From the editor’s desk:
By the way, between his three marriages and various mistresses, Boris Johnson has at least ten, probably 12, and perhaps even more children.
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Typically, the cover of each June edition of this paper features the National March for Life. Not this month. Jim Hughes, long-time pro-life leader, passed away days after the March. Were it not for Jim, this paper would not exist, nor would the National March for Life. It is only fitting that this larger-than-life figure, who did so much to nurture pro-life talent, connect that talent to various pro-life ministries, and start so many vital institutions, is recognized for his achievements and legacy by being on the cover. I do not say this as an apology for featuring Jim on our cover, or really to explain it; rather, it is more to reinforce that much of what we do in pro-life activism today is directly tied to Jim’s leadership of Campaign Life Coalition and within the broader pro-life movement, a movement that would look radically different had not Hughes answered the call to pro-life work. I personally owe Jim so much. I did not know when I went to journalism school that I would be fortunate enough to provide my talents for meaningful and important work in the most vital human rights cause (protecting the preborn) today. Without Jim’s foresight to launch The Interim in 1983 and being handpicked by him in 2001 to become the editor, I would be doing something much less fulfilling today.
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Jim gave me two pieces of advice when I started pro-life work: nurture my spiritual life through the Mass and sacraments, and maintain a sense of humour. It is good advice, and it is in many ways the same advice. Battling the Culture of Death, we must maintain our hope and perspective; faith and humour, help with both of those.
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Jim had a ton of stories and just as many sayings. My favourite of his was this: “We are an Easter people.” Indeed, we are.
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Sam Sifton, a writer for The Morning, a New York Times newsletter published a letter asking, “In obituaries, you often say that the subject’s mother ‘ran the household’ or ‘oversaw the household.’ How do you determine this? (I understand that you want to avoid ‘was a housewife’.)” William McDonald, the paper’s retiring obituary editor responded: “Yes, we use that language in place of ‘homemaker,’ which is old-fashioned and maybe a bit demeaning. (‘Homemaker’ had replaced ‘housewife.’) We make a determination by reporting: We simply ask family members what parents did as occupations.” I was unaware that homemaker, a modern euphemism for the supposedly archaic housewife, has since been replaced by “ran the household” or some other more cumbersome phrase. I wonder if housewives and homemakers find the term demeaning, or whether uppity and uptight feminists took umbrage on their behalf?
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Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley writes about how the legalization of marijuana has led to the normalization of open illicit drug use: “Open drug use, not just someone smoking a joint, but someone smoking crack or meth openly on the streets is becoming normalized. It happens on street corners, in doorways, in parks and on streetcars, and on the subway system.” This is true of Toronto, and many communities across the country. Lilley points out that the state is “aiding and abetting people with their addictions” with, for example, the City of Toronto spending millions of dollars providing drug paraphernalia to users. According to the Sun, “the city procured 2.34 million meth pipes, 3.45 million crack pipes and 14.92 million syringes over a five-year period between 2021 and 2025.” Lilley explains, “On average, that’s almost 700,000 crack pipes handed out each year, just shy of half a million meth pipes and close to three million syringes.” The result is “we are helping create these people who look like they have come out of the (zombie television series) Walking Dead.”
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In November, I reviewed Daniel J. Flynn’s biography of Frank S. Meyer, The Man Who Invented Conservativism (“From Stalinism to Conservatism”). Meyer espoused conservative “fusionism” which married libertarianism with cultural conservatism and respect for tradition. In the Spring edition of The Claremont Review of Books, Declan Leary notes Meyer’s ambivalence toward legalizing drugs. Meyer said: “What is destroyed when under the influence of drugs – and what those who take it seek to destroy – is the intellectual ordering of experience, the fruit of millennia of civilization.” Leary writes, “such comments suggest that Meyer prioritized the Western tradition over absolute freedom when the two clashed openly.” Meyer’s comment explains one of the reasons for opposing legalized drugs and Leary’s comment reminds us why pure libertarianism is wrong-headed.
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Mater Care International says, “The child in the womb is not a potential person, but a person with potential.”
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X (formerly Twitter) account More Births observes, “All over the world, dense cityscapes mean very low birthrates.” It notes that the downtowns of major world cities have disastrously cratering birth rates: San Francisco has a total fertility rate (TFR) of 0.99 births per woman of child-bearing age; Tokyo is 0.95; South Korea’s capital, Seoul’s, is 0.63; Belarus capital Minsk’s is 0.67; Shanghai is 0.45; City of London (U.K.) is 0.32. While all these countries have low birth rates well below the replacement level of 2.1 – the rate at which a population remains stable over time – they are significantly lower in the major urban centres. This is true even in countries with a relatively healthy TFR. Chișinău (Moldova) has a fertility rate of 1.33 although the rest of the country has a fertility rate near replacement; the same is true of Dublin, Ireland, with a TFR of 1.28. A national TFR under 1.3 is considered critically low and many of these urban centres have rates at half that level, bringing down national fertility rates. More Births notes that birth rates outside city centres, toward their suburbs, inch upwards the further one gets away from the downtown core. More Births concludes, “Dense cities seem to be very bad for birthrates.”
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Former British prime minister Boris Johnson wrote in the Daily Mail about declining birth rates, welcoming them. He notes that he can barely open his Financial Times without reading an article “moan¬ing about the demo¬graphic dis¬aster and pop¬u¬la¬tion crisis loom¬ing.” Johnson, a putative conservative, responds: “I say, crisis, what crisis? If we handle this well – as we eas¬ily can – this pro¬cess of demo¬graphic sta¬bil¬iza¬tion will be the best piece of global news for a very long time.” He described population growth during his lifetime (that occurred despite declining birth rates) to rapidly declining birth rates and slower population growth and eventual decline, as a move from “demographic strain” to “demographic dividend.” He says that there being more funerals than weddings in Tuscany, empty kindergarten playgrounds in Tokyo, empty high rises in China, canceled bus routes in Europe and zero-intake schools in India, are all welcome developments. Johnson says “let’s be hon¬est: if and when these new and encour¬aging trends lead to an actual down¬turn in the global pop¬u¬la¬tion, that down¬turn will be no dis¬aster. It will be the first blessed relief of some of the crip¬pling bur¬den we place on nature.” Johnson frets about mankind’s impact on the planet: climate change, deforestation, and animal extinction, the latter apparently a tragedy compared to a human population that will itself become extinct if it follows current population trajectories. A birth rate of 2.1 (replacement) and 1.3 (critically low) does not appear all that large but it is comparable to the power of compound interest: seemingly small differences make huge differences over time. Populations can continue to grow with sub-replacement birth rates over the next few decades, but over the next few centuries, global population will half and then half again.
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By the way, between his three marriages and various mistresses, Boris Johnson has at least ten, probably 12, and perhaps even more children.
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Left-wing podcaster Ryan Holiday said that parents like himself – modern, secular, and progressive – must “overcompensate” for the lack of moral instruction they would normally get in church, that they “have to do more work to do” to “inculcate moral lessons” in their children, to which his guest, New York Times science reporter responded, “I watch Ted Lasso with my son and there is so much in there to talk about … about the world, morality, ethics, feelings.” Romans 1:22 comes to mind: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” The Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson tweeted in response: “What a bleak, morally impoverished world secular liberals live in, reduced to sifting through the rubble of modern tv shows and children’s books to find fragments of the morality that modernity discarded but which they could possess in full through the Christian faith.” Giving up on The Bible and Aesop’s Fables in favour of Harry Potter, The Sopranos, and Ted Lasso wasn’t a very good trade. There is a case for reading Harry Potter books and watching popular television series to be culturally literate … but not in lieu of Sacred Scripture and classical literature.
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“Lucy” Clark has become the first transgender manager in a British women’s soccer league, coaching Sutton in the London and South Regional Women’s Premier Division. Trans-rights groups applauded the announcement but I wonder how the women on the team feel about being coached by a man masquerading as a woman. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, tweeted sarcastically: “When I was young all the football managers were straight, white, midd(le) aged blokes, so it’s fantastic to see how much things have changed.” The Daily Mail reported Rowling was accused by her many pro-trans critics “of cruelty as she mocks transgender football manager by comparing her to a ‘straight, white, middle-aged bloke’.” Rowling responded to the Daily Mail headline: “I didn’t compare him to one. He is one.”
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I have many times warned about taking a victory lap in the supposed victory over woke extremism. For every step back toward sanity there are just many, if not more, examples of the continuation of the lunacy. A case in point is a May 4 communication from Green Party Leader Elizabeth May promoting a talk on Parliament Hill on perinatal mental health, in which she wrote: “Perinatal mental health illnesses are the most common complication of childbearing and can have devastating impacts for 1 in 5 birthing people.” By “birthing people” she means “mothers,” a term that triggers transgenderism ideologues.
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How long until calendars mark the second Sunday of May as Birthing People Day?abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
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Actress Hayden Panettiere, 36, announced in her new memoir she is bisexual and she told People magazine the reason she waited until now to share her sexuality was that it never felt like the right time to announce her sexual orientation because, “I was afraid that if I was honest it was going to be like me jumping on the bandwagon” of celebrities announcing they were lesbian or bisexual. Over the past two decades she has been involved in five high-profile relationships with male celebrities and athletes, including a long-term relationship with her former fiancé, boxer Wladimir Klitschko, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Of course, the actress, who has appeared in hit shows such as Nashville and Heroes, is now being praised for her bravery and courage because there is nothing quite as brave and courageous as jumping on what Panettiere herself saw as a bandwagon.
~ Paul Tuns
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