever venue would have him. He culled student radicals with an intellectual bent who were repelled by the mindlessness endemic on the left in the late 1960s. LaRouche’s pitch was insidious: How can you justify yourself morally unless you know that what you are doing is right? There existed a science of mind, LaRouche claimed, that would enable the adept to reach the right conclusion.

We were atheists, of course—the concept of “religious intellectual” was unknown to me in my student days at Columbia and the London School of Economics—and the idea that truth might come through revelation seemed beyond snickering. The Vietnam War, the crisis in race relations, and the cracks in the economic structure of the 1970s persuaded us that we had to do something and that indifference was morally inexcusable.

And that is where LaRouche had us.

I had the same snickering attitude towards my own Christian background. Goldman continues:

I had grown up as a red-diaper baby in a secular Jewish household (although my parents put me through the motions of a Bar Mitzvah at a Reconstructionist synagogue). I joined the left-wing Zionist youth organization Hashomer Hatzair and spent a summer on a kibbutz in Israel where the Israeli flag flew underneath the red flag of international socialism. Like so many leftist Jews, I came to believe that only a universal solution to humanity’s problems would solve the problems of the Jews, and the more universal the solution, the less Jewish. In plain English I was afraid to be Jewish: The less Jewish I was, and the more universal, the less likely I would be to be killed for being Jewish.

And yet, physical fear in the background of the Holocaust was only one consideration. Another, deeper fear kept me at a distance from Judaism. My only sense of the sacred had come from classical music, the great avocation of my adolescence. The over-representation of Jews in classical music is no accident: Jews who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge God sometimes find music a safer means by which to evoke religious feelings without the fearful demands of encountering a personal God. To approach the sacred, Jewish tradition admonishes, is both exalting and dangerous, and it is less frightening to look for the sacred in Mozart’s sonatas than on Mt. Sinai.

Amen to that. But it gets better.

Around 1985, the ugly awareness that I had spent almost a decade in a gnostic cult coincided with a dark time in my personal life. Deeply depressed, I sat at the piano one night, playing through the score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and came to the chorale that reads: “Commend your ways and what ails your heart to the faithful care of Him who directs the heavens, who gives course and aim to the clouds, air and wind. He will also find a path that your foot can tread.” For the first time in my life, I prayed, and in that moment, I knew that my prayer was heard. That was a first step of teshuva—of return.

Read it all. And subscribe to First Things.

Most interesting post on urban homesteading

Anyone else feeling an impulse to start stocking up? From Hillbuzz:

Before I campaigned for Hillary Clinton in Gary, Indiana for a month in 2008, I used to think Thunderdome was the most terrible place I had ever been (but now I know that, in fact, it’s Gary, Indiana — which may very well be the most terrible place in the whole world). Abandoned warehouses ten stories high, perfect for drug lords to fortify and use as medieval crack castles; a never ending ghost town of boarded up, once gorgeous Victorian homes; overgrown lots where wilderness is trying to reclaim what time and civilization have seemed to forget. Horrifying by day, terrifying by night, Thunderdome has been ignored by every Mayor Cleveland has had since Kucinich in the 1970s, when it first started to degrade into irredeemable depths of terrible. While sports stadiums, Rock Halls, and shopping centers were built downtown, Thunderdome rusted and festered and sprouted new boils and wounds year after year.

So, imagine my shock when Abbey told me she moved there, and didn’t just buy a house, but bought a whole BLOCK.

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe how cheap it is there. And I qualified for all these grants, loans, tax breaks, you name it. I used the Internet and the Library to find it all, and I hardly have any mortgage and I own the whole block,” Abbey told us, proving once again that she’s one of the most industrious people we’ve ever known.

She’s also now a card-carrying member of the NRA, and after 2008, a firm and committed Republican.

“Those idiots,” Abbey says, laughing, “they think Obama will pay their mortgages and give them everything for free, well they’re in for it. After what Democrats did in 2008, I’m done with them. We’re not just in a recession, we’re in a depression, and it’s going to get much, much, much worse. So, I’m building a farm here in Cleveland where no one else wants to live and I’ve got enough guns and ammo in here to defend myself from any socialists who want to stop me, so I’ll be fine. It’s you who I’m worried about. When things fall apart in a year or so, Chicago’s going to collapse into chaos, so if you just show up at my door one day, there’s a room here for you. But be sure to knock first, lest you get that pretty head of yours blown clean off.”

Bishop Carl Reid's photo exhibit

Anglican Catholic Bishop Carl Reid opened an exhibit of his stunning photographs tonight. They are on display at the Ottawa Bagel Shop on Wellington Street until some time in June.

There are also cards for sale of this photos. All the proceeds go for the church or charity.

I feel bad for Jennifer Lynch

Canadian Human Rights Commissioner Jennifer Lynch has become the public face of despised human rights commissions. Her last name lends itself to use in phrases like "Lynch mob" to describe the thought police. Her junketing behavior and her defence of the old "finding a balance" canard between freedom of speech and discrimination against minority groups that requires bureaucrats like herself to police has not helped her reputation. (I believe in balance, but civil society and the marketplace of ideas not governments is the answer).

Her name came up a lot Tuesday during the Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn Shakedown event on Tuesday. Ezra writes about it here. Blazing Cat Fur here.

I confess, I enjoyed the jokes and even the rants at her expense, but have begun to suffer some pangs of conscience. Here's why.

I am among many who have criticized the use of Saul Alinsky's tactics from Rules for Radicals that are now being used by the Obama administration against Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives.

Karl Rove wrote:

Alinsky's 1971 book, "Rules for Radicals," is a favorite of the Obamas. Michele Obama quoted it at the Democratic Convention. One Alinsky tactic is to "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." That's what the White House did in targeting Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer.

One of the things that struck me in reading Alinsky was how he was describing some common sense tactics that work and I remember thinking at the time that maybe the Right ought to first of all become wise to the tactics and, well, maybe consider using some of them. One does not have to read Alinsky though to naturally adopt some principles that work in a negative publicity campaign.

But when you look at what the Left is doing to Miss California Carrie Prejean for defending traditional marriage, to Bristol Palin for having a baby out of wedlock while being a Christian, to Governor Sarah Palin and others---the character assassination, the smears, the derision and so on, I have to say I hate the widespread use of this tactic and I urge caution, and if possible, the high road.

I don't think the targeting of Lynch has come even close to reaching the level of what the Palin family and Prejean have suffered, but I want to sound a note of caution. While I think Ezra and Mark have a great deal of justification for their jokes at her expense because of what HRCs have put these two men through, and neither of them are mean-spirited people even when they are angry, it's the rest of us piling on that bothers me.

Of course, even working for one of these bodies is a shameful occupation. But is Lynch the proper target? She's a bureaucrat, an appointee. She cannot change the law, she can only enforce the laws that she has in front of her. Though public pressure may have forced her to do so in the Macleans' decision, the CHRC is at least now interpreting the thought crimes Section 13 in light of the Supreme Court's Taylor decision, which very much narrows the parameters of what is "likely to expose" a group to hatred and contempt. And while it may have been overreach on her part to commission the Moon Report, all of us were astonished that Professor Moon recommended abolishing Section 13. So she's actually made some incremental positive changes at the CHRC within the confines of her mandate. No, it's not good enough. If she really cared about civil rights, she would resign as a clear protest against what this agency is doing. But just because she's an easy target, doesn't mean she's the most important one.

The person responsible for the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) and her department is Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and ultimately Prime Minister Stephen Harper. No, actually, we the Canadian voters are responsible for this mess. First of all, that we did not give the Harper government a huge majority. I bet that had Canadians given Harper a resounding mandate then the Conservative Caucus, based on the wishes of Conservative Party members, would have overhauled the CHRA and thrown out the thought crimes section.

Secondly, we have allowed ourselves to become afraid of our government rather than make our government afraid of our power at the ballot box.

(Which is why all you Ontario voters who care about freedom of speech should buy a membership before May 14 and support Randy Hillier on the first ballot. Pro-lifers? Vote Hillier first because he would at least defund abortion, even if he his pro-choice. Vote Klees on second ballot. Fiscal conservatives? Vote Hudak on second ballot. But VOTE!!!!! Hillier is unlikely to win, but there must be a significant block of folks who show freedom of speech is a ballot box issue for them to persuade the other candidates of its importance. If you do not register, than you are to blame for Barbara Hall et. al.)

Interestingly, Alberta's Premier Stelmach is becoming the target for criticism of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and deservedly so. Unfortunately, Nicholson is Mr. Bland. He's like the proverbial mayonnaise that absorbs all your punches and leaves your fists greasy.

People on the Left like to think of themselves as morally superior people. That's why they don't bother to develop real arguments against the more reality-based and better conservative ideas. So they use ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments. They have been successful, unfortunately, in branding conservatives as dog-eat-dog social Darwinians who don't care about the poor because they think only bigger government is a solution.

What swayed me to the conservative side after being steeped in progressive thought all my life, growing up in Massachusetts in the Boston area, was seeing first that conservatives were the better people that the lefties claimed to be. After all, it was not conservatives who were shouting people down in assemblies, or desecrating churches, or lying about science in order to attack corporations. I saw conservatives being civil and concerned about being factual and left-wingers acting like fascist brownshirts and ends-justifies-the-means liars. That's when I started being receptive to conservative ideas. And I have discovered that conservatives are also much more compassionate when it comes to the poor on a one on one basis, giving far more to charity than the leftists who love humanity as a concept but hate individual people.

Yes, let's continue the process of denormalizing human rights commissions so that these bodies become as distasteful as the Jim Crow lunch counter and water fountain inspectors were in the United States, making sure no race-mixing was going on. Working for one of these agencies should be a shameful occupation, just as being an abortionist should be a shameful occupation and not something that garners the Order of Canada.

But just as Jim Hughes of Campaign Life Coalition prays every day for the conversion of abortionist Henry Morgentaler, let's pray for the conversion of Jennifer Lynch, Dean Stacey et. al.

And while we're at it, let's not forget to send up some positive thoughts and prayers for Warren Kinsella who is undergoing surgery this week.

As the Binks writes:

~ ONE OF THE WORST aspects of modern utopianism is how it dehumanizes all opponents as embodiments of various froms of ultimate evil. I’m not me, I’m a variously slandered unthinking ‘-phobe’. I often saw it in the church: you were literally unpersoned for holding the unofficial views– even if that meant, ironically enough, that you were on the side of classical Christianity and God and Jesus and that stuff there– yet now, less than human or even Christian, you were reduced to an unpleasant distortion of accepted reality to be politely avoided.

Despite my rhetorical excesses, I am always called to remember there’s a person there: a child of God, a human, a self like me. Waaaaay down on the list of important realities comes a person’s political or so-called ‘life-style’ choices. Despite the modern penchant for ideological self-definition– and the insistence that others share in our militant self-definition, or be labelled enemies– the divine and essential human categories come first. Even for those who would hate or kill me for opposing their various jihads or utopianisms, they are as I am, and they, as I. Child of God, human, self. It’s one of the reasons why authentic Christianity is so much bigger than the sterner streams of Islam, or political correctness.

That’s a long way around of saying that I hope Warren Kinsella indeed uses his brush with mortality that sickness and medical aid bring near to ask himself the basic questions. Not “I’ve buttered my bread, now I have to lie in it”, but “Have I pursued the good, the true, and the holy?” Or “If this were my last day, would I consider I’d left the world a better place for having passed through it?”

Or “Have I shown love to my enemies? Turned the other cheek?” and, of course as a Christian: “Am I ready to see God face to face, with my past life– all of it– to account for?” At very least, even for the secularly-minded, we cannot avoid the old wisdom of Socrates that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Sickness and suffering and the loss of what we are pleased to call our “usual good health” when we have it– this is the time to reflect, to recollect, to reassess, to rest a while from battle.

I think now is a good moment for all of us to ask these ultimate questions, no?

Chilling news from the United States

While there was much joy and celebration last night at Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn's book event in Ottawa, the battle is far from won in Canada and now there are signs of draconian moves in the United States to squelch freedom of speech and control the blogosphere.

Kate McMillan writes at Small Dead Animals in a post entitled "Enjoy it while you can" that "Well, it was fun while it lasted."

Here's what's going on:

Under a recently-introduced bill, H.R. 1966, bloggers would face up to two years in prison if they “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner, and thereby cause them “substantial emotional distress.”

U.C.L.A. Law Professor Eugene Volokh, the author of a First Amendment treatise, has concluded that the bill is unconstitutional. I agree, as I explain here. As a federal appeals court noted in DeJohn v. Temple University (2008), “there is no harassment exception to the First Amendment’s free speech clause.” Speech that causes emotional distress can be protected,as the Supreme Court made clear in barring a lawsuit by Jerry Falwell over an offensive parody.

Under this bill, a blogger like Emile Zola, the courageous writer who exposed an anti-semitic witchhunt a century ago in the infamous Dreyfus Affair through his repeated and “vehement public” denunciations of public officials, would be subject to prosecution. His “severe, repeated, and hostile” denunciations resulted in many public figures being discredited and removed from office, which no doubt caused them “substantial emotional distress.”

The bill is a telling example of how the American Left has turned against free speech and civil liberties. The bill’s sponsor, Linda Sanchez (D-CA), and nearly all of her 14 co-sponsors are liberals. All of them backed the federal hate-crimes bill passed by the House yesterday, which is designed to allow people who have been found innocent in state court to be reprosecuted in federal court. (That bill has been criticized by four members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, including law professor Gail Heriot, and by civil libertarian Wendy Kaminer. Advocates of the federal hate-crimes bill once cited the defendants in the Duke Lacrosse case, who were innocent, as an example of people who should be prosecuted in federal court).

This is horrifying. America? America? My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty?

Here's the tail end of Mark Steyn's brief speech last night at the Ezra Levant booksigning event for Shakedown: how our government is undermining democracy in the name of human rights.

Ezra Levant's friends and fellow bloggers

Last night's event was private, but Ezra Levant managed to slip in some of his friends and fellow free speech bloggers and journalist friends.

I'm the ubiquitous one in the blue lantern-decked blouse. Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury is the tiny gal with the red dress. Pretty scary, eh? Mark Steyn is wearing the gold tie and when he posed between me and Kathy he described us as a hatemonger sandwich or something. But hey, I'm gluten free, does that count for anything? The man with the pink shirt and glasses is Fred of Gay and Right. There's a picture of me with immigration minister Jason Kenney, an old friend, taken by the "shy and retiring" Blazing Cat Fur. In fact he took most of the photos here. He'll have his own montage when he returns to Toronto.

Stephen Taylor's the man in the black shirt. I brought a couple of The Defilers to give away to bloggers who might read and review it. Stephen insisted on buying a copy, saying he buys his friends books. Of course it helped to have Kathy Shaidle next to me telling him what a great read it was, but warning him not to start it that night or he'd never get any sleep.

Businessman and philanthropist Nathan Jacobson is shown with National Post columnist Father Raymond de Souza.

Jacobson recalled the famous words of German Pastor Martin Neimoller:

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

(I like Mark Steyn's rendition of those famous words in his latest book Lights Out: Islam, free speech and the twilight of the west)

The people up here here are fighting for all of us, he said, warning that enemies are trying to shut down our early warning system and trying to "silence our sentries."

"They are heroes," he said. "They deserve our support . . ."

The National Post's Kevin Libin (former editor of the Western Standard which published the Danish cartoons) flew in from Calgary for the event. He's in two shots: one with him on the left, me, Kathy Shaidle and my press gallery colleague Brian Lilley, CFRB and CJAD Ottawa bureau chief. Lilley has been one of the few mainstream media journalists who has actually covered any freedom of speech issues. The other shows Kathy, Ezra, myself and Libin on the right.

It was a great event. A good time was had by all, as the saying goes.

Mark Steyn: "Ezra Levant: the next Governor General"

Mark Steyn says never mind the Order of Canada for himself and Ezra Levant as Senator Jerry Grafstein suggested last night at a booksigning featuring Levant's latest book Shakedown: How our government is undermining democracy in the name of human rights.

Ezra should be the next Governor General said the great Steyn.

"This is a simple and principled issue," said Steyn. On freedom of speech there are two kinds of people, he said: those who don't support the cause because Steyn and Levant are "rightwing bastards"; and those who say "they are rightwing blowhards but . . .in a free society you do not make that a criminal offence."

He admitted they were not appealing victims. He asked the gathering to imagine he Ezra were David Suzuki instead. And he were Margaret Atwood. (!!!!!!)

"You don't get to choose your victims," he said.

Ezra is an "unlikely Ghandi" and he found it strange to be called the "Brigitte Bardot of Canada."

"If you don't believe in free speech for people as obnoxious as Ezra and I are, you don't believe in free speech at all," he said.

He noted that now it seems normal to go to the government to regulate speech. He brought up Carol Churchill's latest 12 minute play about Israel that he described as anti-Semitic and a lousy play. But he saw a letter to the editor in the National Post suggesting a human rights complaint should be filed against it.

He recalled government censorship of television programs in Britain where a government official decided no intercourse could be permitted, but maybe some "heavy petting," and the script had the f-word in it but you can replace it with "crikey said in a vehement way."

That kind of ridiculous oversight was abolished but now so-called progressives want to restore the state's power to censtor plays and novels, he said.

Multiculturalism and progressivism is not progress it is backwards, he said. It must be rejected.

He said life could never be so organized that everyone has to tiptoe around constantly. He quoted Kathy Shaidle who has said what society needs is insensitivity training rather than sensitivity training so that people can "discover the virtue of honest, rough and tumble" debate.

"If we are walking hate crimes, there are an awful lot of Canadians who are accomplices," he said.

"The time is right for the political class to take a stand for freedom of expression," he said.

Steyn said he was surprised members of the Bloc Quebecois were not more supportive of freedom of speech since remarks of separatists after various referendums were controversial and likely to draw the attention of the "thought police."

Though he and Ezra have been described as "controversy entrepreneurs," Steyn said he wanted to draw attentionto the people who have been victimized by HRCs. Alberta Pastor Stephen Boissoin is under a lifetime speech ban and ordered to make a public apology, something Steyn said is the kind of thing done in North Korea or Pol Pott's Cambodia. He called the Boissoin decision "disgraceful" and a "shame" to the province of Alberta.

He pointed out that many people got into trouble for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed--the French editor who published them was fired by his publisher.

But the only country in the western world where the publication of these cartoons became the subject of an official state investigation was Canada, a "mark of shame on Alberta and on this country."

Welcome Mark Steyn readers!

I have several more posts on the event with more pictures here, here, here and here. On the last one, I have some video of Mark`s talk. Oh yeah, here are some pictures of Ezra`s friends and fellow bloggers.

Dykstra: "Strong opinions are not dead in Canada"

Immigration Parliamentary Secretary Rick Dykstra told a gathering of MPs and Parliament Hill Staffers that he co-hosted that "strong opinions are not dead in Canada."

"Left or Right, you still have a right to freedom of speech," he said.

He noted that his Conservative colleague MP Brian Storseth, who is a member of the Justice Committee, has moved a motion that the committee study the Canadian Human Rights Act and there are hopes for a bipartisan examination of the hate speech section 13.

He thanked Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant for their work in promoting freedom of expression.

HRCs "hijacked by extremists"

Senator Jerry Grafstein, speaking on behalf of the Liberals at last night's Shakedown event in Ottawa, issued a mea culpa for his having been "very much involved in the creation of human rights commissions."

He noted that while what's happened to human rights commissions in Canada might seem "quite strange," he said the situation is not unique to Canada.

"Sometimes agencies in a free society are taken hostage by extremists," he said.

Extemists have distorted words and their meaning in an Orwellian way, he said. At a time when truthful speech is needed, "we've had the reverse."

He spoke of the three "isms": communism, nazism, and fascism and how they all take ordinary words and rip out their contents and replace them with something else.

Grafstein said that Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn were entitled to the Order of Canada for their efforts in restoring freedom of speech.

"I may have to file a hate speech complaint against myself"

Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn participated in a joint book-signing last night in Ottawa for Shakedown. Jointly sponsored by Liberal MP Keith Martin and Conservative MP Rick Dysktra, the event drew about 240 people to the Delta Hotel. Martin was unable to attend himself, so Senator Jerry Grafstein took his place. Lots of cabinet ministers, MPs, and staffers attended, though I did not notice a heavy Liberal presence, alas. I have lots of pictures and took notes, so I'll divide this up into several posts.

Ezra told the gathering he had been in Centre Block earlier in the day and a woman introduced herself to him as Jennifer Lynch. Yes, THE Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Ezra was with Alykhan Velshi, Jason Kenney's director of communications. They all got on an elevator together, along with MP Dick Harris.

The conversation continued. Ezra told Lynch about the event coming up that evening. He warned her that there might be "a lot of hate speech tonight."

"I might have to file a hate speech complaint against myself!" he said.

My memory is sketchy but he may have continued in that vein, perhaps asking her who she thought would win if he filed such a complaint. I'm sure Ezra will soon publish a more detailed version of this incident on his site, so look forward to it!

Ezra described Shakedown as part diary and part investigative journalism. He mentioned how pleased he was to receive positive reviews from people who "would disagree with me about everything else," but agree about a "bureaucracy that is out of control."

The pictures show Ezra Levant (evil-looking and hateful with those red eyes); Minister of State for Democratic Reform Stephen Fletcher with Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Levant;
Levant, Senator Jerry Grafstein and Mark Steyn; Levant with Conservative MP Kevin Sorenson, holding a copy of Shakedown; Immigration Parliamentary Secretary and evening co-host Rick Dykstra; Ezra Levant again; and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

John Pacheco on why you must get involved

and buy a membership in the Ontario Conservative Party through Randy Hillier's campaign.

Read John's whole post and follow the link to buy a membership if you don't already have one.
In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here's a scenario that John puts on his site that should help you understand the stakes. Hillier is the only candidate who gets how important freedom of speech and conscience rights are:

Monday morning rolls around and you’re pulling up to your local family doctor’s office with your 5 year-old child. You’ve booked your appointment a few days ago, and you’re there to get some medical treatment for your son who has been experiencing a persistent cough and a certain dizziness. (Unlike many others, you’re fortunate enough to have a family doctor. Ontario isn’t exactly experiencing a boon in the number of family doctors.) You walk in the door and you approach the receptionist’s counter.

“Hi, I’m here for my son’s 9AM appointment with Dr. Smith.”

“I’m sorry”, the receptionist says quite sheepishly, “Dr. Smith is no longer practicing.”

The receptionist notices your look of shock. It’s an expression she is now well accustomed to and she has the next line ready to deliver:

“Dr. Smith is no longer permitted to practice medicine in the province of Ontario because he refuses to refer patients to abortionists or give counsel about artificial insemination between same-sex couples or sex change operations.”

You laugh nervously and blurt out incredulously, ”This must be some kind of sick joke, right?”

No, apparently it’s no joke. The receptionist calmly explains to you that it’s the recently enacted code of ethics of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. The law of Ontario will also soon be changing to come into conformity with the Ontario Human Rights Act and the Star Chamber Tribunal who adminsters it. Doctor’s must comply with the new law regarding “reproductive rights” whether it tramples on their consciences or not. It doesn’t matter that the service is offered by other medical professionals. ALL medical professionals must comply with the new sexual regulations. “You see“, the lidless eye receptionist quips, “it’s part of the new sexual jihad the province of Ontario is waging on people of faith and others who oppose the Minister of Sex in Ontario. Dr. Smith would not compromise his Christian beliefs so he had to fold his practice.”

Awesome! Chuck Colson praises Mary DeMuth's latest novel!

Mary DeMuth is one of my favorite contemporary novelists and I am looking forward to tucking into her latest Daisy Chain. Mary is a fellow member of The Master's Artist, a wonderful community of Christian writers who want to serve Jesus Christ with their art. I've been a little awol lately from this wonderful group, also, busy with other things like fighting human rights abuses in Canada.

Mary is also an outstanding mentor to Christian writers and someone who understands the craft and the business of writing. It's often a heartbreaking business, alas, and just because you are talented at the craft does not guarantee big sales.

Here's what Chuck Colson wrote about her book on today's Breakpoint commentary:

Still, some ways of dealing with tough topics can be easier to handle than others. Sometimes we can learn as much about a topic through the arts—movies or theater or a good novel—as we can by reading a study or a newspaper. Mary DeMuth’s new novel, Daisy Chain, which is published by Zondervan, is a good example.

DeMuth is a Christian and an award-nominated novelist whose books often deal with issues of abuse. Yet at the same time, they intertwine themes of grace and hope. Daisy Chain tells the story of a young boy named Jed who’s struggling with both his best friend’s disappearance and his father’s abuse. On the surface, Jed’s father looks like the model pastor and family man. Only his wife and children know what happens at home when his rage spirals out of control.

DeMuth herself is a survivor of a different kind of abuse, having been molested as a child. Her goal in writing about abuse, she once said in an interview, is “to show folks two things: That God can heal even the most horrific abuse. And to educate parents and professionals about abuse.”

I’m not a big fan of “message” books, where the writer neglects his or her craft and just concentrates on pushing an agenda. But Mary DeMuth is not that kind of writer. Her books are beautifully and sensitively written, and her characters are realistic and well-developed. She has a true gift for showing how God’s light can penetrate even the darkest of situations, and start to turn lives around. Even her villains are not beyond the reach of God’s grace.

Perhaps one of the characters in Daisy Chain puts it best when she tells Jed, “Sometimes parents don’t act right. Sometimes . . . they flat-out do the wrong thing. If you let them wallow in that sin, don’t oppose it, you’re not really loving them, are you?”

I feel the same way. Ignoring the problem of abuse in Christian homes is failing to show God’s love to both abusers and victims.

Here's Mary's site. She's terrific. Do yourself a favor and buy her books.

Change you can bereave in

Via Gateway Pundit:

The radical has already brought America- Change You Can Bereave In.
Here is more on Obama's many broken promises:

Elected with a mandate to fix the economy President Obama has instead pursued a radical social agenda that preys upon the most vulnerable members of our society. Adn. Barack Obama's irresponsible spending will leave this country in debt for generations.

Chilling.

More on Lights Out, Mark Steyn's latest book

Lights Out

I have a stack of books to read so it's got to tell you something that Mark Steyn's latest Lights Out: Islam, free speech and the twlight of the west, suddenly found its way to the top of the pile and became my nightly bedtime reading.

Now, I'm sorry I've finished. That's how much I enjoyed it. While reading Steyn before bed can be dangerous to sleepiness, it sure amused and entertained me while reminding me of the many outrages and violations of civil rights perpetrated by Canada's so-called human rights commissions.

Yes, much of the material inside I have read before---in Maclean's and on Mark's website. But Steyn bears reading and rereading for the sheer delight of his good-humored puns, wit and turns of phrase.

I don't know my mind keeps running to Rahm Emmanuel back when he was a ballet dancer, but imagine if Rahm was any good when he danced, leaping about the stage, doing expert pirouettes and fouettés, and making it look easy. Steyn pulls off virtuoso writing feats of imagination and style that remind me of great but effortless-looking ballet dancing. Steyn's ability as a writer dazzles me. And it dazzles me all the more to discover, while glancing over at him with his laptop perched on his knee at the March 25 Canadian Human Rights Tribunal Hearing more than a year ago is that he does not actually type, he hunts and pecks with his index finger rather slowly. That means the beautifully turned out essay or blog post is carefully and laboriously crafted and those of us who know how hard it is to write well just arise and say, "Bravo!"

While he writes very much like he speaks, i.e. he has captured his distinct voice and he is a witty fount of quick-on-the-up- take jokes, getting that imaginative flow down on the keyboard is not a matter of letting 'er rip in a kind of automatic writing but a polished effort. For sheer artistry, I think Steyn is among the best columnists on the planet. Lights Out is worth the read just for the joy of well-crafted writing, and his humor makes the seriousness of the subject matter go down more easily.

Another reason why I enjoyed rereading some of these columns and blog posts was because they brought back memories of the key battles of the previous year or so where an "army of Davids" in the blogosphere did our part with Steyn and Ezra Levant leading the charge to expose the egregious civil rights abuses of so-called human rights commissions. Steyn and Levant have both been generous to the much smaller, less influential bloggers who joined in the fight, by quoting us, by directing traffic to us, by acknowledging our contributions. Rereading the columns and posts made me remember how exciting it was to turn on my computer every morning and check out www.marksteyn.com, or www.freemarksteyn.com or www.ezralevant.com or any number of other bloggers to find out the latest developments and add my thoughts here. While much of what emerged was appalling, it sure was fascinating and exciting to be part of this battle. Lights Out captures that energy and will make the fight fascinating to, I hope, a whole new set of readers who don't have time to frequent blogs.

While the first audience of this book will be Canadians, I think American readers would greatly benefit by reading this book and find it an amusing and enlightening read. Some of the columns assume a bit of prior knowledge, but Steyn's columns are so captivating that readers who hang in there will have all the questions such as "who are the Socks?" and so on, answered if they read a few more essays.

Lights Out contains a perfect example of how to fight bad speech with good in the case of "the journalism doctor" and Big City Libs accusations that Steyn made up a quote by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Remember how on his blog he proved that he had in fact quoted Khomeini properly and yes, there was in fact a Blue Book that pre-existed the Internet. What a concept.
Anyway, this factual defence of "sheepshagging" proved his accusers were guilty of the very crime they claimed Steyn was guilty of. It's a beautiful thing to behold. To change metaphors in mid stream, it's like watching Mohammed Ali at the height of his powers.

It's funny, but, er, the sheepshagging chapter is kind of the climax of the book, because, well, the essays build to it, and then there is ....nevermind. But seriously, this "climax" captures the problem the west faces in a ridiculous little drama involving politically correct leftists trying to brand Steyn as a confabulator for writing about the ridiculous rules concerning whether you can eat the meat of a sheep you've had intercourse with when Steyn is telling the truth, and yes, it really is this crazy and absurd, but we better remember when people dimissed a shouting nutbar with a little mustache and his "final solution" as a joke. There is, alas, an undercurrent of seriousness about Lights Out that makes it a wake up call---instead of the shrill buzzer, we get a humorous, witty host who manages to sound the alarm without inducing despair.

Get yourself a signed copy over at Steyn's site.

More thoughts on Light's Out here. If you want to contact me, go here.

David Frum on the Obama temperament

David Frum writes re: Mary Ann Glendon's decision not to share the podium with President Obama at Notre Dame's commencement later this month:

A large part of the secret of President Obama's political success is his self-presentation as calm, judicious, and fair-minded - and his ability to depict his opponents as intemperate and extreme. You'd think by now that Obama's opponents would have figured out this trick. You want to beat him? Great. Be more calm, more judicious, and more fair-minded. Don't be provoked. Don't throw wild allegations. Don't boycott. Don't lose your temper.

Instead, we get Anger Theater. It's not smart. And it's not working.

I hardly think that Glendon's measured letter was "Anger Theatre." While I agree with him that it is wise not to ever lose one's temper, what David fails to realize is that even he will be depicted by Obama's minions as "intemperate and extreme" as soon as he stops being one of their useful idiots. And it won't matter how calm, judicious and fair-minded he is once he starts disagreeing with the Obama program.

David has attacked Rush Limbaugh at length as the wrong person to be the face of the Republican Party. Interestingly, Rush does not come across as angry to me at all. He comes across as good-humored. Neither does the rubbery-faced Glenn Beck. Both of these guys are use hyperbole to be funny.

Obama comes across as angry to me. Glowering. Doctrinaire. He's not cool, he's cold.

I think Rush has done more than any American to unmask the tactics of the Obama administrations, tactics based on Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. He knows how they are framing him and those he disagrees with. He also knows how the mainstream media has drunk his Kool-Aid and continues to buy his self-presentation even when it is obvious the many times Obama has been thin-skinned, peckish, vindictive and hardly the judicious person he tries to come across as being.

No matter how calmly and patiently a true conservative expounds their principles, the conservative will be perceived as evil or angry or ignorant or threatening because the principles themselves are dangerous to the power-grabbing collectivists and their impractical and insidious utopian schemes. That's that David and Danielle have to realize.

I have met them a few times and I like them very much and I think they have both contributed much good to the public debate. But they remind me of certain Christian politicians who have tried to keep their beliefs in the closet and attacked other Christians who believe exactly the same things for being more upfront about them. The "closet" Christians have tried to portray themselves as "nice" and "reasonable" and not like those "other" Christians who are as their critics define them, ignorant, bigoted or whatever. They don't realize though that even with their desire to be accepted, to be seen as nice, and not like those others, the illiberal juggernaut will cast them out as beyond the pale, too. And in the meantime, NO ONE HAS STOOD FOR PRINCIPLES FOR FEAR OF THE BRANDING.

No, David and Danielle. We have to stand for the principles. Yes, we have to be judicious. Not lose our tempers. Not demonize our opponents or make rash allegations. But that does not mean that polemics or humor or ridicule or regret or other styles of debate are out of bounds. No, they draw people in in ways that calm, rational discussion causes the eyes to glaze over.

They're going to say you are angry just because you are conservative.

It's time for us to stop being intimidated by the msm-style tar-and-feathering. If no one speaks up for principle, who will?

Remember, Ronald Reagan was made out to be a trigger-happy, ignorant cowboy by the same media that paint Obama in such a positive light today as Reagan's sunny successor.

Dr. Sanity on the capitalism and the free marketplace of ideas

I have started reading Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny. Read it in the line while waiting to get routine blood tests at the local clinic. Because this is Canada, most people haven't a clue who Mark Levin is, so I didn't feel a need to put the book in a brown wrapper. However, I hasten to add, most Canadians are Statists by default.

And most Canadians have also bought into the idea that anyone who disagrees with the progressive, Statist program is evil or a knuckledragging throwback. Thus the ad hominem attack is usually the only argument a progressive type learns because they are so steeped in their own assumptions.

Dr. Sanity points out in a long and excellent post this morning why those on the Left abhor such fundamental civil rights as freedom of speech and the relationship of free ideas to free markets.

Capitalism and free societies are always willing to tolerate even the insanities proposed by collectivists, because in the marketplace of ideas, better ideas will ultimately win out. But collectivists (and leftists of every stripe) are not willing to do the same because they believe they are better people , and the very existence of people who disagree with them is existentially threatening.

She quotes Dr. Zero over at HotAir who writes:

Nobody would be talking about nationalizing health care if doctors and hospital staff were happy to work eighty hour weeks for minimum wage, and pharmaceutical companies were run as giant charities that cheerfully sank billions into developing drugs they resell at cost. Few people would leave a sizable chunk of their estates to the government, if the government didn’t seize the money through death taxes. No large group of people on Earth has every freely chosen to peacefully organize themselves into a socialist collective – they either slip into it through small losses of freedom that seem relatively painless as they happen, or they are forced into it at gunpoint.

Well, this made me think of how hospitals and schools used to be run by the Catholic Church. Nuns took vows of poverty and obedience (to God, through their superiors) and served 80 hours per week for His greater glory.

But the voluntary socialism of the convent or the monastery has to be voluntary. In order for charity to be Christian it must be chosen not coerced.

Read these two posts because they outline the need for scapegoats and anger in order to herd people into the collective. And of course the people who will be scapegoated will be those who are critical of the program---whether they are talk radio hosts, conservative bloggers or authors, Christians, believing Jews, proponents of free markets and yes, the very ideas of America's Founding Fathers. Sad but true.

Uh oh! Another good reason not to vote Liberal

If you care about real civil rights, that is.

Blazing Cat Fur writes:

While the resolution calling for "citizenship status" and "socio-economic class" to be added as prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Canadaian human Rights Act was approved by the LPC convention let it stand for the record that not all LPC members are raving lunatics, just the majority. The final vote tally was 223 in favour to 185 against.

Of course, if your Liberal candidate is one of the non-raving lunatics, like MP Keith Martin or John McKay or Dan McTeague by all means vote for them. I'm sure there are others. We have to go candidate by candidate to see where they stand on life, the family and civil rights.

Dr. Edith Humprhey and Pastor Doug Ward

There's a four week series going on at St. Paul's Anglican Church in Kanata that I highly recommend. It's been organized by Ottawa Anglican diocese's ecumenical officer Father Craig Bower, who also serves as a priest with Father John Bridges at St. Paul's.

Though I am an Anglican Catholic and thus not part of the Anglican diocese, I do have to say that St. Paul's is a great church with two great priests.

You can find information about the Saturday and Sunday teaching sessions that will go on for the rest of the month and believe me, if you are Catholic or Protestant or something in between, you will find the lectures and the reflections edifying.

It was my pleasure today to slip over to hear Edith Humphrey, a New Testament scholar who is now based in Pittsburgh.

Edith gave two talks: on worship and on tradition.

I missed the first, alas.

I hope I can get a digital copy of her notes or soon a link to her talk (which I trust Tony Copple will put up soon). In the meantime, here's what struck me.

She told how she had been unable to sleep one night and went down to her computer. For some reason, she decided to investigate how the Greek words that have been translated into tradition are used. The words are paradidomi (to tradition, to pass on) and paradosis (tradition) and didomi and dosis (I give and gift)

What she discovered was that in most of the popular Protestant translations of the Bible, the word tradition was commonly used in a pejorative or negative sense, for example concerning the traditions of the Pharisees and so on.

That's sad. Even my favorite King James Bible! And it's true that "tradition" and even Holy Tradition that I have discovered is so wonderful and pre-existed the New Testament, is often treated negatively as "religion" and the traditions of men not God. Yet Edith pointed to a number of Scriptures where Paul talks about traditions being handed down to the new Christian believers. Some of these traditions were handed down by word of mouth and then by letter before Acts or any of the Gospels were written, she said.

She outlined the various relationships different denominations have towards tradition: Sola Scripture (Scripture alone for some Protestant groups); Scripture and Holy Tradition for Catholics and so on.

But she said the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral (that she said John Wesley would not have agreed with) of Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience has now resulted in experience trumping the other legs or pillars. Boy oh boy does that ring a bell!

"Many of the hot button issues are fueled by an appeal to experience over and against Scripture and Tradition," she said.

She pointed out, however, that even the Sola Scriptura types have a tradition for intepreting scripture.

Well, my former pastor, Doug Ward of Kanata Baptist Church, gave a response. He has kindly sent me a digital version which I have posted in full here. I remember when I first met Doug I told him I was a heretic and a maverick and had never been able to sign on the dotted line of any church. "Maybe this church is big enough for you," he said. And then, he gently allowed the Holy Spirit to do His work. The man practices what he preaches and I will be forever thankful for that. With his blessing, I have moved on to the Anglican Catholic Church but the folks at KBC will always be part of my family. Doug's remarks had some people in tears at St. Paul's. Here's a highlight, but do read the whole thing and be blessed!

Worship is only hard work because it does what Dr. Humphrey says it does, it promises to change us, it changes us from within – the most dangerous of sources for altering behavior, and it points to something beyond itself. It therefore challenges our assumptions, our carnal motives, and gets to the very root of our sin. We have contracted a spiritual disease that only God can cure. God incarnates himself in the act of worship, moving us from simply being objects of his adoration, into walking and talking disciples who desire nothing else than to spend time in His presence.

Indeed I would say that the recent financial crisis that we are experiencing has allowed God a direct line into our souls. We have looked to the bankers and the moneylenders and the brilliant minds of CNN and we find their confusion and doubt and shallow answers and now, out of necessity, we look to God. God’s response – “where have you been my child – I have been speaking to you of your utter desolation without me since the day you gave your heart to me – continue to listen”.

Here’s the trick - how can I listen in an IPod, Iphone, fully apped - world. Last week while travelling, I sat in an airport lounge with 171 other people, waiting for a plane with a three-hour delay, where everyone in the place was listening to earphones, iPod’s or attached to a cell phone. It is simply a herculean effort to ask anyone to release themselves from their own controlled atmosphere and enter into dialogue with anyone, on any subject. For my part, I had my fully loaded Bose noise cancelling headphones in place because I was tired and wanted privacy. But that’s different, right.

Mid way through my journey I dropped into Banff to spend two days with my daughter and found there a culture dominated by twenty something’s, iPods, climbing and skiing gear, mountain bikes, cell phones and love for nature that gave credit to everything in life but God and has ignored the father of creation to their personal peril - Individualism on steroids.

We are in an uphill battle for the souls of people in a world of smug self-satisfaction and rampant immortality.

-snip-

So culture has had a profound and deleterious effect on church, worship and worship expression. But do not be fooled, God is not nervous and the Kingdom is not rife with anxiety. The Kingdom of God has been doing very well, and will continue to flourish no matter the ebbs of flows from one century and continent to another.

As a missiologist - a fancy name for someone who still holds that God is alive and busting to meet his people – how do we respond to this challenge of preparing for God to move and speak?

If we listen to this message today – we have established that the encounter with Jesus in worship drives us deeper into Scripture, correlatively the fruit of the Spirit emerges, that God promises to grow in us, and stuff leaves and we are healed of our pride, worry and driveness. We must want this and expect this. We are to position our faith and our worship at the centre of God’s concerns. He sets the table, despite all the dire predictions of the world around us.

-snip

We have hope because we believe that:

• God is in the mix and all His considerable love and grace and character are leaning into people in any particular culture.

• The Gospel is immoveable, unshakeable and true for every culture and is the hope of the world for all of creation. The Gospel does not change; but how it engages culture, does.

• Our culture will always be in opposition to the integrity of the gospel and resistant to its advances, until Jesus comes again.

• God specializes in working in so-called God-forsaken places.

• All cultures can be penetrated with the gospel. If not so, people would have to change cultures to become Christians.

• God is allowing the forces of Postmodernity and culture to deconstruct the church for His greater glory in order to strip away any pretense that “God helps those who help themselves”. These tectonic forces are pushing people to the limits and causing massive tremors and the periodic tsunami.

• Christ’s salvific activity in bringing about the kingdom is already going on before our arrival in any given context.

God desires to meet us.


(The pictures show Edith Humphrey, Doug Ward, and Doug Ward with Fr. Craig Bowers of St. Paul's Anglican.)

An interesting poem by my aunt

My aunt just sent me this poem that she started some time in the 1990s and recently rediscovered and polished up. Ava Kar is a pen name:

ADAM’S LAMENT

I am a modern Adam, God,
and I would speak with you.
Trying so hard, I am, to keep control
over desire, fear, and hatred
of the modern Eve.
She is too powerful, dear God,
and I…I want to kill her
for what she does to me.
Put her back into my rib,
replant me in the Garden,
and please don’t
start the story all over again.

Ava Kar


Q 1 What does God reply? What does Adam imagine God replies?

Q 2 and what does Eve say?
Ava Kar

30 March 2009

I didn't know the Japanese were warned

This is a must-see video by Bill Whittle on why the atomic bomb was dropped twice on Japan.
I never knew, for instance, that the Japanese were warned in advance that certain cities with military installations, conveniently set up among civilian populations, would be destroyed and thus civilians were given the chance to evacuate.

Very interesting. I understand that John Stewart has since recanted his observation that President Harry Truman is a war criminal.

The one choice pro-choicers won't accept . . .

Riveting story by a former Notre Dame student who discovered she was pregnant:

I was confused and full of conflicting emotions. But I knew this: No amount of shame or embarrassment would ever lead me to get rid of my baby. Of all women, Our Lady could surely feel pity for an unplanned pregnancy. I recalled her surrendered love to God’s invitation to become the home of the Incarnate Word. “Let it be done to me according to thy word,” she had said. In my hour of need, on my knees, I asked Mary for courage and strength. And she did not disappoint.

My boyfriend was a different story. He was also a Notre Dame senior. When I told him that he was to be a father, he tried to pressure me into having an abortion. Like so many women in similar circumstances, I found out the kind of man the father of my child was at precisely the moment I needed him most. “All that talk about abortion is just dining-room talk,” he said. “When it’s really you in the situation, it’s different. I will drive you to Chicago and pay for a good doctor.”

I tried telling him this was not an option. He said he was pro-choice. I responded by informing him that my choice was life. And I learned, as so many pregnant women have before and since, that life is the one choice that pro-choicers won’t support.

Read it all. (H/t Rod Dreher)

By the way, my novel The Defilers is pro-life and a rip-roaring read to boot. Go here to find out how you can get a signed copy.

Mark Steyn on Obama's 100 Days--get ready to laugh

Mark Steyn reviews Obama's 100 Days and the news conference that I could not bear to watch except in rerun snippets on Fox News. While his column makes some depressing points, he made me laugh out loud. That's why he's my fave.

President Obama's strongest talent is not his speechifying, which is frankly a bit of a snoozeroo. In Europe, he left 'em wanting less pretty much every time (headline from Britain's Daily Telegraph: "Barack Obama Really Does Go On A Bit"). That uptilted chin combined with the left-right teleprompter neck swivel you can set your watch by makes him look like an emaciated Mussolini umpiring an endless rally of high lobs on Centre Court at Wimbledon. Each to his own, but I don't think those who routinely hail him as the greatest orator since Socrates actually sit through many of his speeches.

On the other hand, if you just caught a couple of minutes of last Wednesday's press conference, you'd be impressed. When that groupie from The New York Times asked the president about what, during his first hundred days, "had surprised you the most … enchanted you the most … humbled you the most and troubled you the most", Obama made a point of getting out his pen, writing it down and repeating back the multiple categories: "Enchanted," he said. "Nice." Indeed. Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger, you may see a stranger across a crowded room, but then he scribbles down your multipart question to be sure he gets it right, and he looks so thoughtful, and suddenly he's not a stranger anymore, and the sound of his laughter will ring in your dreams.

David Frum makes sense on torture debate

How do we deal with terrorists and pirates? Do we grant them all the rights and benefits of the American or Canadian legal system, thereby treating their activities the way our police might treat a case of arson or mugging?

I don't think so. By the same token, I don't think their being classified as old-fashioned "enemies of humanity" is a justification for torture or mistreatment. David Frum has a good column on the issue in today's National Post:

Critics depict the Bush administration as a revival of the Spanish Inquisition: racks, thumb screws and other horrors. I wonder how many of these critics realize -- as Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies pointed out in a brilliant appearance on the Daily Show this week -- that only three terrorists were ever subjected to waterboarding? Or that this technique was last used in 2003?

The terrorist most frequently waterboarded was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 plan. When captured by U. S. and Pakistani agents in Karachi, he was immediately asked whether al-Qaeda had any more acts of mass murder planned. He answered: "You'll find out."

The Bush administration decided not to wait to discover what the arch-terrorist had in mind. Under harsh interrogation, Mohammed revealed information that saved American lives, according to every serving intelligence chief -- including President Obama's own director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair.

Maybe it was wrong of the Bush administration to do so. Maybe they should have run more risks with American lives. That would be an interesting debate, but for obvious reasons it's not a debate that critics of the Bush administration want to engage in.

One of my problems with the program 24 and Jack Bauer's routine use of torture that busts kneecaps and threatens to gouge out eyes is that it confirms the impression a lot of American critics have that real torture is routinely approved and carried out by Americans. I think Frum puts the approved "torture" or "harsh interrogation techniques" (if they are torture and they may well be, they are on the lighter end of the spectrum).

Frum continues:

To qualify for Geneva treatment, fighters must meet some basic moral tests: They must wear uniforms or some other identifying sign. They must carry arms openly. They must follow the command of a superior officer. To engage in violent conflict without meeting these tests is itself a war crime. Lawless fighters like al-Qaeda terrorists fall into the same legal category as pirates or bandits: "common enemies of all mankind."

snip

Under international law, as it was understood in all Western countries before 9/11, captured terrorists possess none of the rights of soldiers. That does not mean that they can be tortured or abused -- they cannot. But unlike soldiers, they can be questioned. Unlike soldiers, they can be tried. Unlike soldiers, they can be executed for their acts of violence.

Maybe waterboarding was wrong even in 2002-2003. The Bush administration itself has acted on the understanding that it was unnecessary after 2003. But make no mistake: What is going on in this so-called "torture" debate is an attempt to hijack humanitarian feeling to smuggle into international law new claims on behalf of the world's most conscienceless criminals.

Frum is absolutely right. I don't think pirates who have just fired on an oil tanker or cruise ship and have attached grappling hooks should get a trial with a tax-funded defense lawyer. They should be blown out of the water or captured and sent to a Gitmo like facility until the piracy problem is eradicated and they can be sent home. Same with people who blow up marketplaces full of civilians or use women and children as human shields. No, I don't think they should be tortured in the thumbscrews sense. Their basic humanity needs to be respected, but this respect does not translate into their being treated as if they are citizens of the United States.

But until humanitarian feeling is summoned on behalf of innocent babies in the womb, I have a lot of trouble buying the moral superiority of Obama, who doesn't even care about the life of the poor infant born alive as the result of a botched abortion.

I also think Charles Krauthammer makes some good points on this issue:

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

I'm still struggling with this issue, folks. I agree with Pope Benedict XVI on the imperative to respect for human life from conception to natural death and I am sure that torture in any form is not something he would ever condone.

But there's a part of me that is not sure I would want Pope Benedict as president of the United States . I confess, that part of me agreed with much of what Robert D. Kaplan wrote in his book
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos.

So I struggle with my inner pagan and her ruthless utilitarianism and survival and protective instincts. I may choose Christian martyrdom for myself and I hope that God would grant me the grace to witness for Him should I be called to that, but I do not think I have the right to choose Christian martyrdom for others without their explicit consent. I think I would fight tooth and nail to make sure no one touches a hair on the head of my grandson.

Kaplan writes in the New York Times:

Machiavelli famously said that good men bent on doing good must know how to be bad. And because we all share a social world, he goes on, the virtue of a policy maker resides not in his moral perfection but in the communal result of his act. If one is not already ill at ease with such maxims, consider this: In the ultimate hypothetical case, if a terrorist with hard intelligence about an impending large-scale terrorist strike could be broken by torture, shouldn't it be used? That nauseating question forms the theme of ''Torture: A Collection,'' edited by Sanford Levinson, a professor of government at the University of Texas. What's most striking about these essays is that despite their abstract and theoretical content, they generally do not contradict the depiction of actual interrogators described by Mackey and Miller. The wall between the liberal campus and a conservative, utilitarian-minded military breaks down because the questions are so serious that few of this book's contributors want to engage in polemics, and few -- to their credit -- ever seem completely comfortable with their own conclusions.

To follow Machiavelli further: it is not simply and crudely that the ends justify the means. It is that evil, if it is to be employed, should be used only to the minimum extent necessary, and then only to accomplish a demonstrably greater amount of good. As the Princeton professor Michael Walzer writes, ''It is important to stress Machiavelli's own commitment to the existence of moral standards.'' But knowing what that minimum extent is, and knowing with reasonable certainty that a greater amount of good will result, thwarts scholars and interrogators alike.

snip

Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago, counters that torture is so extreme that it should remain ''tabooed and forbidden,'' and that any attempt to legitimize torture even in the rarest of cases risks the slippery slope toward normalizing it. Seeking a middle ground, Miriam Gur-Arye, a criminal law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues that in the absence of a concrete terrorist threat, only a specific self-defense argument can justify force in an interrogation: it cannot be justified by the more general and utilitarian -- that is, Machiavellian -- argument of necessity.

I'm a big Elshtain fan, so what she says carries a lot of weight. As I say, I am struggling with this issue and not finding it easy to come to conclusions.

Kaplan has an interesting article in the Atlantic on Samuel Huntington, by the way.

The liberal values that a democracy holds dear, Huntington explained, are also the values that can undermine a professional officer corps. "The heart of liberalism is individualism," he wrote. "It emphasizes the reason and moral dignity of the individual." But the military man, because of the nature of his job, has to assume irrationality and the permanence of violent conflict in human relations. "The liberal glorifies self-expression" because the liberal takes national security for granted; the military man glorifies "obedience" because he does not take that security for granted. A democracy may fight better than a dictatorship, because its middle-level officers are more inclined to make risky decisions; that is one reason for our success on the beaches of Normandy, and for the success of the Israelis over Arab armies. Nevertheless, a truly liberal military would lack the lethal effectiveness required to defend a liberal society threatened by technologically empowered illiberal adversaries.

Only conservatism, Huntington argued, proves properly conducive to military professionalism. Indeed, conservatism grows organically out of the military ethic that dominated society in ancient times. Conservatism recognizes the primacy of power in international affairs; it accepts existing institutions; and its goals are limited. It eschews grand designs, because it has no universal value system that it seeks to impose on others. The conservative mind, like the military one, believes that human beings learn only from human experience, which leads to an accent on the study of history. History forms the centerpiece of war-college curricula.

Interesting. Read the whole article. Our ability to live by liberal values is made possible by those who are willing to exercise force on our behalf.