“Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” The Once and Future King, T.H.White
Canada’s morally corrosive socialism is now so far advanced that the totalitarian drift of her various governments, academia and media has been both predictable and inevitable. As with all socialistic governments, its undeclared but ultimate goal is to replace God with the State which, in turn, becomes the lone moral authority in the lives of every citizen.
Which is why, ever since Canada took her first steps towards socialism after World War II, Canadians have been bombarded with unprecedented and non-traditional moral choices cleverly presented as liberating, merciful and even necessary solutions to life’s various problems and perceived injustices. The answers to which were all to be found in the radical new movements of racial, sexual, environmental and feminist politics and all offering an alternative to God and traditional religion. Which was and is ‘the State’.
And proving wildly successful, their political advancement continues apace to this very day.
Coercing abortion
Take, for example, Ontario’s new law making it an offence, punishable by fines and prison, to “attempt to advise or persuade” someone to refrain from having an abortion, or to “attempt to perform an act of disapproval (of abortion)” in any way, if the attempt is made within up to 150m of an abortion clinic. Meaning that Ontarians can now be arrested for attempted persuasion.
“In what kind of state are people arrested for ‘attempting to advise or persuade’ or ‘attempting to inform’ or for expressing disapproval of a (taxpayer-funded) ‘service’? asks John Sikkema, a lawyer with the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada.
Answer: An emerging totalitarian state, a state Canadians long assumed was an impossibility in the True North, a state which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has described ominously as the world’s “first post-national state”.
To point this out, Archbishop Thomas Cardinal Collins has been publicly challenging the ruthless edicts emanating from the PM’s office, particularly the one compelling students to hold and declare government approved pro-abortion views before he can be considered for a summer job with the government. This, in a country with no abortion law whatsoever.
To apply, all applicants take an oath of what amounts of ideological purity and attest to the following: “(That) both the job and the applying organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, color, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.”
“I think (it) unique in Canadian history, that applicants for a summer – or any – program, any grant from the government, have to attest not that they are going to obey the law or that they are legitimate applicants, (but) they have to attest to their beliefs…” the cardinal said January 26. “Not only have people of faith objected to this intrusion, but people who have not faith at all…I suspect they truly don’t understand that you sign your soul away. It’s like Thomas More. Are our signatures so cheap that we can say, ‘Cross your fingers and sign’?”
Any society that values citizens’ given word so cheap is in serious trouble, Cardinal Collins warned. “We are on a short path to destruction.”
Trifecta of coercive forces
The path is indeed short but few seem alarmed at how far down that path we are. Or how our every institution has already been morally inverted by a trifecta of forces — governmental, academic and media — pounding us daily with their incessant drumbeat to reverse and ‘liberate’ one human tradition after another on a descending scale. First make divorce much easier; then pressure women into joining the workforce; legalize abortion as a human right; allow teenage contraception and abortion without parental knowledge; legalize and normalize pornography; remove prayer from schools; implement explicit sex education into the grade school system; accept and normalize homosexual behaviour and campaign for ‘assisted suicide’, forcing the suicidal patient to have a physician as an accomplice.
Consider this last item – the push for assisted suicide across Christendom. According to a recent provincial Ontario coroner’s report, a shocking 1,029 Ontarians were euthanized in the first 18 months after Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government legalized the practice in June 2016.
Step one accomplished. Step Two came January 31, 2018, when the Ontario Court ruled that doctors who oppose euthanasia must act contrary to their beliefs, and refer patients making a euthanasia request to a physician who will end their lives. Last July, three justices of the Ontario Superior Court unanimously agreed that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) policy requiring doctors to “effectively” refer patients for medical practices they conscientiously object to — notably euthanasia and abortion — does, in fact, violate their Charter right to religious freedom.
But never mind. The same court also ruled that in light of the goal of “ensuring access to health care” the CPSO effective referral policy presents “reasonable limit on religious freedom, demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
Which means that Ontario physicians, whose vocation is to prolong life according to the laws of God and the Hippocratic Oath, must now befoul their profession by choosing the government’s law over God’s law. Or face punishment.
So much for the claims of euthanasia advocates who pretended to want assisted suicide only for the terminally ill. Who pretended to favour strict guidelines. What was intended all along was to force dissenting MDs, nurses, and pharmacists to either board the death train or leave medicine. In other words, to choose God or the State.
Convenient too, is it not, that such manoeuvres come all the easier in a socialized medical system where citizens have no medical alternatives except, for now, to leave the country.
But this is merely a part of a grander totalitarian plan.
A Totalitarian Plan
With the advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s, another aspect of the abortion question appeared. Should women have children at all? Particularly when the planet was so ….. threatened …. not by mankind, but by activists such as Paul Ehrlich who predicted catastrophic overpopulation by the year 2000 and imagined he and his minions, not God, had power over the planet by manipulating human minds.
Sadly, this antihuman philosophy is typical of the totalitarian mind which leaves individuality out of its every scheme. The totalitarian mind is also notably intolerant of all who disagree with them. For them, the State is all, as epitomized by Josef Stalin who famously said: “No people, no problem.”
Today, this cross-contamination of faulty logic, fanciful suppositions and godless theorizing is found in every aspect of Leftist, Progressive and totalitarian rationale.
Take, for example, how the Gospel of Climate Change — which teaches that mankind is threatening the health of the planet – has influenced Feminism. Despite chronically low fertility throughout the Western world, many women to save the planet are now refusing to have children and insisting any children allowed to be born must be educated to reduce their carbon footprint, curtail their greenhouse gas emissions, contracept, live car free, avoid airplane travel, and eat less meat. All the while remaining oblivious to the real consequences of such folly: Labour shortages, the loss of human capital for solving world problems such as famine, pollution, disease, inadequate support for the elderly, and the general loss of character, social cohesion and happiness that burgeoning families once brought to the culture.
Freudian mischief
Which brings us to what may be the biggest influence of all. It began more than a century ago with Freudian notions that eventually led to the relaxation of traditional sexual restraints. Which in turn attacked the family and gave rise to widespread abortion, illegitimacy, cohabitation and generalized emotional and physical insecurity. Nor did it stop there. Today countless Canadians are still feeling the relentless pressure – under threat of social rejection – to approve, even embrace, every sexual predilection and practice once regarded around the world as sexual sin.
And conveniently, this Brave New World of so-called sexual liberation even has a curriculum, thanks to Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government sex-ed program which includes introducing the concept of same-sex relationships in grade 3; masturbation, ‘healthy relationships’ and ‘consent’ in grade 6 and ‘sexting’, oral and anal sex in grade 7. Does that make you wince? Imagine how parents feel.
An unnatural progression
Yet it’s all part of an unnatural progression that – decades ago – most cultural observers mistook for a harmless, well-intended advancement of the personal freedoms of persons who had been previously rejected.
So writes venerable British historian Paul Johnson, who, like so many others, was initially fooled half a century ago. He corrected himself last summer, however, when the British media led the LGBTQ celebration of the 50-year anniversary of the U.K.’s repeal of its anti-sodomy law. On July 27, 1967, the Queen formalized the House of Commons’ passage of a law negating Britain’s historic anti-buggery law dating back to the reign of King Henry VIII. The updated Sexual Offenses Act decriminalized consensual sodomitic acts between men, once universally regarded as a “crime against nature” in British and North American law.
But Johnson now views the repeal of his nation’s sodomy law as another example of the destructive incrementalism on which the entire LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) community was then empowered to grow and continue its advance across the world through a series of seemingly harmless steps taken in the name of compassion and progress.
“The end-game, as we now know, was a secular values revolution, bitterly hostile and threatening to both Christianity and genuine liberty,” Johnson wrote. In truth, what seemed like a common-sense reform of an antiquated law in 1967 was actually the first step in the meteoric rise of intolerant, obnoxious homosexual power in Britain. “Thus we began by attempting to right what was felt an ancient injustice and we ended up with a monster in our midst, powerful and clamouring, flexing its muscles, threatening, vengeful and vindictive towards anyone who challenges its outrageous claims, and bent on making fundamental – and to most of us horrifying – changes to civilised patterns of sexual behaviour.”
It’s important to note that Johnson wrote all this in 1996 before the legalization of homosexual marriage and the rise of transgender activism and before so many of today’s mind-altered Christians had been eroded by decades of gay agitprop and political correctness.
But essential truths are immutable. Which is why Johnson’s observations of how the LGBTQ movement’s advance by corrupting people and cultures, and displacing virtue with man-centered notions of a moral wrong as a “civil right” remains relevant.
“The radical agenda … with its strong appeal to the idealistic, as well as the materialistic, instincts of mankind, especially among young people, does constitute an alternative religion. Like any other form of humanism, it replaces God by man, and the welfare – or supposed welfare – of man, rather than the worship of God and obedience to his commandments, as the object of human existence and the purpose of society,” writes Johnson. “That, of course, is its defect. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once argued that it is the consciousness of God, the acceptance that there is power outside and above ourselves, to whom we owe allegiance and whose guidance we must follow, which essentially distinguishes mankind from other creatures. If belief in God were ever to fade completely from the human mind, we would not, Promethean-like, become masters of our fate; on the contrary, we would descend to the status of very clever animals, and our ultimate destiny would be too horrible to contemplate.”
As with any alternative to God, the result is not human happiness, but human misery. Not a Utopia but a literal hell on earth where ‘liberated’ mothers have deserted their Hollywood-perfect homes, where doctors mercifully murder their patients, where abortion is compulsory, where transgender persons give birth to the new progeny of the New World Order and where humans are sacrificed – one way or another – to the great beast, the State, where distrusted and despised police patrol ugly streets inhabited by a soon-to-be pot-addled population.
How can this possibly end well?