Portuguese court nixes euthanasia law LISBON -- Portugal’s Constitutional Court ruled on March 15 that a recently passed assisted suicide law is unconstitutional. In January, Portugal’s parliament passed a euthanasia bill that permitted euthanasia in cases of psychiatric suffering, disability, or when patients refused care for treatable illness. President Marcelo de Sousa said the bill was “excessively imprecise” and refused to sign [...]
The Interim Staff In February, Amazon, the online bookseller responsible for more than half of all books sold in the United States, banned the sale of the print and e-book versions of Ryan Anderson’s 2018 book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. The book was removed from Amazon, as well as from Amazon subsidiaries Kindle, Audible, and AbeBooks. Initially [...]
Paul Tuns The Trudeau government deducted $140,216 from Ottawa’s Canada Health Transfer to New Brunswick over “the province’s lack of coverage under its health insurance plan for abortion services outside the hospital setting.” According to the 2019-2020 Health Act Annual Report, the federal government’s report to Parliament, tabled on Feb. 22, Ottawa reimplemented a cut made to the health transfer that was [...]
Rod Taylor On Monday, April 19, the federal Liberals unveiled a budget that showed no attempt to achieve balance or relief for taxpayers. What else could one expect? The same government that took the national debt over the $1 trillion mark in 2020 has now laid out a plan to allow that debt to further balloon to $1.23 trillion over the course [...]
Review By Emma Castellino Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher (Sentinel, $36, 256 pages). Live Not By Lies is the book I needed someone to write. When I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 2016, it felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes. I began to smell propaganda beneath every compassionate platitude in the [...]
Interim writer, Joe Campbell, Light is Right “I got bumped,” he said, stepping out of his car. Although I looked, I could see no evidence of damage or injury. “Where?” I asked, looking more closely at both vehicle and driver. “At work.” “It’s good it wasn’t serious.” “It was serious enough.” “You have accident insurance.” “This was no accident.” “Someone [...]
During debate on Bill C-7—the Trudeau government’s new medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation—some members of Parliament argued that a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada would find that some provisions of the bill go too far in licensing physicians to kill patients, while other members contended that the Court would deem that those same provisions do not go far enough. [...]
“Is Democracy a Transcendent Good?” Edwin Dyga New Oxford Review (March 2021) How has a movement dedicated to the promotion of moral order in the public square, known broadly as “mainstream conservatism,” come to advocate ideas and policies that traditionally characterized its opponents’ worldview and objectives? There is an obvious consensus between both ends of the mainstream political spectrum concerning [...]
Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey By Josie Luetke This past year has been a hard one for me, and, unsurprisingly, for most of the rest of the world. At my lowest moments, I considered whether there was a conflict between my professional life in the pro-life movement and my personal life. I was urging people to choose life whilst [...]
By Rick McGinnis In the first decades of the 19th century, upstate New York became known as the “Burned Over District,” a hotbed of spiritual revival that gave birth to an explosion of religious sects and utopian communities. Usually evangelical and often millenarian in nature, these included the Shakers, the Mormons, the Millerites – who would in turn produce Seventh-day Adventists and [...]
By The Interim Staff In February, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) published its Pornography Action Kit, a toolkit to help concerned Christians urge the government to act against pornographic websites. The EFC says that “children and youth are exposed to sexually explicit and violent material online at younger and younger ages,” and that Ottawa must act, at the very least, [...]
Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times Jonathan Sacks (Basic Books, $38, 366 pages) Rabbi Jonathan Sacks died last November, and his latest and presumably last book, Morality, was published shortly beforehand. It is message to all, Jew and gentile alike. He opens arguing that: “Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal politics alone. It needs a third [...]
Ken Boessenkool argues on The Line, here, that “(i)f the Grace Life (sic) (Church) leaders want to truly make (sic) their case, they should be charged.” A Canadian Reformed Calvinist,[1] Boessenkool deems GraceLife Church’s holding packed Sunday services in Spruce Grove, Alberta, as civil disobedience. He implies they are unwilling to “accept the consequences of their actions,” including trial and imprisonment. He [...]
By Paul Tuns When the pandemic spread from Red China to Europe and then North America, there were news stories predicting either a baby boom as couples spent more time together or a baby bust as families worried about their future economic prospects. Most demography experts predicted the latter, putting further downward pressure on declining fertility rates in most of the western [...]