From the editor’s desk:
In the United Kingdom, the House of Lords is debating whether to legalize euthanasia. We have a report on it in “And then there was this” on p. 17. I wanted to highlight one part of the on-going debate on that side of the lake, namely Lord Falconer’s comment during the third committee stage debate that the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill would apply to pregnant women. Lord Mackinlay said that in Oregon, one of the first jurisdictions to legalize euthanasia, there is a requirement that physicians keep the mother alive as long as possible to get the preborn child to the point of “viability” although in the Netherlands, the preborn child must be killed prior to the mother being euthanized, a grisly two-for-one medicalized killing. Lord Mackinlay asked Lord Falconer his view about euthanizing pregnant women and the latter replied “pregnancy should not be a bar” to Medical Assistance in Dying. Former MP Miriam Cates responded with admirable concision: “It’s no surprise that those who are pushing the assisted suicide bill also have extreme attitudes to abortion. Once you lose the belief that human life is sacred, it becomes progressively easier to come up with reasons to kill people.” Let’s be blunter: there is a Death Cult among some politicians who favour doctors killing innocent human life at both ends of the spectrum. That it “becomes progressively easier to come up with reasons to kill people” is a truism, explaining that wherever supposed safeguards or limits are put in place – abortion in cases of rape or incest, abortion only in the first 12 weeks, euthanasia for just the terminally ill – they inevitably fall. It becomes all too easy to rationalize expanding the lethal writ once the principle that human life is sacred is compromised.
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Is the Pope Catholic? Sure is. Is Catholicism opposed to abortion. Completely. Pope Leo XIV in his Jan. 9 address to the members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See said, “the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right” and “a society is healthy and truly progresses only when it safeguards the sanctity of human life and works actively to promote it.” Then on Jan. 17 he sent his support for the 53rd March for Life, held in Washington D.C. on Jan. 23. He said, “I would encourage you, especially the young people, to continue striving to ensure that life is respected in all of its stages through appropriate efforts at every level of society, including dialogue with civil and political leaders.” The pontiff continued: “May Jesus, who promised to be with us always (cf. Mt 28:20), accompany you today as you courageously and peacefully march on behalf of unborn children. By advocating for them, please know that you are fulfilling the Lord’s command to serve him in the least of our brothers and sisters (cf. Mt 25:31-46).”
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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is receiving widespread praise for his defiant speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos for repeating the same anti-American and hopeless middle power platitudes that Liberal politicians have been offering for as long as I’ve been watching politics. The Wall Street Journal said that in the same week as Carney’s widely covered speech there was another, more important and better speech delivered by a politician from this side of the Atlantic in Europe. U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson became the first person to hold that position to address the British Parliament, in which he observed, “our long-term prosperity and security are currently being undermined by, let’s call it a crisis of self-doubt.” Returning to a favoured theme of former National Post columnist Mark Steyn, he said the West lacked the civilizational confidence needed to lead. Johnson said every “high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things” and then he listed them: “the dignity of the individual, the stabilizing role of the family . . . and the indispensable relationship between freedom and virtue. In short, we have to remember our foundations and we have to describe what they are because the generation behind us seems not to understand this.” Later that same week, Johnson told the March for Life in Washington that he stood with other pro-life Republicans at the annual March because it an important event: “It always is because we welcome the opportunity to recommit ourselves to this cause of life and to remember why it is we gather and march in the cold weather. It’s important for us to stand together. My friends, it’s especially important this year because as you know, this is the year we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday, the greatest nation in the history of the world. The thing that we celebrate about America, there’s so much for which we are blessed and we’re thankful for, but the thing that we remember, especially at this time, is the foundational truth of America. The bold statement of faith that set this experiment in self-governance, this independent country, along its way. We celebrate the self-evident truth. That all people, every single person, is made by God. We are made by our Creator.”
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A recurring theme of mine is to eschew taking a victory lap when the transgender ideology or the woke left suffers a setback; some take those setbacks as evidence that transgenderism or wokeism is on the wane. Paul Gottfried reviews Jonathan Butcher’s The Polarization Myth: America’s Consensus on Race, Schools, and Sex in the January edition of Chronicles in “The woke left is far from defeated.” Butcher’s book summarizes polling data that shows most Americans are not enthralled with various far-left progressive causes and that there is not as much polarization as the media, opposing political parties, or online discourse suggests. And yet, it is easy to misunderstand the figures Butcher presents; if 42 per cent of Americans oppose allowing boys masquerading as girls in female-only spaces and an equal amount are neutral, there is still one in five people supportive of the policy and large number of neutrals indifferent to the essentials of transgender activism. Furthermore, one in five people is not an insignificant number and Gottfried rightly says “it pains me to think that so many Americans aren’t disgusted by the idea of having girls and young women in a vulnerable situation in which they’re exposed to a group that suffers disproportionately from mental disorders and a propensity for violence.” (See our editorial “Death becomes them” on page 4 and our cover story on page 10.) Whatever victories there are, we would do well to remind ourselves that electoral wins frequently allow only a temporary reprieve from the excesses of the Left. As Gottfried explains, “the cultural left occupies too many command positions to be turned back in a few election cycles.” Transgenderism and wokeism remain firmly held convictions among many opinion-makers in education and the media (entertainment and journalistic), to say nothing of corporate leadership and HR departments. There are wins and they should be celebrated, but we must remain clear-eyed about the strength opposing ideologies.
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Some Foundation Trusts – local National Health Service providers in the United Kingdom – have adopted new software for registering births. The program asks for usual identifying information: time and date of birth, parents, weight, length, and head circumference. The Daily Telegraph reported that the Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust’s training session for the new software system stunned staff because it did not include an option for recording the newborn’s biological sex, a sop to transgender activists, but did include sections for the newborn’s gender identity, preferred pronouns, and sexual orientation. The Telegraph’s Celia Walden said “I’m just going to let that sit for a moment” as readers “digest how warped a group of human beings have to be by their own ideology to suggest that a newborn baby could have decided – in the five minutes that he/she/they has existed on earth” that they are nonbinary or cis-male or whatever and that they actually have the capacity to determine their chosen pronouns. Pro-trans activists have called maleness and femaleness the sex “assigned at birth,” like it is somehow an arbitrary decision of doctors rather than the recognition of an obvious biological fact. But if staff at hospitals are going to input a gender identity or sexual orientation or impose pronouns on newborns, those would be arbitrarily assigned at birth. This is complete nonsense but it is not inconsequential. It further politicizes the medical profession, to say nothing of beclowning the United Kingdom’s health care system.
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Last October, Japan swore in its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, a nominally right-wing populist. One of her cabinet appointments was Kimi Onoda, named Minister of Economic Security and a self-described otaku, a devotee of Japanese anime (television and movie animation) and manga (comic books and graphic novels). There is nothing inherently noteworthy of all that, except that Onoda went on X (formerly Twitter) to say that “the possibility of getting married feels so utterly creepy to me… I don’t consider 3D people as romantic prospects… it’s the same as if you were to suggest to a gay person that they marry someone of the opposite sex.” By “3D people,” she means real-life people. Onoda “I’m 2D-exclusive!!” because “What I demand from a man isn’t money or power—those things are truly irrelevant. The one non-negotiable absolute condition is that he’s a handsome 2D guy, and that’s it.” 2D guys are the two-dimensional animated characters on her television screen or the paper of her books. She says in “the 3D world” she is “married to the nation” as a member of Takaichi’s government, but “privately, I’m devoted to the 2D world!” This seems like a parody but unfortunately it isn’t.
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The Christian Heritage Party is fighting the City of Hamilton over its persecution of the party because it dared ask on a billboard, “What is a woman?” It is absurd that this question has to be asked and even more absurd that there are people who cannot answer it or get the answer wrong.
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If you don’t subscribe to the CHP’s free newsletter, you should. CHP leader Rod Taylor shares the platform with many others within the party, and sometimes outside. In a recent newsletter, the CHP republished a piece by former Newfoundland Premier Brian Peckford, who criticized the federal government’s attack on the notwithstanding clause, which Peckford describes as part of Confederation’s “bargain”: were it not for the clause, which permits federal and provincial legislatures to temporarily override court decisions, Pierre Trudeau would not have received the support of the nine assenting provinces to get the Constitution passed. Peckford should know; he was part of those negotiations in the early 1980s. Increasingly, provincial governments resort to the notwithstanding clause, sometimes pre-emptively, because courts have repeatedly refused to respect the legislature’s prerogative to enact laws. Courts should narrowly apply the Charter to ensure laws do not violate certain inalienable rights, but over the past four decades the courts have acted as if they legislatures and judges (un)elected legislators, throwing out laws judges do not like with the flimsiest constitutional reasoning. (Gwen Landolt cautioned during the constitutional debates that the Charter would invite judges to act like legislators, but few heeded her warning.) Now that the notwithstanding clause has been used by the Government of Alberta and Government of Saskatchewan to protect laws that protect parental rights when it comes to the gender transitioning of children, the federal government wants to trample on the Constitution and negate the very clause of that document that permitted it to come into being.
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Pro-lifers do not oppose euthanasia because legalized killing is prone to abuse. Even if it works perfectly as advocates claim it can and only take the lives of those who truly want to die, it is wrong. Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, wrote on his year-end blog: “We are opposed to euthanasia because it is literally about killing people. Assisted killing is a bad idea not just because it cannot be contained or it will negatively affect people at a vulnerable time of their life, even though those statements are true. We oppose assisting a suicide because it is also about killing someone. Assisting a suicide undermines the need that the person is experiencing, where the response should be proper care and suicide prevention.” We are all made in the image and likeness of God; we will be publishing an editorial next month on the pro-life significance of Imago Dei. Intentionally taking the life of an innocent human being is always wrong. We are all called to end the practices of abortion and euthanasia because it is always a direct attack on the sanctity of a human life and a degradation of the idea that all life is precious.
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Beginning in this issue we are identifying a few of our freelance contributors. Mary Zwicker has been writing for us since she was a Campaign Life Coalition summer intern in 2022 and who continued writing freelance articles for us later that year. She is now our European Correspondent, writing from Europe where she lives with her family. Oswald Clark began writing for us during the Obamacare debates in Washington and has been covering the United States ever since. He will be our U.S. correspondent. Finally, Tanis Cortens began writing for us last summer when she was a CLC summer intern, and has been writing a monthly article for us since then. She will be our Feature Writer. These are not full-time jobs, or even part-time; they are freelancers, what in the business are called stringers and in the case of Oz Clark, his contribution to the pro-life movement is writing for us gratis. We think having their beats identified will make for a better reading experience for subscribers.
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We often get complaints about the size of the font. Beginning in the March edition, we will have a new font which should be easier to read, which is also part of our ongoing efforts to make The Interim a better reading experience.
~ Paul Tuns
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