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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 2, 2005
Age of consent
We are living, today, in the most child-unfriendly society that has existed. There is little room for children in public life, and little time for them in the double-income structure of the “modern” family, even when it remains intact. Children are actually banned from many apartment buildings and upscale residential environments, and where they are permitted, grow up in neighbourhoods physically adapted to cars and other heavy machinery, but not to them.Play areas are allotted in public parks, where they are tolerated under conditions of intense supervision, and daycares now proliferate where the smaller ones can be warehoused during office hours, so that they do not become an impediment to their mothers’ professional lives. The older ones continue to be warehoused in unionized and bureaucratized public shelters, which are misleadingly identified as “schools”. There, they become the subjects of government experiments in social engineering, designed to make them politically correct. But our repulsion from children begins much earlier, and is quite literally murderous. Under Canadian law, mothers may have their children aborted at any point during pregnancy -- even on the delivery table -- and that boundary will soon be stretched with “liberal” laws on euthanasia. Parents are, moreover, under social encouragement to eliminate a child promptly, should intrusive medical procedures determine that the creature in its mother’s womb is imperfect in any way. At the other end of childhood, when adolescents are progressively released into urban and semi-urban surroundings that resemble the old red light districts, they are now commonly deprived of the crucial parental influence of a father, by family law that effectively enables their mother to exchange him for cash. But this is only the end-point of legislative innovations that have anyway transferred nearly every traditional paternal function, except the earning of a paycheque, to the state. It should thus be no surprise that our young -- where they survive at all -- are turned out today wearing the faces you may see on public transit and the sidewalks. Unhappy, empty, and cynical, would be among words most apt to describe many I see pass me every day, from a society that has delegitimized childhood. Am I exaggerating? I would hope so, though I am not sure. I am aware of the heroic efforts of many parents -- principally of the sort often characterized as “religious zealots” -- to resist the prevailing current. And in the poor urban neighbourhood in which I live, I glimpse many little acts of real love from mothers who are, often as not, a child’s only ally. The instinct to parental responsibility and affection seems sufficiently powerful to weather considerable adversity, but remember how many of these young parents are themselves the graduates of broken and blighted homes. All this necessary preamble, to set my stage for a minor moment in Parliament this last week, when the minority Liberal government (minus its “socially conservative” members) combined with the separatist BQ, and the socialist NDP, to squelch a Conservative private member’s bill that would have raised the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16 years of age. This would have brought Canada into line with most Western countries, where it is at least 16, and sometimes 18 years. Irwin Cotler, the justice minister, led the mocking chorus against the bill, casting it as an affront to human rights, and an attack on what he called “puppy love”. This, surely, on a level with Paul Martin’s previous “You can’t cherry-pick rights!” defence of “same-sex marriage” -- an argument so broad that it could itself be used to justify constitutional protection for paedophilia. The bill (C-313) was explicitly presented as a measure against the sexual predation of children, which contrary to the assumptions of the majority in the House, is a real and present problem. Its sponsor, Rick Casson of Lethbridge, made clear he was open to a “close-in-age” amendment to make its principle perfectly clear. This was ignored. Instead, Mr Cotler said the existing Criminal Code, and pending government legislation (Bill C-2), would adequately protect children against “exploitation”. Since the new legislation has been introduced by Mr Cotler, I frankly don’t believe it will. More likely, we will soon see the age of consent for anal intercourse (which our Criminal Code now sets at 18) reduced to match the remarkably low general age of consent. That is, after all, among the current demands of “Egale” (the “gay and lesbian” lobby group): and what Egale wants, Egale gets from this Liberal government. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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