NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 21, 2003
Judas rising
I should like to share with the reader this week what I have come to think is a profound insight into Canadian politics in the last couple of generations. The insight is hardly unique to me and I have only come to grasp it vividly through the "accident" (in the Aristotelian sense) of deciding to become a Catholic myself. There are things which one may see only dimly from outside the Church but become much clearer in the moment the light changes as one looks in the door. It is a strange story of the interaction of Church and State. Yet before I begin I must resist a clich? that may be leaping into the reader's mind. There is no "separation of church and state" in Canada nor ever was. Nor may the phrase be found in the American Constitution for that matter. Their famous First Amendment reads Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... -- which is something else entirely. And even that applies only to the U.S. border; not here. In Quebec especially there was no separation. There remains no separation -- for in a curious way politics and religion remain inseparable in Quebec even while the religion has been transformed into something old Quebec would never recognize. For reasons of political correctness Canadians are no longer taught their own history and have by now lost the sequence of cause and effect. Our politics today are not reasoned from precedent and principle for the great majority of us have been effectively zombified. The nonsense most now believe about such legal abstractions as "equality" perfectly illustrates the case. The fiction for instance that "same-sex marriage" could be instituted as an "equality issue" can only be spread among people deprived of the intellectual equipment to resist it. For a person of average intelligence and an old-fashioned grade school education the idea could never fly: for the institution of marriage has had from its beginnings in prehistory nothing to do with equality of any kind. Likewise the passage in the Commons this last week of Svend Robinson's recklessly-worded private member's bill to criminalize "hate speech" against homosexuals or homosexuality theoretically granting homosexuals protection on the analogy of members of religious racial and cultural minorities. It inserts an apple into a row of oranges; it required a wanton indifference to fact and reality to even consider it seriously. Yet after years of confutation it was glibly passed by Parliament's marionettes 141 to 110. I forgive the marionettes and the simpletons who voted for them. There is little one can do with a wooden head when one's arms are suspended by wires. Much the same marionettes voted down the proposition by much wider margins whenever it came up before. For until recently it was assumed that the Canadian public would never stand for such bilge. Now it is assumed that we will. Canada has not been led down the road to perdition by a bunch of puppets but by the purposeful machinations of puppeteers. It is the Trudeau legacy I refer to spreading through the Canadian body politic like a virulent cancer destroying our immunities. This is indeed how Bill C-250 should have been seen: as a direct attack on the free speech that would enable us to resist. At the very moment when our government and courts have conspired to overturn the moral order by instituting "same-sex marriage" -- the government empowers the same courts to invite hate-speech prosecutions against those who disagree. Let's not kid ourselves. The attack on free speech was absolutely intentional and the courts -- stacked as they now are with half-baked radicals -- will avail themselves of this new weapon to squelch "social conservatives" the moment it is available. I have called this attack -- on Canada on our freedoms on moral order on human decency -- the "Trudeau legacy". And yet that describes it too narrowly. It does not really explain one of the mysteries of post-modern Canadian history: that this most conservative and cautious and civilized of countries is now leading the attack on Western civilization itself. To understand the power of Pierre Trudeau's satanic legacy is to understand one of the most extraordinary events in modern times: the sudden apostasy of the old Catholic province of Quebec in the 1950s and '60s. It is to understand that Trudeau himself was a kind of arch-apostate Catholic and that the Liberal Party that descends from him has provided a kind of "apostate succession". One of the things I've learned from mail as a Catholic convert intending to be faithful is that the so-called "liberal" Catholics hate us far more than any innocent Presbyterians hate us or friendly Evangelicals or observing Jews or even twisted Anglicans. (A similar fight has been happening within the Anglican fold as within the Catholic but it's quite minor league in comparison.) The fate of Canada is I have come to realize a spill-over from the fate of the Catholic Church in Quebec. The real fight was not in Parliament nor even in the Courts -- those are clean-up rounds. Rather the real fight was and remains inside the Church among people who still call themselves Catholic and from the days when Quebec went anti-clerical and morally rancid. The present prime minister Jean Chretien is another of these apostate Catholics and yet another Paul Martin is waiting in the wings. Each is in open rebellion against almost all the teachings of his Church. They have successfully grabbed the sceptre of power in this country and they rule through alliance with a tatty legion of confused lapsed-Protestant types who serve as their "useful idiots". What appears outwardly to be a clash between Christian and secular liberal values is inwardly nothing of the kind. For the secular liberal traditions do not even resemble the sort of legislation that has been foisted upon us. The clash has instead been within Catholicism over the authority and meaning of Christ. And the apostate Catholic rebellion is ultimately against Christ himself. The paradox which isn't really a paradox and must be lost on the "innocent bystanders" outside the Church is that the only people who can effectively stand against the apostate Catholics are the faithful Catholics. As it were no one else knows the script. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top