Intolerant of Truth

^“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”   2 Timothy 4: 3-4

For thousands of years, the central tenets of life and how it reproduces and sustains itself were understood and accepted as day follows night.

For thousands of years, it was accepted and expected that a man would leave his parents and take a wife in marriage. And the two would become one and form a new family into which children would be born, reared and sent on their way to marry and repeat the process, thereby filling the earth with their progeny, all created in the image of God. The God Who created the heavens and the earth.

Any practises that diverged from this template were the exception.

Then, around 1960, a strange thing happened. The arrival of the contraceptive pill which allowed a quick and easy departure from the natural law, apparently without consequences. With the daily ingestion of a tiny pill, any woman, married or single, could engage in sexual intercourse with little to no risk of her conceiving a child. Thus, in the name of “family planning” was pleasure separated from its natural purpose. Normal conception was frustrated.

Thus, a new day dawned in which “sexual liberation” was heralded from the mountain tops.

The impact on the course of daily life was enormous. Incalculable. Like tearing the curtain of the temple in two, use of the tiny birth control pill meant the separation of female sexuality from its fruits – children. A divorce from the natural law had been effected. Sexual behaviour then became a plaything, a vessel of pleasure only, a method of achieving so-called sexual “satisfaction” without the worry of pregnancy.

Yet such was the inherent deceit of it all that only those with spiritual wisdom immediately understood that nothing in life – nothing – is inconsequential. Still, it was only a relatively few – who were derided as puritans and killjoys – who had the eyes to see that this deceptively simple invention – separating female sexuality from its natural purpose – would have horrific and unanticipated consequences.

Which is why Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae – which decried the pill – was shouted down around the world. After all, it was 1968, its critics harrumphed. What did an old pope know about life and the “joys of liberated sex” anyway?

More than half a century on, the entire world is living with the fruits of its profound error and folly. The fruits of so-called “sexual liberation” and all its toys, indulgences and deceits have long since poisoned every aspect of daily life and turned our once rich, once God-centred culture into a coarse, two-dimensional, utterly intolerant culture. A culture so shallow, so decadent and so unlovely that, as my mother would say, “it’s hardly enough to keep the mind alive!”

Ontario Election

Which brings me to the Ontario election now underway and heading to the polls on June 7.

Competing for the premiership are three candidates: Kathleen Wynne, a “married” lesbian quick to call any critic a ‘homophobe’, Andrea Horvath, the NDP leader who ironically finds herself not nearly as far Left on the tired and trite socialist scale as Wynne; and Doug Ford, now the Progressive Conservative leader who must navigate the treacherous shallows of political correctness for hidden mines that could explode in his face at any moment.

This is why, in my opinion, Ford jettisoned Tanya Granic Allen – a mother of four, brave enough to call things as they are. “Exposed” by the Liberals for expressing her revulsion over the implementation of a radical sex-ed program in Croatia in 2014, her punishment was to lose her PC candidacy Never mind that she was criticizing a curriculum similar to the one she’s been decrying in Ontario where the innocence of young children is now being routinely violated by the Wynne Liberals.

Her speech was said to spew hatred and homophobia so toxic that Ford got the vapours. Hours later, he dismissed Granic Allen, whom he has called a friend and who many regarded as crucial to his election as PC leader.

Political Calculation?

But hey, that’s politics. Hardball politics. Where words destroy people. Where words can be used like tar-soaked sponges to smear an entire political campaign.

It may be – in fact, it’s likely – that when confronted with Granic Allen’s comments, Ford made a simple political calculation. Just as Stephen Harper appears to have done on abortion a decade ago when he may have concluded that Canada had, by then, become so inculturated to abortion that his party could not win if he publicly opposed it. In the same way, it appears that Ford too has calculated that his party could not win if Granic Allen’s “controversial” views provided the opposition with an easy and ongoing smear of his entire party as “intolerant” of abortion, homosexuality and transgenderism in “tolerant” Ontario.

So much for diversity. So much for inclusion. So much for truth and the freedom to tell it.

But Ford may be right.

While Granic Allen campaigners have told me that, for the first time in their experience, they were finding warmth towards their candidate as they went door to door asking for support, Ford’s PCs appear convinced that any divergence from the politically correct tenets of the day – the result of decades of public indoctrination – will spell doom for their party. And doom Ontario to still more years in the maw of the radical Wynne Liberals who have submerged the province in massive debt amidst one scandal after another while also implementing a sex-ed curriculum that mere decades ago would have been inconceivable.

Indeed, so far into the sewer has western “liberalism” taken this once Christian, pro-life culture that PC candidates such as Andrew Lawton, candidate for London West, are now repudiating their entire past to win a seat in the legislature.

How did we get here?

Decades of propaganda

The usual way. We’ve failed to oppose lies and stand up for the truth of life itself. Catholics too – many of whom have oh-so-humanly succumbed to squishy thinking and the decades-long brow-beating of non-stop media propaganda – have been losing one battle after another in the culture wars. To the point where many have gone over to the other side. Particularly in politics where traditional Catholic teaching has been discarded incrementally all the way back to Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical of Pope Paul VI, defending and reiterating the Church’s stance on family planning and reproductive issues such as abortion, sterilization, and contraception which even the bishops of Canada would not endorse, resulting in the notorious Winnipeg Statement.

The resulting mess we find ourselves in today is therefore no mystery. Having followed this seductive yellow brick road for the past six decades, no one should be surprised that we’re now dealing with the deluge of abortion, STDs, mental illness, shattered families, sexual and gender confusion, drug addiction and widespread depression. This is not hate speech. These are the wages of living outside the natural law

Meanwhile, the strangeness and spiritual dislocation continues and increases, often taxing human imagination. What, for example, is a child to make of a biological male who identifies as neither male nor female and now has received Ontario’s first birth certificate with an “X” designation in place of his biological sex? As is now the case with Joshua M. Ferguson, a Vancouver-based filmmaker who considers himself “non-binary” because he is biologically male but grew up with more feminine features?

And so it goes ….

The Results

What few anticipated, however, for failing to strongly and publicly oppose the tenets of free-for-all liberalism and its consequent dysphoria is that Ontarians now find themselves outshouted. And cornered to the point where a Canadian prime minister, with a straight face, can proclaim that the compulsion to abort now trumps free speech.

Free speech! Confirming once again – as it has been throughout human history – that by failing to defend ourselves and life itself publicly out of excessive politeness, confusion and simple cowardice, we’ve now lost it.

“We will not apologize for valuing abortion over free speech,” proclaimed Justin Trudeau last month in defense of his pro-abortion summer jobs grant attestation. Trudeau was also arguing that his government’s pro-abortion values take precedence over the beliefs of program participants – the almost 70,000 students who are now required to sign an attestation that their “core mandate” agrees with a variety of left-wing positions, including a “right” to abortion if they hope to be hired by a participating organization.

“The commitment that this government has made to stand up and defend reproductive rights and the rights of women at every single opportunity is one that sticks in their craw,” a defiant Trudeau responded. “We will not apologize for ensuring that women’s rights are protected across this country.”

Nor would the City of Ottawa issue a proclamation this year declaring May 10 as March for Life Day.

But that didn’t stop the thousands who showed up at the nation’s capital to do just that. To convert hardened hearts through prayer and to protest the Canadian government’s insistent slaughter of innocents which will always be a heinous, profoundly indecent and unnatural crime.

Implacable Trudeau

One wonders why Trudeau is so adamant in defending this hideous act as a right, even a duty? As if something unspeakable was demanding it. When Canada has no abortion law whatsoever.

And while Conservative lawmakers have challenged Trudeau on the matter during a House of Commons question period, the PM appears implacable, and has even gone as far as revoking Liberal MP Scott Simms’ chairmanship of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for voting against the attestation.

“There is nobody who believes that the Prime Minister is committed to free speech when he punishes all those in this country who do not agree with his personal point of view,” said Conservative leader Andrew Scheer.

“Trudeau is so obsessed with ensuring that the maximum number of children are killed by abortion, that he’s prepared to slay even the conscience rights of his own MPs,” Campaign Life Coalition senior political strategist Jack Fonseca said. “Shame on the Liberals.”

Thus freedom is lost. Not by taking it from us but by our throwing it away with both hands, beginning with the minute we began to accept a lie for the truth, followed by more lies blithely accepted as truths, ultimately imprisoning ourselves in an ever tightening noose of lies.

The so-called Culture of Love promised in the drug-hazed, pleasure driven 1960s has, in truth, led directly to our current Culture of Lust, where impulse and feeling are the main drivers, soon to be further fuelled with cannabis.

Meanwhile, criticism of Doug Ford for dumping Allen is rising. And, in the end, his political expedience may cost him. Or it may not. Only time will tell.

What he has done, however, has continued the ongoing failure to uphold the truth of Life itself and how it has refreshed, renewed and replenished itself since Genesis. And the longer this goes on, the greater are the consequences of this failure to affirm the natural law, its inherent morality and its immutable rules.

And we’re already witnessing them, are we not?