Musings on the passing scene

From the editor’s desk

We sent our February edition with its cover story on the link between transgenderism and deadly violence to the printer in the last week of January. The edition started hitting mailboxes around Feb. 7. On Feb. 10, a man who identified as a woman, killed eight people in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., at his family home and a nearby school. A few days later, another gender-confused man shot his ex-wife, one of his children, and then himself, in Rhode Island. Many media outlets described how some right-wing commentators peddled “conspiracy theories” about transgender killers. Statistics show that a mass killer is about three times more likely to be transgender than a so-called cisgender male (biological male). It is not a conspiracy theory to notice that gender confused individuals are more likely to commit a mass killing. Some readers were upset with The Interim for “exploiting” the tragedies, showing “insensitivity” toward the victims’ families by publishing the story so near the times of these horrific crimes. While we pride ourselves in providing honest reporting, we are not prophetic. As noted above, the story was in the works long before these predictable tragedies occurred in British Columbia and Rhode Island, and the paper was published and in the mail nearly two weeks before the killings occurred.

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In this edition, we report on the successful medical malpractice lawsuit by Varian Fox against her former psychologist and plastic surgeon for the double mastectomy they did on her shortly after she turned 16. National Review Online editorialized about the meaning of that decision: “The doctors played God, and forgot that they are not. A jury of their mortal peers reminded them.” Despite howls from the practitioners of gender medicine that they are providing affirming, evidence-based care, doctors in fact were not following best practices but rather a fashionable ideology. May Varian’s lawsuit be the first of many; if the fear of God does not encourage them to do the right thing and eschew body-mutilating procedures on impressionable and troubled youth, perhaps the fear of lawsuits will.

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In a Feb. 14 speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio talked about the shared history of the U.S. and Europe: “For the United States and Europe, we belong together.  America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before.  The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.  We are part of one civilization – Western civilization.  We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” In reality, Canada shares these bonds although the Laurentian elite are in denial about them. On Feb. 17, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked about Rubio’s speech, which he proceeded to dismiss as a form of Christian nationalism. Carney said that Canada’s nationalism stems not from the Christian faith but the country’s “cold winters” and “diversity.” Carney simply denied the cultural heritage of Canada – the history, Christian faith, language, and sacrifices we share with Europe – in favour of a cute comment about the weather and programmatic Liberal talking points about diversity, completely ignoring our vital cultural inheritance. Rubio described nutrient-rich soil in which civilizations thrive while Carney talked about barren ground from which no flourishing society can grow.

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Six World Cup games will be held in Toronto this summer as North America – Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. – hosts the international soccer extravaganza. Organizers said the total cost to municipal, provincial, and federal taxpayers between $30-45 million, but expenses have ballooned to $380 million – 750 per cent higher than originally estimated. One cost being picked up by taxpayers is nearly $200,000 for condoms and other sex paraphernalia. Noah Jarvis, Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, writing in the Toronto Sun, reports that Toronto Public Health (TPH) has ordered 576,000 World Cup-branded condoms, 200,000 individual packets of sexual lubricant, 12,500 female condoms, and 16,000 dental dams. The items were purchased by TPH from Kitchener-based Pamco Distributing. Jarvis wrote of Torontonians, “So, the next time you pay your property taxes, remember that some of your money is paying for a mountain of condoms and lube for six soccer games that are costing taxpayers $63.3 million apiece.” TPH says that cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea have been increasing in recent years and that the $199,960 expense will be used to combat its spread during the games, but also claims the branded condoms would be collected by soccer fans. I was unaware that there was a market for condom collectibles.

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National Post columnist and former nurse Amy Hamm writes about the dangers of expanding euthanasia to include people suffering solely from mental illness and she worries that suicide hotlines in the future might provide the option for Medical Assistance in Dying to those thinking about killing themselves. Hamm notes that Dying with Dignity, a charity that blogger Patricia Maloney (Run with Life) has reported receiving millions of dollars in federal funding, describes its “vision” thusly: “everyone can choose their good death.” Hamm sardonically observes, “As though choosing how to die is like choosing custom sandwich toppings.”

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Et tu, Alberta? Since high school, I have closely watched the annual releases of various countries listing newborn names as potential signals about the cultural shifts that occurring but not yet visible, with the popularity of traditional names suggesting movement toward conservatism while a propensity for novelty names indicating an ascendent liberalism. Now, in places such as London (U.K.) and Toronto, the name Muhammad typically tops the list, indicating something else entirely about the culture. Juno News reports that, “The name Muhammad topped the list of most popular baby names for boys in Alberta last year, when all its spelling variations were counted.” In total, 270 boys were born with that name, whether spelled Muhammed, Muhamad, Mohammad, Mohammed, Mahammad, Mehemmet, Mohamad, Mohamed, and some other variation. The next most popular boy’s names were Noah (249), Theodore (205), Oliver (184), and Henry (180).

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Them Before Us (Katy Faust) tweeted:  “Interesting how when a ‘legally married hetero couple’ has children, the child is united to both mother and father. But when a ‘legally married gay couple’ has children, the child always loses their mother or father. It’s as if these two marriages are fundamentally different.”

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The pro-transgenderism worldview claims that gender is chosen, identified by one’s feeling that they are whatever they want to be, and that this identity is fluid, dependent on however one feels at any given moment. Many left-wing politicians have trouble defining what a woman is, and essentially deferring to a version of U.S. Supreme Court Potter Stewart’s line about obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” But the nonsensical and incoherent world of transgenderism can lead to self-parodying moments. Kristen Schultz, a Democrat running for the State House of Representatives in Kansas was asked by a camera-wielding interlocutor “are you a girl” and she replied twice with, “I don’t know.” That the trans insanity leads a certain type of person to deny knowing whether or not she is male or female speaks to the moral and intellectual rot of the transgender ideology.

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I do not want to be (too) self-referential, but responding to recent videos making the rounds on social media of pro-LGBTQ politicians and pastors saying that transgenderism is compatible with Christianity, I tweeted: “God does not make mistakes; He does not put a person in the wrong body. It is wrong to mutilate and sterilize any children and it is perverse to defend doing so quoting Scripture. To subscribe to the trans ideology is anti-Christian.”

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Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

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Do you remember about a dozen years ago there were news stories of “gay penguins” in zoos, in which two male penguins seemed to share a deep bond. The lesson, we were told, was that homosexuality was natural. It is strange enough that the modernist worldview which reduces mankind to mere animal spirits suggests we have something to learn from God’s other creatures. (Never mind that these stories anthropomorphize animals by assuming deep bonds onto which a sexual orientation was foisted upon by officious narrators). But penguins or whatever other animals you choose are not, like man, made in the image of God (imago Dei). Another problem with assuming that mankind is just another species of animal and that we have something to learn from these other creatures is that the obvious cherry-picking of what traits we should emulate. Most of nature is brutal, involving life and death struggles against nature and between creatures, and it is a mark of our uniqueness that we do not live in such a Hobbesian world. Nicholas Wade in his new book The Origin of Politics remarks upon the fact that female chimpanzees can sometimes mate up to 50 times a day with multiple partners. Wade says that biologists have concluded that female chimps do this to confuse the males about the paternity of their offspring: females who mate with multiple males lead each one to believe he could be the father of her offspring, which in turn makes him less likely to harm or kill the baby chimp. This is hardly a model worth emulating, for mankind has developed more civilized practices (marriage, for example) to ensure protection of mother and child. It is another example of how we are not mere creatures but the creation of God in his likeness and image.

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The X (formerly Twitter) account Stop Abortion Now, that goes by the handle LifeNewsToo, tweets: “Why is a germ considered life on Mars but an unborn baby in the womb isn’t considered life on Earth?” Good question.

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Priests for Life Canada states in its first newsletter of 2026 that “Conscience rights seem to be an abstract idea, but they’re not.” They explain that for many types of workers in the caring industries, from doctors and nurses to medical students and social workers, the threat to conscience is “a day-to-day problem.” These professionals “are being forced to choose practicing and living out their faith and practicing their hard-won profession.” Priests for Life Canada says we all must “speak constantly, to defend these people and these institutions upon which we rely. We need them and now they need us.”

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Campaign Life Coalition in its February CLC National News explains this year’s National March for Life theme, “Follow Me,” is a multifold invitation: an invitation to discipleship, to be fishers of men, seeking to win not only arguments but hearts; an invitation to mothers and fathers to embrace the life they have created and the joys and trials that raising a family entails; an invitation to act, including attending the National March for Life in Ottawa on May 14 and in provincial marches for life also being held across the country. “Not all of us are called to work in the pro-life movement full-time, but all of us are called to sacrifice for the cause.”

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40 Days for Life saves mothers from the tragedy of killing their preborn children, saves the lives of children in the womb, and rescues abortion workers whose eyes are opened to the injustice of abortion. There are 12 vigils taking place in Canada during this Lenten season: Montreal, Toronto, Guelph, Hamilton, Oakville (Ont.), Niagara Falls, Sarnia, Windsor, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, and Sechelt (B.C.) Please pray for spiritual protection for those taking part in 40 Days for Life in Canada and around the globe, and if you are able, sign up for times in those communities through the 40 Days for Life website.

~Paul Tuns