As this interminable election process lumbers on, like a dying African elephant stumbling through the savannah, only to curl up beside some fetid swamp, we, the electorate, are in the danger of ennui, and eventually not caring who becomes Prime Minister, nor who forms a government, just to get the whole interminable thing over with.
The taxpayer-funded-and-supposedly-neutral CBC is replete with anti-Harper rhetoric, a significant portion of their precious airtime given to those who, by hook or by crook, fair means or foul, want nothing more than to bring the whole Conservatives apparatus down in flaming ignominy. Sometimes, I wonder how much Harper and his fellow party members care, as we watch various bizarre scandals unfold. Would that the media dug so deep into the back stories of other candidates.
But care, as voters, we must, even if the choice is amongst the least of three evils, like the wicked witches in Macbeth, as it has been in Canada for some time. I am no big fan of Stephen Harper, and find him milequtoasty and weak, especially on moral issues, which are the only issues that really count. Everything else one believes on less ‘contentious’ issues, like all the blether about jobs and security, flows from one’s views on the more contentious, and more foundational, issues, like human life and family, God and religion.
The thing is, that Harper, for all of his aversion to discussing anything truly controversial, such as the taboos of abortion, euthanasia and ‘same-sex’ marriage, at least allows his MP’s to vote their conscience, and supports at least some policies, like income-sharing and baby bonus, that are supportive of the traditional family (which is the only real family there is, all else being a shadow or a sham).
The other two viable choices, Liberals and NDP, led by Monsieurs Trudeau Jr. and Mulcair, both have rigid pro-abortion and generally anti-life policies. They may phrase these policies in the context of ‘freedom of choice’, and a ‘personal decision between a woman and her doctor’ (or, now, a patient and his doctor, in euthanasia), but this is duplicitous. Abortion is almost always not a decision made only by the woman and her doctor, for there is always a man, whether husband, boyfriend or whatever, who may, or may not coerce, or care for, the woman. Stories are replete of women who would not choose abortion if given some level of support and encouragement.
We will soon see the same in euthanasia, as elderly parents and grandparents are urged to get on with dying, as impatient children run out of money, and wait with baited breath for their inheritance.
Some choices will always have evil consequences, regardless of one’s freedom or lack thereof to choose them, and the law should refrain us from making those bad choices, especially when they inflict grave harm on others, and what graver harm is there than death?
Misters Trudeau and Mulcair seem to believe that abortion is morally equivalent to removing an appendix, or perhaps like plastic surgery. Even worse, they consider any pro-life policy to be a policy against women, enslaving them to their bodies, forgetting, of course, the child inside their bodies. They are far indeed from admitting the universal moral approbation and repugnance of abortion, suicide and murder, as any sane and morally healthy individual, or society, would.
This should deeply trouble us, in two men who may soon become the next leader of this beleaguered country.
But what bothers me even more are the minions underneath them, all of their prospective MP’s with their signs dotted around the grassy areas of this fair land, who kowtow to the dictatorial pronouncements of their benighted leaders. Trudeau Jr., in particular, has made it very clear that absolutely no pro-life initiatives will be permitted in his ‘party’, and that a universal, publicly-funded ‘right’ to abortion is a sacrosanct principle of Liberal policy.
I ponder this as I meander through the cities I visit, and see row upon row the grinning visages of these Liberal and NDP hopefuls, especially the men: Do they have a mind or a will of their own? Do they all believe in a universal right to abortion, and on the taxpayer dime to boot? Are they all sycophants?
I am reading a book at present by a recently-deceased Jesuit, Father Paul Quay, a rather in-depth and theologically rich argument of several hundred pages on the recapitulatory nature of the Old Testament in relation to the New, as well as to our own individual lives. At one point, he declares that one of the manifestations of the spiritual immaturity and moral regression of our modern world is that we are often governed by ‘wimps’. The good Jesuit defines a ‘wimp’ as one who acts primarily to please others.
This struck me, as I reflected upon my own wimp-dom, and how often I have acted, or more often not acted, to ‘please others’. We do not reflect enough upon the sin that this entails, called ‘complaisance’, approving of evil by deed or omission just to please someone else (you will find it in the Catechism under the eighth commandment).
But complaisance runs through the very heart of our political machine. I would much prefer they acted on principle, for better to be hot or cold, than a lukewarm wimp.
The conclusion seems clear. Presuming Trudeau and Mulcair are themselves acting on principle in permitting, even supporting, the wholesale murder of a good portion of our future generations at the whim of their expectant mothers, their would-be ministers are either with them, which is bad enough…
Or, on the other hand, they are not, but ‘go along to get along’, and, wrapped in the mire of complaisancy, say nothing, sticking a ‘Team Trudeau’ or ‘Team NDP’ beside their own faces, which is in some ways worse.
A vote for the Liberals, or the NDP, is a vote for evil, or a vote for profound weakness, or, more likely , both.