A Yearning For The Hearth

If you live in Canada you probably know this name, and you probably know that he’s been awarded the nation’s highest civilian honour - the Order of Canada.

In case you’re not Canadian he’s our abortion crusader. Passionately and totally devoted to ‘the right to choose.’ He’s been amazingly successful, Canada is unique on the planet with complete and unrestricted access to abortions for any women for any reason at any point during the pregnancy completely covered by medicare. In Canada, if your child is unborn it is your absolute right to have it killed. This is Morgentaler’s legacy, and this is what’s being honoured and tacitly endorsed by the Governor General’s office.

My initial reaction to this is pure dismay, but on further reflection there may be a positive side-effect: it may get people talking and thinking about the abortion issue again in Canada. The issue needs to be discussed and brought forward. Right now all discussion is repressed under a cloud of repression and political correctness.

I don’t think there’s much point in laying out why abortion is immoral, the argument has already been won by people smarter and more articulate than me. It’s also an absurdity that there is an argument, it’s like debating whether torturing kittens is cruel or whether generosity is good: if you’re arguing the point then your perspective is so skewed that debate is impossible.

What I’d like to ask is what it means that our culture is so at ease with itself, self-righteous in fact, while this immense horror is happening all around us. It can only mean that our culture is deeply and critically flawed.

The more I contemplate it, the more I believe that when our civilization is eventually eclipsed future generations will look back at us as the people of slaughter and ours as the age of the massacre. Abortion is only a part of this. The last two centuries have seen more people starved, burned, smashed, crushed, bludgeoned, incinerated, gassed, blown up, shot up and just plain butchered than the whole of human history. And it’s not just because there’s so many more of us. When we think back on medieval Europe we think of cruel and hash times. The Crusades, the Inquisition. Those were trifles, absolutely nothing. They were merely pioneering the art we have perfected. War to them was a few dozen gentry clanging away until they could extract tribute or kidnap someone worthy of ransom. War to us is annihilation.

We are completely blind to our own brokenness. I really question how far we can trust our moral perception when we acquiesce to evils like abortion. It can mean nothing but that we are terribly and deeply disordered on a deep philosophical and moral level. 

In my random Internet wanderings, I sometimes read foreign newspapers to keep an eye on what’s happening in the world, or at least in the anglo-sphere. I recently read something interesting in the Jerusalem Post. The op-ed focuses on a point in the Republican You-Tube debate where one of the questions posed is whether the candidates believe in the Bible, saying: “This will tell us everything we need to know about you: do you believe every word of this book?” (He then holds a Bible up to the camera, I can’t tell, but it looks as though he may have also been trying to show us the traslation. King James, no doubt but it wasn’t picked up on).

The author of the the article asks the same question to some Rabbis. Their responses are pretty interesting. None of them affirm anything like verbal inspiration, even though some of them seem to hold to Mosiac authorship of the Torah. They clearly have a ‘tiered’ canon, with the Torah forming the center, the other books forming a commentary on the Torah, but all of it suppored by an indispensible and authoritative history of interpretation.

I recently read The Mediation of Christ by Thomas Torrance, in which he argues that Christians desperately need to communicate with and understand our Jewish brothers and sisters in order to (among other things) properly understand God’s covenental relationship with humanity and better understand our own faith. After reading this article I’m wondering now if they might have something to teach us about the study and use of Scripture too.

The Saskatchewan Party has just won a majority government in my home province of Saskatchewan, and it’s set me to thinking about politics and more especially, the peculiar politics of the Canadian prairies. Saskatchewan is the birthplace of the CCF, the grassroots socialist party started by farmers and blue collar workers that eventually morphed into the NDP. Saskatchewan was the first place in North America to elect anything like a socialist government, and there’s still a strong leftist constituency in the province. At the same time, for most of my life Saskatchewan has supported the libertarian and right wing Reform, Alliance and Conservative parties at the national level. So the natural state for Saskatchewan is to vote of the most liberal option available provincially, but for the most conservative option available nationally.

What it heaven’s name sustains this contradiction? I can’t tell you definitively, but I can tell you a few things. For one, the traditional NDP party of Saskatchewan is different than its national counterpart (Quite a bit more centrist). For another, the provincial Conservative party in Saskatchewan was caught in a scandal that wiped it off the map, weakening the opposition to the NDP for years. Finally, the animosity and distrust of the federal Liberal party (with the exception of Ralph Goodale) is so great that the middle ground is essentially wiped out of the picture, both nationally and provincially. This is true, of course, across the prairies (though not in BC where the provincial Liberal party has distanced itself sufficiently from its federal counterpart).

The NDP’s legacy in Saskatchewan is one of both achievement and embarrassing failure. On one hand, they helped to deliver Saskatchewan through the immensely difficult period during and following the Great Depression when things were truly bad out west, especially in Saskatchewan. They introduced Canada’s nationalized health care system, which spread throughout the country and has now become almost sacred. Yet Saskatchewan lags badly behind its neighbours, and while it can’t be pinned totally on years and years of the NDP, they bear a great deal of the blame.

When my great grandfather settled in southern Saskatchewan there were no roads, no power, no water, no rail lines. They lived in houses made of sod and farmed with oxen and horses. By the time he died, the province was fully industrialized. Now the rail lines have been pulled from the ground, the roads are crumbling and many houses are abandoned. Schools and hospitals are being closed. The population of Saskatchewan in 1901 (before it was a province) was about 91,000. In 1921 it was 925,000. At this point, Saskatchewan was one of the most populous and most important provinces in the Dominion. Now it’s about 980,000, and Saskatchewan is at best an afterthought. I think it’s difficult for us to imagine the incredible hope and anticipation people had when they arrived on the prairies during that time of immense growth and expansion; when people went from sod houses and wagon trails to concrete and freeways. What happened to that optimism? I think two world wars and a great depression have something to do with it. Still though, why has Alberta (and Manitoba to some extent) been able prosper and grow? (Don’t say oil, it is not that simple)

I’m hopeful. I’m not so naive as to believe a simple change in government is going to alter the course of a people, but I think it signals a change in attitude and might demonstrate a renewal of hope and optimism. For many years people have voted one way out of fear, plain and simple. I think the Saskatchewan party has some good ideas. They’re really not that different from the NDP policy-wise, they’ll lower some taxes, they’ll free up some red tape, they’ll streamline some bureaucracy, but they don’t have the political capital to do much else (regardless of the strength of their majority). I’m hopeful that this election signals a change in the thinking of the people of Saskatchewan and a renewal of the optimism and dynamism that built the province early in the last century.   

I try not to be a Bush basher, there’s too many people out there foaming at the mouth, but I have to mention this.

Bush is planning to veto a bill which would supply basic health care for young children in the US. He initially supported it, but is now stongly opposed because of some modifications that made more children eligable. He’s vetoing on the grounds that the bill is a step toward “government-run health care for every American.” (It’s interesting that this idea is heresy in the States, when it’s gospel in Canada. We’re both a bit irrational about health care).

What’s extraordinary is that the bill has found solid support from Republicans in the Senate, and that Bush feels strongly enough to overrule many of his own, on a bill designed to help kids! This from the President that wanted ‘no child left behind’?   

I’m a pragmatist when it comes to social policy: some things work well when administered by government, some things don’t. Government should focus on the former…often they focus on the latter. Certainly publicly funded health care hasn’t been a complete success and I can understand reservations. BUT, this having been said, we also have a responsibility to take care of children. Of Course parents do too, I know that. But so does the community, and when it’s practical and possible and affordable to help take care of kids, we have to do it. 

People frequently appeal to the separation of church and state. It’s especially interesting when people appeal to this in Canada/UK since our head of state, the Queen, is also the head of the Anglican Church. There’s no separation of church and state at all in our countries! This is what the American republican founders were addressing when they introduced the concept of separating church and state. What they did not intend, and how it is most often now interpreted, is that faith should have no place in the public sphere. This is a dangerous and unhealthy situation. It reflects an implicit preference in our culture for the personal whim of an elected official over the instruction of an established system of thought.

This arouses some interesting contradictions. Most politicians have religious convictions, but is counted as a virtue that they are able to lay aside their ‘personal’ faith and take on and sustain the vague values of the modern culture. It comes as a great surprise and scandal to us when we become aware that our political leaders have acted in an unsavoury manner. I wonder why we should be surprised that someone who is willing to set aside his or her most basic convictions about life and death issues would also be willing to flaunt the rules on matters of finance and fidelity? It should not surprise us at all!

One can make an argument for a separation of the church and state, but to try and separate faith and the public sphere is dangerous, and ultimately impossible. This is not to say that religion in politics is always a good thing – it can often be bad and unhealthy, but that’s another topic – I’m only saying that it’s not categorically bad and it does not defy the principle of separating church and state (in the nations where that exists).