The Story of Fritz Schnitzel

Have you heard the story of Fritz Schnitzel?

Freidrich Johann Wilhelm Helmut Gerhard von Schnitzel was born in Toronto in 1925. His parents were Germans who had moved to Canada after the First World War. The family moved back to Germany in the spring of 1933 shortly after the Reichstag voted plenary powers to the newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler, the first of many steps in which the famous tyrant seized total power and turned Germany into a police state. Fritz’s father was a member of the National Socialist Workers Party and when Fritz turned fourteen in 1939 he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. Already thoroughly indoctrinated in his father’s ideology, Fritz was an enthusiastic supporter of the organization, the Nazi Party, and its Fuhrer.

By this time the events leading up to the Second World War were well underway. It was not long after Fritz joined the Hitler Youth that the Third Reich signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union. This took place on August 23rd. During the night of August 31st, German agents posing as Poles attacked a radio station in Gleiwitz in the false-flag operation that provided the pretext for Germany to invade Poland. On September 1st German troops were rolling across the Polish border. Two days later, the governments of the United Kingdom and France, made good on their pre-invasion guarantees to Poland, and declared war on Nazi Germany. The British Commonwealth of Nations rallied to the support of the United Kingdom, with the parliaments of Australia and New Zealand issuing their own declarations of war that very day. One week later, the Dominion of Canada passed her declaration of war and faithfully took her place by Britain’s side.

At this point in time the Nazis had not yet thought of using the Hitler Youth as a military force – that would come out of desperation towards the end of the war after the tide had turned against them. Fritz, however, in his zeal for the Nazi cause, was determined to take part in the fighting despite his age. In 1940, through a combination of lying about his age and family connections – his father was reportedly very close to Himmler – he was enlisted in the Waffen wing of the Schutzstaffel and sent to fight in France. At the young age of fifteen, he joined in several of the Waffen-SS’s bloody massacres with ghoulish delight. He was captured by the Allies, however, and, after the United States joined the war in December of 1941, was shipped to a prisoner of war camp in America.

Finding himself a prisoner in North America, Fritz made contact with the Canadian embassy in the United States. He appealed to our diplomats to intervene with the American government and the Allied high command and arrange for him to be transferred to a camp in Canada. He naively thought he would be given more lenient treatment here, little realizing that in 1940s Canada, decades before the social and cultural revolution wrought by the Liberal Party in the 1960s, he would not find namby-pamby courts content with slapping him on the wrist, patting his head, and telling him it wasn’t his fault, that he was a basically good kid who was just misguided and misunderstood. The Canadian ambassador read his letter of request, showed it to his friends and his superiors in Ottawa, and after they had all had a good laugh over it, used it to light his cigar. Fritz remained in the American POW camp until the end of the war.

When the war ended, Fritz filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government demanding an apology and $20 000 000 in compensation. The courts threw the suit out and told him not to waste their time. He then turned to the media to air his grievances but found little to no sympathy. Eventually, during the premiership of John Diefenbaker, he was barred from even setting foot on Canadian soil.

The preceding story is, of course, fiction. It is accurate, however, in its depiction of what would have happened, in that era, had an enemy of our country attempted to capitalize on his having been born here in this way.

Sadly, we are living in a very different day and age.

In 2002 Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan where he had been fighting on the side of the Taliban. He was just short of sixteen at the time that he launched the grenade that murdered American medical officer Christopher Speer. He had been born in Toronto, but was raised by his father in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he was indoctrinated in Islamic jihad and trained to follow in his father’s footsteps as an al-Qaida terrorist. Captured by the Americans after the murder of Speer, he was held in Guantanamo Bay where he was interrogated both by American officials and, since he had Canadian citizenship, by CSIS and representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When charged before a military tribunal he pled guilty to several war crimes, including the murder of Speer, and received a light sentence of eight years, not including the time he had already spent in Gitmo. He applied for and received a transfer to a Canadian prison, which the federal government tried unsuccessfully to prevent during the Harper premiership, and under the jurisdiction of our penal system he was eventually released on bail. He launched a lawsuit against Canada, claiming that his rights under both our Charter and international treaties governing the treatment of prisoners of war had been violated, and demanding both a public apology and twenty million dollars. The media, both the CBC and most of the private media companies, fell in love with him and elevated him to superstar status. The Supreme Court ruled that his rights had been violated and most recently it was revealed that Justin Trudeau plans to issue an apology on behalf of Canada and to give him a cheque for ten and a half million dollars.

In the World War II era, Canada, her people, and her leaders, still knew who we were as a country. Consequently, they would not have made the mistake of thinking of someone who had been raised in Germany, indoctrinated in a toxic ideology like National Socialism that is hostile to our traditions of freedom and justice, and who had zealously taken up arms against our country and its allies in war, could possibly be a “Canadian” just because he had been born on our soil. Today, after decades of the Liberal Party’s relentless assault upon our traditions, history, and heritage, our politicians, judges, educators, clergymen, and other opinion-shapers, have lost sight of who we are. In their minds, Canada has been almost reduced to a mere geographical location and so they find it difficult to understand why anyone would not regard someone raised on the other side of the world, in an ideology hostile to our way of life, and who literally waged war against our country and its allies as being fully “Canadian” if he happened to have been born here. Ordinary Canadians have no such difficulty but it is ordinary Canadians who will have to pay the price – all ten and a half million dollars of it – for the folly of our leaders.

Canada needs to recover her roots, traditions, history, and heritage or we will sink yet further into this madness.

Northern Dawn Symposium: Canada: More Than Just a Land

In commemoration of Canada's 150th, Northern Dawn, a website that looks at Canada and Canadian issues from a traditionalist/reactionary perspective, is holding a symposium. The theme of the symposium is Canada: Who Are We? I had the honour of being invited to contribute to this symposium and my contribution, an essay entitled Canada: More Than Just a Land was posted on July 1st, Dominion Day.

You can read the essay here: http://northern-dawn.ca/2017/07/01/canada-more-than-just-a-land/

I recommend that you also check out the rest of the Symposium as it is posted over the next few weeks as well as their previous postings.

Many thanks to Mark Christensen of Northern Dawn for the opportunity to be part of this Symposium.

Eugene Forsey: Patriot of the Old Canada

One hundred and fifty years ago today the British North America Act came into effect and a new nation was born. A nation in the political rather than the cultural sense, she was given the name Canada, which had previously belonged to the provinces that after Confederation would be known as Ontario and Quebec, and the majestic title of Dominion. She was a federation of provinces, four at first but whose number would eventually swell to ten, governed by her own parliament under the monarchy she shared with the rest of the British Empire and later Commonwealth of Nations. She was founded, in other words, as an experiment in nation-building that was the exact opposite of that which had been attempted a century earlier in the land to her south. The Americans built their republic on the foundation of a revolt against and severance from the British Empire. Canada was built upon the opposite principle of loyalty to the Crown and the maintenance of the family connection to the British Empire/Commonwealth. It is fitting, on this important anniversary, to commemorate her birth with a look at one of her patriots who maintained his faith in the vision of the Fathers of Confederation throughout the twentieth century – the century in which the Liberal Party was doing everything it possibly could to remove Canada from her foundation and roots.

Eugene Alfred Forsey was born in Grand Bank, Newfoundland in 1904. This was forty-five years before Newfoundland joined Confederation and so Forsey joked in his memoirs that “At the age of eight months I became an involuntary immigrant to Canada.” This was when his mother moved back to live with her family in Ottawa after his father, a Methodist preacher and school teacher, passed away due to weak health worsened by a bout of bronchitis contracted in Mexico . He grew up, therefore, in the nation’s capital city, listening to the speeches and debates in the House of Commons, where his maternal grandfather served as Chief Clerk of Votes and Proceedings.

“There are many good Tories in the Labour Party”, Enoch Powell once said, and in Canada, Eugene Forsey was the classic example of this. Forsey was raised Conservative and in McGill University, which he initially entered with the idea of following his father into the Methodist ministry, but where he ultimately studied Economics and Political Science in the Department headed by arch-Tory Stephen Leacock under professors such as John Farthing (the author of the Canadian Conservative classic Freedom Wears a Crown), he was the vice-president of the Conservative Club. When, however, in 1926, he went off to Balliol College in Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, he joined the Labour Club. When he returned to Canada he joined a socialist think tank, founded by F. R. Scott and Frank Underhill, entitled the League for Social Reconstruction and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation for which he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate in several elections. After lecturing in Leacock’s department at McGill for twelve years, he went to Harvard on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and when he returned to Canada in 1942 accepted the position of Director of Research with the Canadian Congress of Labour. He nevertheless continued to call himself a “John A. MacDonald Conservative” and proved by many of the stands he took that this was not just rhetoric.

When he entered Balliol College as a socialist this was in part because he had been converted to this economic doctrine. In his memoirs, however, he wrote of Arthur Meighen “Had he remained Leader I do not think I could ever have left the Conservative Party.” Meighen resigned the leadership of the Conservative Party on September 24th, 1926. This was ten days after Mackenzie King’s Liberals had won a majority government in the election that ensued after the famous King-Byng affair. In this incident, Mackenzie King, whose government had less than a plurality in the House but was propped up by a third party, the Progressives, had asked for a dissolution when his government stood to censured by Parliament following a customs scandal. The Governor General refused the dissolution and asked Meighen, whose Conservatives held the plurality in the House, to form a government when Mackenzie King handed in his resignation. The Meighen government was shortly defeated in a confidence vote when Mackenzie King accused Byng and Meighen of acting improperly and unconstitutionally. Forsey, in his memoirs, wrote:

I was in the gallery of the House of Commons for almost every word of the debate on the Customs Scandal of 1926 and the subsequent constitutional crisis…I was also in the House when the King government was defeated in the small hours of June 26, and I was sitting behind Mrs Meighen when Meighen’s confidential messenger brought the news that Mr King had asked the Governor-General, Lord Byng, to dissolve Parliament that he had refused. King thereupon resigned and Meighen became Prime Minister. I had not, even then, the slightest doubt that Lord Byng’s refusal of Mr King’s request for a dissolution of Parliament was completely constitutional, and indeed essential to the preservation of parliamentary government. Nor had I the slightest doubt that Meighen’s temporary government of ministers without portfolio, acting ministers of departments, was constitutional. I watched with anguish from the gallery the fumblings of the Conservative front bench in reply to Mr King’s attacks on the constitutionality of the temporary government (attacks which, of course, were wholly and demonstrably without foundation).

The Liberal version of these events, in which Mackenzie King is the champion of Canadian domestic sovereignty against Lord Byng as representative of British imperialism quickly became a cornerstone of what Forsey’s friend and colleague, conservative historian Donald Creighton, mockingly called “The Authorized Version of Canadian History.” Fifteen years later, however, in his Ph.D. thesis entitled “The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth”, Forsey examined the crisis in depth, comparing it with precedent in the UK, elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and here in Canada, demonstrating that Lord Byng was in the right, that the request for dissolution under such circumstances was disgraceful and that the Crown’s right to refuse the request was “an essential safeguard of constitutional liberty.” Trimmed to about half its length – the dissertation is 440 pages long – this was published as a book by Oxford University Press in 1943 to the outrage of Liberal apologists such as Mackenzie King’s biographer Robert MacGregor Dawson and Winnipeg Free Press editor John Wesley Dafoe. Throughout his entire life he never deviated from the Tory position he took in that book, that the monarchy is important not merely as a symbol and a connection to the past, but as a safeguard against Prime Ministerial tyranny essential to the preservation of responsible parliamentary government and liberty and that its reserve powers can and should be used, whenever necessary, to prevent a Prime Minister from acting as a dictator. He would reiterate these arguments in the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 in defence of the actions of their Governor General Sir John Kerr.

His “John A. MacDonald Conservative” principles were also on display when he sent back his membership card in the New Democratic Party in 1961. The CCF, of which Forsey had been a member since it was founded, joined with the Canadian Labour Congress, the successor of the Canadian Congress of Labour for which he still worked as Research Director, to form the NDP that year. He turned in his membership card, which had come automatically, because in his words:

It stated that by accepting it I accepted the constitution of the NDP. I wrote the ‘federal’ (not national! perish the thought!) secretary that I could not accept a party constitution from which the word ‘national’ had been deleted seventy-six times on the grounds stated by Mr. Brockelbank.

J. H. Brockelbank had talked the NDP founding committee into eliminating the word “national” from the new party’s constitution on the grounds that referring to Canada as a nation would offend French Canadians. Forsey, present at the meeting where Brockelbank had made his case, considered it to be an insult to the intelligence of all present and said so. He quoted from the French-speaking Fathers of Confederation such as Cartier and Tache who spoke of their work in putting together the Dominion of Canada as the founding of a “great nation.” He would later sarcastically comment:

This is probably the only occasion in the history when some thousands of people met to form a new national political party and began by resolving that there was no nation to form it in.

The word nation has a double meaning. It can mean a group defined by its culture – a shared language, religion, and ancestry. It can also mean a state with sovereign control over its own territory. It has this double meaning in both English and French, but Quebec nationalists, Forsey argued, were dishonestly attempting to pull a switch-and-bait in which recognition of French Canadians as a “nation” in the cultural sense of the term would be used as a stepping stone to obtaining recognition of Quebec as a “nation” in the political sense of the term. Such recognition would mean the end of the Confederation project of building the Dominion of Canada into a strong and united nation.

Canada’s English-speaking politicians were far too willing to appease the Quebec nationalists on this matter, Forsey, believed. This included not only the NDP but the Progressive Conservatives as well. In 1967, in the leadership convention that Dalton Camp had forced upon the party in order to oust John Diefenbaker, who like Meighen had been a long-time friend of Forsey’s, the Progressive Conservatives also voted on a resolution, drawn up by a pre-convention meeting of the party’s intelligentsia at Montmorency Falls, embracing a “two nations” view that was indistinguishable from that of the NDP. At the conference the party voted to reject Diefenbaker’s leadership and to accept the two nations policy. Although this was internally consistent – Diefenbaker, who would title his three-volume memoirs One Canada, was adamantly opposed to the two nations policy and spoke against it at the leadership conference – it was a reversal of the position the Conservative Party – the party of Confederation – had taken ever since Sir John A. MacDonald. It would become an albatross around the PC Party’s neck, dooming Mulroney’s Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords to failure, and leading to the party’s decimation in the polls in 1993.

This is why Forsey was able to write “When I was in the Senate I used to say that I sat as a Pierre Trudeau Liberal because I was a John A. MacDonald Conservative, and it was not just a witticism.” Forsey’s acquaintance with Trudeau had begun while they were both Quebec socialist intellectuals in the 1950s but his enthusiasm for Trudeau’s taking over the leadership of the Liberal Party and the premiership of Canada was built upon Trudeau’s strong support for Canadian national unity against Quebec separatism. “In my judgement”, he wrote, “Pierre Trudeau kept Quebec in Canada when nobody else could have done it.” I do not agree with Forsey’s judgement here, I must say, and consider it akin to the folly of those in the United States who credit Abraham Lincoln, whose election was the catalyst that split the American Republic into two warring factions, with keeping their country together.

At any rate Forsey accepted an appointment to the Senate from Trudeau in 1970 and upon doing so joined the Liberal Party in 1970. Rex Murphy, another Newfoundland-born Rhodes scholar, said that he was “one of the great ornaments of the Senate” by contrast with the “lickspittles and placeholders” who filled the Upper Chamber in more recent times. He remained in the Senate until he reached the upper age limit in 1979 and had to retire. During that time he spoke out and voted against the Trudeau government more often than in support of it. A particularly prominent clash occurred in 1978 when the Prime Minister tabled Bill C-60, the Constitutional Amendment Bill. Forsey, who saw that the bill would weaken both the monarchy and responsible government, campaigned vehemently against it. Charles Taylor, in his account of this conflict wrote:

During the battle, he was accosted at lunch in the Chateau Laurier Grill by Trudeau’s chief political aide, Jim Coutts. “Why are you doing this to us?” Coutts asked. Forsey looked at him scornfully: “Why are you doing this to the country?”

The Trudeau government lost this battle when the bill was referred to the Supreme Court of Canada but in 1982, three years after Forsey’s retirement from the Senate, Trudeau succeeded in having the constitution, repatriated to Canada. The process required the addition of a constitutional amendment formula, and Trudeau also tacked on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and devolved a considerable amount of power to the provincial governments. Forsey, in his retirement, was not silent on the subject. Charles Taylor, who heard him lecture on the subject at Erindale College in Toronto, gave this account:

“Had I been in the Senate I would have voted against it,” Forsey declaimed. “I would have voted for the original version – before the provincial warlords got at it.” In particular, he ridiculed “that ghastly ‘notwithstanding’ clause” – the clause that gives the provinces the power of opting out. “If you’re going to have a charter of rights – on balance I’m for it, but not without reservations – it had better be entrenched.” In fact, said Forsey, the new document offered the average citizen only a dubious protection for his rights.” “The thing is badly drafted. Chances are it will take a very long time for the courts to determine what it means. The lawyers will have a field day. For them, it’s a license to print money.” Above all, putting the courts above parliament was creating a very dangerous situation: “Judges should not mix themselves up in matters which are essentially political.”

He did, however, find some good mixed in among the bad, namely that the Monarchy and its vice-regal representation, as well as the Senate, had survived the process intact and entrenched. He was particularly exuberant over the fact that “Dominion” had also survived as the country’s official designation. He had been fighting Liberal attempts to eliminate it since the premiership of Louis St. Laurent and always referred to what most Canadians would call a general or federal election as a “Dominion election.” He saw the attempt to eliminate “Dominion” as a particularly bad example of the Liberal Party’s “attempts to rob Canada of her history”, other examples of which included the elimination of “Royal Mail” as the name of the Post Office and the introduction of the new flag in 1965. He fought on the side of the old traditions in each of these battles but objected particularly to the attack on “Dominion” because it was conducted in an underhanded, sneaky, and dishonest manner and because it was based on an outright falsehood – the idea that the title indicated a subservient or colonial status when it had actually been chosen from the Bible by the Fathers of Confederation themselves. The Liberal lie about “Dominion” was very similar to other myths they had been propagating in their efforts to undermine the constitution. Forsey, talking about the fight over Bill C-60 in his memoirs, wrote:

I had to cope more than once with people who suffered from the delusion that the British North America Act of 1867 had been imposed on us by the British Government when in fact it was based almost wholly on resolutions adopted at Quebec in 1864 and in London in 1866-7, by delegates of the British North American provinces, with not a single representative of the British Government even present.

Forsey’s life-long stand for the monarchy and our parliamentary constitution, for the vision of Canada as one nation that had been held by the English and French Fathers of Confederation, and upheld by every Conservative leader from Sir John A. MacDonald to John G. Diefenbaker, and for our British history, traditions, and symbols, was not typical of the average member of the CCF and would be even harder to find in that party’s successor, the NDP, whose typical members are more Liberal than the Liberals in their rejection of the traditions and heritage of the old Canada. It shows him, however, to have been a great patriot of the Dominion of Canada, worthy to be remembered on our nation’s sesquicentennial.

So in memory of the Honourable Eugene A. Forsey, PC, I say to you all:

Happy Dominion Day!
God save the Queen!

Bibliography:

Forsey, Eugene A. A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey. Toronto. Oxford University Press. 1990.

Forsey, Eugene A. The Royal Power of Dissolution in the British Commonwealth. Ph.D. Dissertation. McGill University. 1941.

Murphy, Rex. “Eugene Forsey and the Senate.” The National. CBC. May 23, 2013. Television.


Taylor, Charles. Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada. Toronto. House of Anansi. 1982.

Captain Airhead Strikes Again!

It has been almost two years since a gullible Canadian electorate was duped into giving the Liberal Party a majority government in the last Dominion election. This means that that government, headed by Captain Airhead, is approaching the half-way point in its four year mandate. It has recently been reported that the Grits have passed less than half the legislation in that time than the previous Conservative government had. This is not surprising. The Prime Minister has been far too busy flying around the world, handing out money, and looking for photo-ops, all at the taxpayers’ expense, to actually do the job of governing the country. John Ibbitson, writing in the Globe and Mail, made the observation that “the amount of legislation a Parliament creates matters less than the quality of that legislation.” As true as that is, the quality of the bills the Trudeau Grits have passed is enough to make one wish that they had, the moment they were sworn in, called a term-length recess of Parliament and sent every member on a four-year paid Caribbean vacation.

One example of this is Bill C-16, which passed its third-reading in the Senate on Thursday, June 15th and which was signed into law by the Governor-General on Monday, June 19th. Bill C-16 is a bill which amends both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. To the former it adds “gender identity or expression” to the list of grounds of discrimination prohibited by the Act. To the latter it adds the same to Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause of the Code. The Canadian Human Rights Act and Section 318 of the Criminal Code were both inflicted upon us by the present premier’s father in his long reign of terror and it would have been better had the present Parliament passed legislation striking both out of existence rather than amending them to increase the number of ways in which they can be used to persecute Canadians. When, a century and a half ago, the Fathers of Confederation put together the British North America Act which, coming into effect on July 1, 1867, established the Dominion of Canada as a new nation within what would soon develop into the British Commonwealth of Nations, their intention was to create a free country, whose citizens, English and French, as subjects of the Crown, would possess all the freedoms and the protection of all the rights that had accumulated to such in over a thousand years of legal evolution. The CHRA and Section 318 do not belong in such a country – they are more appropriate to totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Third Reich.

The CHRA, which Parliament passed in 1977 during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau, prohibits discrimination on a variety of grounds including race, religion, sex, and country of origin. It applies in a number of different areas with the provision of goods and services, facilities and accommodations, and employment being chief among them. Those charged with enforcing this legislation have generally operated according to an unwritten rule that it is only discrimination when whites, Christians, and males are the perpetrators rather than the victims, but even if that were not the case, the very idea of a law of this sort runs contrary to the basic principles of our traditional freedoms and system of justice. It dictates to employers, landlords, and several other people, what they can and cannot be thinking when conducting the everyday affairs of their business. It establishes a special police force and court – the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal respectively – to investigate and sit in judgement upon those private thoughts and prejudices. Those charged do not have the protection of the presumption of innocence because the CHRA is classified as civil rather than criminal law.

There are more protections for defendants under Section 318 because it is part of the Criminal Code but it is still a bad law. Incitement of criminal violence was already against the law long before Section 318 was added. It is not, therefore, the incitement of criminal violence per se that Section 318 was introduced to combat, for the existing laws were sufficient, but the thinking and verbal expression of thoughts that the Liberal Party has decided Canadians ought not to think and speak.

Bill C-16 takes these bad laws and makes them even worse. By adding “gender identity and expression” to the prohibited grounds of discrimination the Liberals are adding people who think and say that they belong to a gender that does not match up with their biological birth sex to the groups protected from discrimination. Now, ordinarily when people think they are something they are not, like, for example, the man who thinks he is Julius Caesar, we, if we are decent people, would say that this is grounds for pity and compassion, but we would not think of compelling others to go along with the delusion. Imagine a law that says that we have to regard a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar as actually being the Roman general! Such a law would be crazier than the man himself!

Bill C-16 is exactly that kind of law. Don’t be fooled by those who claim otherwise. The discrimination that trans activists, the Trudeau Liberals and their noise machine, i.e., the Canadian media, and everyone else who supports this bill, all want to see banned, is not just the refusing of jobs or apartments to transgender people but the refusal to accept as real a “gender identity” that does not match up with biological sex. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been fighting this sort of nonsense at the provincial level for years, and who testified against the Bill before the Senate committee that reviewed it, has warned that it could lead to someone being charged with a “hate crime” for using the pronoun – “he” or “she” – that lines up with a person's birth sex, rather than some alternative pronoun made-up to designate that person’s “gender identity.” Supporters of the bill have mocked this assertion but we have seen this sort of thing before – progressives propose some sort of measure, someone points out that the measure will have this or that negative consequence, the progressives ridicule that person, and then, when the measure is passed and has precisely the negative consequences predicted, say that those negatively affected deserved it in the first place.

Indeed, progressive assurances that Peterson’s fears are unwarranted ring incredibly hollow when we consider that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has said that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would be considered discrimination under a similar clause in Ontario’s provincial Human Rights Code, if it were to take place in a context where discrimination in general is prohibited, such as the workplace. Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, writing in the National Post, explains that this new expansion of human rights legislation goes way beyond previous “hate speech” laws in its infringement upon freedom of speech. “When speech is merely restricted, you can at least keep your thoughts to yourself,” Pardy writes, but “Compelled speech makes people say things with which they disagree.”

It is too much, perhaps, to expect Captain Airhead to understand or care about this. Like his father before him – and indeed, every Liberal Prime Minister going back to and including Mackenzie King – he has little to no appreciation of either the traditional freedoms that are part of Canada’s British heritage or the safeguards of those freedoms bequeathed us by the Fathers of Confederation in our parliamentary government under the Crown. For a century, Liberal governments have whittled away at every parliamentary obstacle to the absolute power of a Prime Minister backed by a House majority. The powers of the Crown, Senate, and the Opposition in the House to hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable have all been dangerously eroded in this manner. Last year the present government attempted to strip Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of what few means it has left of delaying government legislation. The motion in question was withdrawn after the Prime Minister came under strong criticism for behaving like a spoiled, bullying, petty thug in the House but it revealed his character. These Opposition powers are a necessary safeguard against Prime Ministerial dictatorship but Captain Airhead, the son of an admirer of Stalin and Mao, regards them, like the freedoms they protect, as an unacceptable hindrance to his getting his way as fast as he possibly can. Years ago, George Grant wrote that the justices of the American Supreme Court in Roe v Wade had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought - the triumph of the will.” This is also the modus operandi of Captain Airhead and the Liberal Party of Canada.

A Subversive Film

Wonder Woman

Produced by Atlas Entertainment, Cruel & Unusual Films, DC Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, Tencent Pictures, Wanda Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures
Directed by Patty Jenkins
Screenplay by Allan Heinberg
Story by Zack Snyder, Allan Heinberg, and Jason Fuchs
Distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures

A presumably biologically male individual – for reasons that shall become apparent I cannot call him a man – named Steve Rose, was not impressed with the new Wonder Woman film, and while some of his criticisms – “bludgeoning special effects”, “a messy, often wildly implausible plot” are technical, his primary objections are political. Writing for the left-liberal Guardian newspaper, Rose blasts the movie for failing to be the “glass-ceiling-smashing blockbuster” that he had been anticipating. Later in his review he laments the fact that it left its potential for “patriarchy upending subversion” as an unexplored avenue.

Anyone paying attention to the silly controversies that surrounded the release of this film, from the jeremiads over the heroine’s shaved armpits to the demands for women-only showings, will know that feminist ideologues had high hopes for this film. Not only is its protagonist a female superhero – the female superhero, for that matter, as no other has come remotely close to the same stature as William Moulton Marston’s legendary creation – its director was a woman as well, Patty Jenkins. Surely such a film would not only be a step towards redressing the gender imbalance in the superhero genre but would also be a vehicle for proclaiming the feminist gospel of strong, independent, women who do not need men?

Perhaps the production team had such thoughts in mind as well – finding somebody in today’s Hollywood who is not heavily programmed with left-liberal ideology including feminism is like finding a needle in a haystack – but they had other priorities. They were, after all, making the fourth in a series of films leading up to this fall’s Justice League in which DC hopes to achieve the same kind of success that their rival Marvel has had by tying in movie versions of all their main characters to the Avengers franchise. Apart from the character’s cameo in last year’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, this was to be the big screen debut of the character who comprises, together with the title characters of the aforementioned film, the triumvirate of DC heroes that have dominated the world of comic book superheroes since the Second World War – a full two decades before Stan Lee became the Edward Stratemeyer of cartoons and ushered in the Marvel Age of Comics with the Fantastic Four, Spider-man, the Incredible Hulk, etc. Clearly a lot more was riding on the success of this film than satisfying the demands of feminists.

It is possible, however, that what really has Mr. Rose’s panties all tied up in a twist, is that the film is subversive after all – subversive of his own beloved, if entirely unrealistic, beliefs. Although this is purely unintentional on the part of the film’s producers it is nevertheless the effect of the story’s plot. Note that to explain how I will have to give away that plot in its entirety so if you have not seen the film and wish to do so without knowing how it ends, go and do so now before reading any further.

The film begins and ends, shortly after the events depicted in Dawn of Justice, with the title character, portrayed by Israeli model and actress Gal Gadot, reflecting on her personal history in response to a message from Bruce Wayne. She was raised on the island of Themyscira – a tropical paradise where nobody grows old, hidden from the rest of the world by a magical barrier, and populated entirely by women – the man-hating Amazon warriors. Diana, the future Wonder Woman, is the princess of the Amazons, being daughter of their legendary Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen). Her father, as she discovers at the end of the movie, was Zeus, king of the Olympian gods. Her mother keeps her paternal heritage hidden from her, telling her that she had sculpted her from clay and begged Zeus to bring her to life.

Note that if you are looking for “patriarchy upending subversion” in a strong, female, warrior character, it rather defeats this purpose if the character is both an Amazon and a goddess. From Homer’s Iliad onwards, these have always been exceptions to the patriarchal rule that only men are warriors.

So why did Hippolyta deceive her daughter about her origins? Well, it turns out that Zeus had a particular purpose in mind in siring Diana. In the backstory to the movie, an interesting synthesis of Greek mythology and the Biblical account of the creation and fall of man, Zeus had created man as a just and kind being, but man was corrupted by the god of war, Ares. Zeus then created the Amazons as a positive influence but they were enslaved. Hippolyta led them in revolt, but Ares killed off the gods when they came to the Amazons' defence until Zeus, himself fatally wounded, forced Ares into retreat and then created Themyscira for the Amazons and sired Diana so that there would be someone powerful enough to finish off Ares should he return. Hippolyta gives her daughter an abridged version of this story, leaving out the information that Zeus was her father and that she herself was the weapon intended to be used against Ares.

Hippolyta clearly does not relish the thought of her daughter performing the task for which she was sired. She is reluctant to allow Diana to be trained as a warrior at all, relenting only when it becomes evident that she cannot prevent it. While this is partly maternal concern for the safety of her daughter, she also does not believe the world to be worth saving. When Diana leaves the island during World War I with the intention of hunting down Ares Hippolyta tells her daughter “be careful in the world of men – they do not deserve you.”

The reason Diana left the island is because she had learned of the “war to end all wars” from American Captain Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) whom she had rescued from the ocean after his plane crashed just off the coast of Themyscira. Having become convinced that Ares is behind the war, she arms herself with the Amazonian body armour that would become her Wonder Woman costume, a golden lasso that compels people to tell the truth, and a sword she has been deceived into thinking is the god-killer. She makes a deal with Trevor – she will help him get off the island and back to the war, and he will take her to the front where she can confront Ares. Convinced that a particular German warmonger is Ares in disguise she slays him – but the war still rages on. Trevor explains that people are not always good and share in the responsibility for the evils of war – there isn’t just one bad guy to blame. When she repeats her mother’s words he admits that it may be true, but tells her that it isn’t a matter of deserving, that if she truly believes the war should end and that lives should be saved, she should keep on fighting but she turns from him in disillusionment.

At this point the real Ares (David Thewlis) reveals himself to her. She attacks him with the sword she thinks is the god-killer, but he easily destroys it. He then reveals to her everything that Hippolyta had kept secret – and tries to persuade her to join him in his hatred of mankind. When she hears her mother’s sentiments again, this time from the mouth of her archenemy, she repeats the arguments of Steve Trevor, whom she has just seen sacrifice himself to save thousands of innocent lives, and blasts Ares to smithereens with lightning. Lightning was, not insignificantly, the weapon of her father.

So how best do we encapsulate all of this? To become Wonder Woman and defeat her archenemy, Diana had to leave her women-only island, reject the philosophy shared by both her mother and the villain, and discover the father her mother had hidden from her and choose the path he had set for her. To do all of this she had to meet, fall in love with, and draw inspiration from the man whose judgement she ultimately accepts over that of her man-hating mother.

Yes, this film is subversive all right – subversive of its own feminist message. For that it deserves an award.

Hic et Ille VII

An Apology to My Readers

My posting has been light all year and it has now been over a month since my last post. I apologize for this. It is due to my writing time being tied up with projects external to this blog. One of these is quite a large project and is still not finished so posting may continue to be light for a few months to come – perhaps the remainder of this year.

So We Have a New Conservative Leader

In the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership convention last month, Maxime Bernier the most libertarian of the candidates was leading up until the thirteenth ballot, which gave the leadership to Andrew Scheer. This outcome has its positives and its negatives, as of course would have been the case with any of the alternatives as well. Among the positives, Scheer is a strong royalist – an absolute essential for a Tory leader – and has the reputation of being a social conservative if not as staunch a one as Brad Trost or Pierre Lemieux. Also impressive is Scheer’s promise that as Prime Minister he would withdraw federal funds from universities that allow Social Justice Warriors to get away with bullying, harassing, and silencing those who hold opinions contrary to theirs.

The down-side to Scheer is that he is very much a Stephen Harper man. Apart from the fact that this taints him by association with the man who made himself so unliked during his time as Prime Minister that the country was willing to hand the reins of power over to a shallow little empty-headed egomaniac, there is something in the Harper brand of neo-conservatism that puts a damper on the enthusiasm that would otherwise be inspired by each of the listed positive points.

Harper-style neo-conservatism blends elements from the traditions of both the old Conservative Party and the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance. The latter was a very pro-American tradition that believed in closer economic partnership with the United States – free trade, traditionally a plank of the Liberal Party platform – and in introducing democratic reforms to the upper house of Parliament to make it more like the American Senate. These aspects of the Reform tradition have survived into the neo-conservatism of the present Conservative Party even though they are the most difficult to harmonize with the elements, such as royalism, taken from the tradition of the old Conservative Party. Scheer himself is on the record as saying “I support an elected Senate with meaningful term limits.” Many royalists such as myself would say that to insist upon elections and term limits for the Senate weakens the foundation upon which you will need to stand in fighting for our hereditary monarchy should it come under republican attack. (1)

Neo-conservatives are convinced that fiscal conservatism wins elections but social conservatism loses elections. This is what the media, the academics, and the other parties tell them, but what it boils down to is the idea that people want balanced budgets, spending cuts, and tax breaks more than they want secure homes and communities, strong marriages and families, and a stable moral environment in which to raise their children. This is nonsense – but try convincing a neoconservative of that. This is why social conservatives know that while neo-conservatives will court their votes and tolerate them within the “big tent” – which is more than can be expected from the leadership of the other parties – they will do nothing to advance the causes dear to their hearts.

Finally, as welcome as are Scheer’s proposals for cutting off funds to schools that allow politically incorrect viewpoints to be silenced by the tyranny of well-organized cultural Marxist bullies, civil libertarians will remember that the Harper administration was no friend to freedom of speech. The private members bill that finally brought about the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – the “hate speech” clause – during the Harper years had the support of the governing party, but not of the government itself. Worse, while it is the Trudeau wing of the Liberal Party that has demonstrated a propensity for passing absurd laws that punish people for saying things about women and racial, religious, and sexual minorities that egalitarians consider offensive, the Harper neo-conservatives have shown themselves to be fond of enhancing the government’s powers to monitor our private conversations in the name of national security. This is what Bill C-51, which made Harper so unpopular towards the end of his premiership, was all about. The response of both the American and Canadian versions of neo-conservatism to the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism has not been the sensible policy of keeping potential jihadists out of our countries while letting Muslims live in peace if they can in their own. Rather it is the exact opposite of this – allowing mass Islamic immigration into our countries while bombing the hell out of them in their own. When, as any thinking person could have predicted, this produces an increase in incidents of Islamic terrorism, they then introduce intrusive domestic surveillance and other police state measures to deal with it.

If there is an unmixed positive about Scheer, something that does not have a corresponding negative to diminish it, it is that he has said that he would scrap the carbon tax which, like so many other of the schemes of the Liberals/NDP/Greens is an evil wearing the mask of a good. The carbon tax raises the cost of living for all Canadians while reducing the funds they have available to meet their expenses, hurting the poor and the working class the most. The villains who have imposed it, however, like that soulless monster Justin Trudeau, go around bragging about how caring and compassionate they are, because they are doing something for the environment. In reality the environment is not helped in the least by this shameless money grab. Let us hope that if Scheer gets the opportunity to put this promise into practice that he will follow through.

Kudos to America’s Caesar

Liberals have, for decades, denied the obvious fact that the news media, in its editorializing and increasingly in its reporting, is heavily biased in their favour. How much longer, one wonders, can they maintain this façade? It is difficult to know which is more sickening – the way the Canadian media fawns over our grossly incompetent, arrogant, and idiotic Prime Minister or the way the American media pounces on the smallest flaws they can find in their President as grounds for terminating his term in office. “He starts on the wrong side of his mouth when brushing his teeth – impeach him!”

While there is much that President Trump deserves criticism for – among other things, the way he has moved away from the Buchananite rhetoric of his campaign towards a more typical neo-conservatism with regards to the Middle East – he deserves praise for the move for which the international media has sought to crucify him over the last two weeks. On June 1st he announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change a year and a half ago. This agreement was a fraud of the same type as the Trudeau Liberal carbon tax, just on a larger scale.

Let me explain it to you. The climate on this planet of ours has never been constant. It has been changing for as long as there has been an earth and will continue to change for as long as earth exists. The amount of that change which can be attributed to human activity, past, present, or future, is a fraction of a fraction of a percentage point. Even if the theory of anthropogenic climate change were true – and it is not – and the earth’s climate was changing in the way the theory says it is, for the reasons it says it is, and with the results the theory predicts, the actions that the governments of the world agreed to take in the Paris Accord would not have the slightest effect on it.

The Paris Accord is about one thing and one thing only - allowing the political leaders of the world to show off, pose as saviours of the world, and otherwise virtue signal for a scheme that does nothing – absolutely nothing – except take wealth from poor and middle class taxpayers in rich white countries and give it to wealthy kleptocrats in poor non-white countries.

Kudos to Donald Trump for pulling his country out of this farce.

Ontario To Rename Itself New Sodom?

If, unlike the residents of George Orwell’s Oceania that we are all starting to resemble, you can think back a couple of decades and remember the past as it actually happened, you will recall that at the time one of the hot issues on the agenda of what was then called the gay-rights movement was the question of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children or not. Those who supported the status quo, which prevented them from adopting, did so on the basis of a child’s need for both a father and a mother. That their reasoning was perfectly sound and legitimate did not prevent the other side from getting into a tizzy, shrieking hysterically and calling it bigotry and discrimination and all sorts of other nasty and unpleasant sounding things. That was basically all that their own argument amounted to and eventually some judge got so sick and tired of their whining that they won.

Now, in the current year, the Liberal government of the Province of Ontario, headed by a hatchet-faced lesbian with an axe to grind, has just passed a law, Bill 89, which allows – or, perhaps, requires – foster and adoption agencies to turn down couples who oppose the agenda of the alphabet soup gang. In practice, this means “Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditional Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians in general, need not apply.” Worse, it gives Children’s Aid the right to take natural children away from such parents.

It is remarkable, is it not, how quickly those who start out by saying “we just want our rights” can move to taking away rights from other people once they attain power.

Christians, of course, are not the only ones who hold quaint, old-fashioned, antiquated ideas like that if you are born with a penis you are male, if you are born with a vagina you are female, that males should pair with females and vice-versa, and that male-female couples should raise their children together. All of these Muslims that Kathleen Wynne, like Justin Trudeau, is so enthusiastic about bringing into the country, think the same way. Do you think that now that under the provisions of Bill 89 the Children’s Aid of Ontario is going to start taking their children away?

Yeah right.

(1) For a Senate Reform proposal that addresses the problems with the Senate as it stands, while remaining true to the principles the Fathers of Confederation had in mind when they made the upper chamber of our Parliament an appointed Senate, see my essay "Senate Reform": http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/08/senate-reform.html

Scriptural Truth, The Equality of the Sexes, and “History’s Greatest Monster”

Suppose someone were to tell you that the idea that men ought to love their wives is archaic, out-of-date, and offensive and that moreover it was invented by women in a bygone age in order to make their men into slaves and that it needs to be done away with in our more highly enlightened era. Would you not think this person to be stark, raving, mad and furthermore be justified in so thinking?

Let us suppose that the person making this novel argument against the uxorial right to husbandly affection professes to be a Christian. You make the observation that “husbands, love your wives” is backed by divine authority, being an injunction written to the church of Ephesus by the Apostle Paul in inspired writ. Would you consider his exegesis to be sound if he replied that this verse was the product of the selfsame gynocratic culture that he has been decrying and that it is in no way binding on Christians today?

You, dear reader, knowing the Scriptures would undoubtedly raise in objection to this singular interpretation the fact that the Apostolic injunction is grounded in a metaphorical application of the relationship between a husband and wife to that of Christ and His church and therefore cannot be simply dismissed by an appeal to the so-called cultural argument. The New Testament commandment to husbands together with accompanying reasoned explanation reads in whole as follows:

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; (Eph. 5:25-33a)

The chances are, of course, quite slim, that you will ever find yourself in discussion with anyone who maintains that the Apostle’s commandment to husbands to love their wives is cultural and non-binding. I suspect, however, that you have probably encountered more than one person who insists that the parallel instructions to wives from the same passage be interpreted this way. The final verse of the passage quoted above, concludes with “and the wife see that she reverence her husband” and immediately prior to that passage we find the following addressed to wives:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (Eph. 5:22-24)

As you can see, the Apostle grounds his instructions to wives in the same metaphorical likening of the relationship between a husband and wife to that between Christ and his church that his commandment to husbands is based upon. There is no honest, consistent, and logical way to say that the one commandment (to husbands) is an enduring and binding edict that stands for all time whereas the other (to wives) is a product of first century culture that can be set aside for our own day. Yet this is precisely what many do with these texts.

The reason for this is because the instructions to wives contain an element that clashes with an idea that is considered very important in the culture of the present day. It declares the role of husband to be an office of authority and the relationship of marriage to be a hierarchical relationship. The culture of the Western world in the present day has been permeated by the modern ideology of liberalism to the point that its ideals are widely regarded as so self-evidently true as to be beyond reasonable question. One such ideal is that of the equality of the sexes. This is an ideal that does not harmonize well with Ephesians 5:22-24 or, for that matter, the similar instructions given in Col. 3:18 and 1 Peter 3:1-7 or the instructions to Timothy, Titus, and the Corinthian church that restrict women from certain authoritative teaching offices.

The question, therefore, for those of us who claim Christianity as our faith and therefore profess to regard the Holy Scriptures as authoritative sacred writ, inspired by God Himself, is do we subject the ideals of the present day to the judgement of the Scriptures or do we do it the other way around.

One person who has chosen the latter path is James Earl Carter Jr., who served as 39th President of the United States of America from 1977 to 1981, and who was amusingly described by a member of an angry mob in an episode of the Simpsons as “history’s greatest monster”. Seventeen years ago, Carter decided to secede from the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination in which he had been raised, in which he had served as a Sunday School teacher, and which had provided him with the “born again Christian” credentials he used to his advantage in his gubernatorial and presidential election campaigns. He objected to the SBC’s decision to take a step away from sliding into the abyss of the unbelief of liberalism by affirming a conservative view of Scriptural authority. He especially objected to their affirmation of the abiding authority of the above discussed verses. Nine years later he wrote an article explaining his decision, entitled “Losing My Religion for Equality” that was published in the Australian newspaper The Age in July of 2009 but which has recently resurfaced from the obscurity it deserves to once again poison the minds of gullible people.

The article is neither inspired nor insightful, consisting mostly of a psittacine recital of tired out liberal and feminist talking points, each of which has been soundly rebutted a thousand times over. Even the title is, except for the last two words, second-hand, having been borrowed from that of the song that had become R.E.M.’s biggest hit – eighteen years previously. Carter writes:

During the years of the early Christian church women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets. It wasn't until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy.

This view of church history sounds like it was lifted from the rants of a Dan Brown villain – presumably from Sir Ian McKellen’s portrayal of such in the film version of The Da Vinci Code that was released three years prior to the article as it is highly dubious that Carter possesses the literacy necessary to have made it through the novel. At any rate it is pure nonsense. The fourth is the century in which Emperor Constantine, inspired by a dream, won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge under a standard bearing the symbol ☧ (Chi Rho – the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek), converted to Christianity, legalized the faith, and called the patriarchs and other bishops of the church to the first post-New Testament general council (the First Council of Nicaea of 325 AD). Towards the end of the century the Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of Rome. This century has long been pointed to by those who wish to resurrect the heresies that plagued the church in the early centuries as the point when the church abandoned a supposedly pristine and pure primitive Christianity for an adulterated pagan version. It is particularly reviled by those who reject the Trinity and the hypostatic union of perfect deity and perfect humanity in the Person of Jesus Christ. It is only by pointing to the Gnostics and other heretical sects who denied these doctrines, the rebuttal of whose false teachings occupies much of the writings of the second and third century Fathers, and who were formally condemned by the church in the Nicene and subsequent councils, and by regarding these rather than the orthodox as the “real Christians” that this myth of an early church full of female priests and bishops can be maintained. To hold to this perspective consistently, one also has to reject the authority of the Apostolic writings traditionally considered to be Holy Scripture by orthodox Christianity, i.e., the New Testament, for it is the earliest manifestation of these heresies combatted by the early church fathers and condemned in the early church councils that was the doctrine held by those that St. John called “antichrists” in his epistles.

Such a rejection of the authority of the New Testament can, in fact, be found in Jimmy Carter’s screed. He makes it absolutely clear that when Scriptural authority and truth come into conflict with the liberal spirit of the age, he sides with the latter over the former.

Carter says, for example:

The carefully selected verses found in the Holy Scriptures to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place - and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence - than eternal truths.

By saying that these verses – rather than an interpretation of them with which he disagrees – are the product of the time and place in which they were written and that they are an expression of the selfish wish of male leaders to “hold on to their influence” rather than eternal truth – he is denying their divine inspiration. He thus testifies to his holding to the view that the Scriptures contain the Word of God – or that they “become” the Word of God when we experience God through them – but that they are not themselves the Word of God. This is called the “neo-orthodox” view of the Scriptures, but the term is a misnomer for this is not a form of orthodoxy. The orthodox doctrine of Christianity is that the Holy Scriptures are the written Word of God which bears authoritative witness to the living Word of God, Jesus Christ.

Carter rejects the orthodox view of the Scriptures because he has weighed them in the balance of the modern liberal idea of the equality of the sexes found them to be wanting. By doing so, however, he has been applying an unjust measure.

Equality means sameness. It is used in political philosophy to refer to the idea that people are all basically the same and that they ought to be the same in terms of status, power, and wealth. Egalitarianism is immature to the point of being infantile – an unworthy elevation of the toddler’s cry “Johnny’s piece of pie is bigger than mine!” into something that passes for an intellectually respectable political position. Its appeal is to human vice – specifically to the vice of envy, of looking to others and hating them for what they have that one does not have oneself. It is the wellspring of the evil of violent revolution.

The egalitarianism of our age is a form of idolatry – not in the literal sense, of awarding a wood or stone representation of a pagan deity the honour and worship due to the true and living God but in the extended, philosophical sense of the substitution of a counterfeit or lesser good for a true or higher good. In this case equality has been swapped for the good that has been recognized since ancient times under the name justice. Justice is the state of being and acting rightly in accordance with divine, natural, and civil law. Unlike equality, justice recognizes the legitimacy of hierarchy, of differences between people, and of differences both in degree and kind between our relationships with other people, and the obligations it places upon us differ accordingly. Justice is a far more difficult and exacting standard than equality, which is perhaps why our lazy and decadent age, has turned to the latter.

Men and women, as everyone who is not a total moron knows, are not the same. They both belong to the species Homo sapiens to be sure, and there are many ways of the ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, one nose variety, in which they are alike. Traditionally, orthodox Christianity has acknowledged other, less trivial, ways in which they are the same. Men and women are alike created in the image of God, alike fallen into sin and exiled from Paradise, alike loved by God and through faith share alike in the redemption provided by God through Jesus Christ. In these senses men and women could be said to be equal and it is in the last mentioned of these senses that Galatians 3:28 – written by the same man who wrote most of the verses that Jimmy Carter objects to - declares there to be “neither male nor female” in Christ. In other ways, men and women are very different, and until very recently, our societies and traditional religions, took those differences into consideration in the roles assigned to the two sexes. We never came close to achieving actual justice, of course, but the rise of sexual egalitarianism was not a step towards this ideal but rather away from it.

One of the biggest differences between the sexes is natural and biological – women conceive, carry developing foeti in their wombs for nine months, give birth, and then nourish young infants with their milk. Nature has placed no similar burden upon men. The traditional way in which human societies dealt with this was to acknowledge the difference and to compel men to protect and provide for the women they impregnate and the children they sire. Indeed, human societies traditionally inspired men to do all sorts of unpleasant things, from working at backbreaking labour from sunup to sundown to going into battle to fight and die, with the motivation that they were doing all this as a duty owed to their wives and children. Need we look further for evidence of the insanity of liberal egalitarianism than to the fact that it seriously maintains that such societies were organized for the oppression of women and preservation of a male monopoly on power? Those who make the equality of the sexes their goal, have a very different approach to this natural difference between men and women. It is to assert the right of women to terminate their pregnancies.

This is a matter on which Jimmy Carter has long sat on the fence. Having courted the evangelical vote throughout his political career, he never endorsed the “abortion on demand” pro-choice position of the typical liberal Democrat and has at times criticized his own party for its position, seemingly trying to move it closer towards the pro-life position. In the article we are discussing, however, he used language that sounds very much like that of the pro-choice movement. More recently he told the Huffington Post that Jesus would approve of abortion in cases of rape or incest. It was inevitable that someone who has worshipped at the shrine of the equality of the sexes would eventually come around to endorsing abortion to some degree for that idol is the equivalent in our day of the Moloch of the Old Testament.

In the same interview Carter said that Jesus would approve of same-sex marriage, providing further testimony that when he speaks of “Jesus” he is not talking about the Jesus of orthodox Christianity. In this we can see the idea of the equality of the sexes taken to its logical conclusion. If the sexes are equal they are the same and interchangeable, and if that is the case, there can be no reasonable objection to a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman. If there are to be no distinct roles for men and women, there is no barrier to a man being another man’s wife, or a woman being another woman’s husband. For that matter, if the sexes truly are equal and therefore interchangeable, there is no barrier to a man being a woman or a woman being a man. Those who still believe in traditional, man-woman, marriage, and can see the gender insanity that has swept North America in the last couple of years for the madness it is, should think twice about jumping aboard Jimmy Carter’s “equality of the sexes” train for that is the vehicle that has led us to this terminus.

Climbing aboard that train is not an option for orthodox Christians of any denomination. We are to evaluate the ideals of our culture by the truths of the Holy Scriptures and not the other way around. We are not to be like King Jehoiakim of Judah, cutting out parts of the Scriptures we don’t like and burning them. We cannot have Galatians 3:28 without 1 Timothy 2:9-15. If husbands are to love their wives, wives must submit to their husbands. If in our doctrine we reject the authority of fathers/husbands for the sake of equality, we will find that authority not so easy to undermine. Children will continue to look to their fathers for the leadership and direction that God has appointed them to provide, and if men are driven from the pews by these feminist attacks on the role of father and husband from the pulpit, the children will follow them out, a fact to which the rapidly shrinking and aging congregations of the churches that have gone this route bears testimony. Look to their example and be warned.