The Pope, the dope and Comedy Central

Last week, as I made my way to the final hour of debate on the euthanasia and assisted-suicide private member's bill, I noticed hundreds of people sitting in clusters or standing around on the Parliament Hill lawn, plastic bottles and other trash strewn around them and a pall of smoke rising above them.

I asked the driver of the little green bus what was going on and he said it was 4/20 or National Weed Day, and the demonstrators were publicly smoking marijuana to mark it.

Oooookay.

So, I got off the bus, and sure enough the stench of cannabis enveloped me as I went up the steps
of Centre Block.

That pall of smoke seemed an apt metaphor for the confusion and distortion emanating from the House of Commons on the euthanasia debate. The House was nearly empty--maybe 20 MPs altogether, and it seemed the only arguments those in favor of giving doctors or others the license to kill other human beings were resorting to the same arguments as I imagine the potheads outside were using. Kinda like "everyone's doing it," so why should it be a crime?

In other words, proponents of this draconian law relied on confusion about what is the legitimate withdrawal of treatment or nutrition and hydration at end of life (when it becomes too burdensome) with the deliberate taking of a human life through action or omission.

We are all going to die, and Catholic teaching does not insist that we be kept alive at all costs. But there is a huge difference between allowing a natural dying process to take place vs. getting out the needle or the barbiturates to hasten it along. Thankfully, the House overwhelmingly rejected Bill C-384 in a vote the next day.

It made me sad, though, to see so many outside pushing for the legalization of a drug that has done more than anything to sap the masculinity, adulthood and initiative of a whole generation of young men. But no one was demonstrating against a bill that would have been the coup de grace for any foundational notion of a right to life recognized by the state. I think I was the only journalist covering the debate.

Which brings me to the latest concern over Comedy Central's censorship of South Park.

Mark Steyn called my attention to this column by Ross Douthat, perhaps the only good thing the New York Times has going for it. Douthat writes (my bolds):

In a way, the muzzling of “South Park” is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. It’s no worse than the German opera house that temporarily suspended performances of Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” because it included a scene featuring Muhammad’s severed head. Or Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of a novel about the prophet’s third wife. Or Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoons ... in a book about the Danish cartoon crisis. Or the fact that various Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians — the list includes Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Michel Houellebecq in France, Mark Steyn in Canada and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands — have been hauled before courts and “human rights” tribunals, in supposedly liberal societies, for daring to give offense to Islam.

But there’s still a sense in which the “South Park” case is particularly illuminating. Not because it tells us anything new about the lines that writers and entertainers suddenly aren’t allowed to cross. But because it’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.

In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.

Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

So what does this have to do with the Pope?

Look at how our news media has been in a rush to trash the Catholic Church and the Pope. We have some brave folks who want to insist on the same freedom to trash Islam as anyone has to trash Christianity or Buddhism or other religions. Freedom of Speech has become about transgression, pushing the envelope in sexual taboos, and, in effect, pushing spiritual slavery---slavery to the senses, to the animal nature, to unrestrained appetites. It is about selfishness and the fiction of autonomy.

It makes me sad that the best response that can be mustered up against radical Islam is today's Boobquake, launched by a 22-year old girl to show cleavage in response to some Imam's blaming a recent earthquake on the immodest dressing of westerners.

Sorry, but sitting around smoking dope and displaying cleavage while snickering at the Pope and devaluing the Christian faith and every good principle underlying western civilization from the roots of Athens, Jerusalem and Rome is not going to stop the growing totalitarian onslaught against everything that has made a free and prosperous west possible.

I just finished reading Leon Podles book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity

which you can read online. He makes some important observations about how much the Christian faith has become a church for women, while the men mostly just stay home.

If we want to save our fundamental freedoms, we have to revive a masculine Christian faith, one that will wake up and engage some of those dope-smoking, videogame playing, porn-watching young men who have become enslaved by their own weaknesses and self-indulgence.

Only a robust Christian faith that raises up protective, self-restrained, virtuous men and women who show their hope for the future by having children can stop this tide of decadence.

Flashing our boobs and finding the courage here and there to trash Islam may be a freedom of sorts, but it is not the freedom Christ died for or the freedom the Pope tells us about, even as his words are drowned by a cacaphony of derision.

If any of us are wondering how most of us would have responded if we were living in Germany during the rise of Hitler, I think the West's craven capitulation to even the possibility of a jihadist threat tells us we would have done little or nothing to stop the trains when the jackboots were everywhere.

We need to find the freedom of a Maximilian Kolbe, or a Deitrich Bonhoeffer, a freedom that finds itself in the willingness to shed one's blood for the love of others. The "freedom" of lighting up a joint on Parliament Hill, of offing grandma when she becomes inconvenient, of trashing the religious leader of one's choice, of baring one's boobs, and aborting one's babies, is an illusion that leads to slavery.

The pictures were taken by my friend Christopher, who I am sure agrees with this post.