From the editor’s desk:
Radical pro-abortion NDP MP Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre) was complaining about the Carney government’s lack of funding to support “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” people. The Alphabet People’s acronym is a fluid construction, with endless amendments and additions to ensure that everyone is included, except for, apparently, white males, Christians, and conservatives. That plus sign at the end is supposed to represent those not fortunate enough to be represented by a letter. What does MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ stand for you may ask? MMWIG is the acronym for indigenous females who have been victims of violence or have disappeared, so its addition to the gender and sexuality panoply means the monstrosity refers to “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual.” The term was immediately mocked on social media, including by Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter). I was not ready for LGBTQ+ to be expanded to include a demographic that does not have any sexual or gender connotation, but victimhood has its privileges and must be represented.
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A small piece of good news: Fox News reported that Walt Disney World in Florida has recently brought back its “Ladies and gentlemen” greeting which it ditched in 2021 for the gender-neutral “Good evening, dreamers of all ages.”
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There is anecdotal evidence – Tik Tok videos, local parish numbers, unscientific surveys — that suggest that there is a revival of religious enthusiasm among young people, especially young men and especially for the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Articles about growing numbers of young men flocking to more conservative church services — Anglican Book of Common Prayer parishes and Catholic parishes that offer Latin Mass are growing, Orthodox Churches with newfound members – are being featured in the legacy media on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean from the New York Times to the Daily Telegraph. However, the facts do not support the narrative of a widespread growth in religious sentiment. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The Pew Research surveys on religious practices are considered the gold standard of polling on the topic and Ryan Burge is the most insightful analyst of religious polling. He has highlighted recent Pew research that shows many more adults are leaving the Catholic Church of their childhood than are joining the Catholic Church in adulthood. In the U.S. two per cent of adults have joined the Catholic Church but 13 per cent of adults have left the Catholic Church. That means that for every adult who joins the Catholic Church, 7.5 are leaving. The U.S. is hardly an outlier in this regard, except maybe it is rosier than elsewhere. In Canada, one per cent of adults have joined the Catholic Church while 19 per cent of Canadian adults have left the Catholic Church; that’s a 19:1 ratio of leavers compared to joiners. In both Chile and France, two per cent of adults have joined the Catholic Church while 26 per cent of adults have left it, a 13:1 loss to gain ratio. In Spain, the Catholic Church lost 17 adults for every adult it gains and in Italy the ratio is 22:1. Churches are not, in fact growing, when they are losing between 7.5 and 22 adherents for every adult that joins. Most other churches are likely having the same experience; Burge highlighted this data to disprove the anecdotal stories of burgeoning faith in one of the more morally and ritualistically conservative churches, Catholicism. I am overjoyed that some people are finding faith in adulthood, but the larger story is how heavily churches are bleeding members. Lost souls should be mourned. Furthermore, if church leadership begins to believe the false narrative that it is attracting a greater number of adherents than it is losing, it will be clueless to the true state of the Church.
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In 2021, Lord Sewell issued his Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities report in the United Kingdom, in which he found that factors such as class and family structure played a greater role than did race or ethnicity when it came to predicting underachievement in school. He dismissed the idea of systemic racism as a catchall blame for poor blacks underachieving, in part because poor whites actually performed worse than did their coloured counterparts. The Centre for Social Justice has issued a new report on school achievement which replicated the ethnic and racial findings of Lord Sewell, who says that “our warnings were not listened to.” The Centre for Social Justice has pointed to family breakdown as the main driver for underachievement in all groups, but especially poor white children, of which only 20 per cent live with both married parents. Spectator columnist Toby Young observes “turns out, growing up in a stable two-parent home is a stronger predictor of educational attainment than which ethnic group you belong to.” While these studies focus on the British scene, they resemble findings in North America. In business jargon, stable, intact families are the best practices when it comes to educational achievement and well-being. Government policy should reflect that fact.
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Matt Walsh tweeted: “If we’re going to have a conservative civil war, the dividing line should be those who believe in protecting and preserving marriage, the family, and unborn life vs those indifferent or opposed. You can’t be a conservative in any meaningful sense if you don’t want to conserve the bedrock of civilization itself.”
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The National March for Life will be held May 14 in Ottawa, with various events scheduled throughout the week. If you are not going, you can tune into coverage by EWTN, an Interim advertiser, for live coverage of the National March for Life events, including the Candlelight Vigil on the night before starting at 9 pm, the National Mass for Life at 10 am on the morning of the March, followed by end-to-end reporting on the rally on Parliament Hill and the march through the streets of the nation’s capital.
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Of course, if you can attend the National March for Life, that is even better. Debbie Duval, a member of the organizing committee and Campaign Life Coalition’s national capital organizer, issued a statement about why pro-lifers should attend the National march: “Abortion and euthanasia are federal issues. If we sincerely wish to see them re-criminalized, we must appeal to Parliament, because the Criminal Code of Canada falls under federal jurisdiction. It is the Criminal Code of Canada that currently defines ‘human being’ as one fully separate from his or her mother. When Campaign Life Coalition founded the National March for Life in 1998, we were headquartered in Toronto. Many of our supporters were also there. We decided to hold the National March for Life in Ottawa because that’s where it needed to be … We march to issue a critical political demand to Parliament that cannot be issued from anywhere else or by any others. It’s a specific call issued to the specific people who have the power to fulfill it.” In other words, attending the marches for life in the provinces is not a substitute for marching in the nation’s capital.
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Patricia Maloney published an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney on her Run with Life blog about the summer jobs program in which Ottawa subsidizes students hired for the summer by private enterprises, charities, and not-for-profit organizations. She asks, “Will your Liberal government now put an end to Justin Trudeau’s discriminatory practice of excluding pro-life people from receiving these grants? As a self-proclaimed practicing Catholic one would think that you would be happy to not exclude those who hold Christian beliefs that the child in the womb is as valuable as any other Canadian human being and that organizations who espouse pro-life beliefs are as worthy of taxpayer funded summer job opportunities as any other Canadian.” Maloney concludes “I look forward to hearing back from you” but I doubt she’s holding her breath.
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A pair of physicians, Mark Komrad and Catherine Ferrier, authored an article in The Psychiatric Times, “Euthanasia: No Evidence Base for Futility and Irremediability in Psychiatric Disorders.” Noting that, in March 2027, Canada is scheduled to expand euthanasia to those suffering solely from mental illness, they “make an argument (here) as to why these practices should remain closed to individuals with psychiatric disorders.” Dr. Mark Komrad is a psychiatrist on the teaching staff of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore; Dr. Catherine Ferrier is a family physician working in the Division of Geriatric Medicine of the McGill University Health Centre. They observe that “Unlike many other kinds of illnesses, futility or irremediability cannot be reliably resolved by clinicians in cases of psychiatric disorders, especially for any one particular individual.” That is, psychiatry cannot with any confidence deem who might respond to treatment and in what time frame. Komrad and Ferrier note the clinical objections to expanding euthanasia to psychiatric disorders: “diagnosis and prognosis of mental disorders are unreliable,” “inability to know which suicides to prevent and which to provide,” “enormous and unspecific variety of treatments for mental disorders,” “the challenge of evaluating capacity to consent to MAiD,” “those with mental illness are more marginalized and more vulnerable,” and “MAiD inverts the fundamental ethos of mental health professionals … whose daily work and fundamental ethos is to prevent suicide.” The authors argue that is impossible to distinguish between patients whose mental illness may include suicidal ideation and those sincerely seeking to be euthanized by their doctors. The hallmark of a psychiatric disorder is that the mind plays tricks on the person; how can capacity to consent be assumed under such circumstances?
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I often make a point that euthanasia safeguards and restrictions are forms of discrimination: some people are allowed to have medical assistance expediting their death but others are not. Modern Man cannot tolerate discrimination. Thus, when the law discriminates to protect certain classes of people such as the mentally ill, non-terminally ill disabled, or children, euthanasia activists want to tear down those protections because all they see is the discrimination, not the protection. The record where euthanasia has been permitted is that safeguards originally established to restrict Medical Assistance in Dying to some supposedly limited group of people invariably see those safeguards ignored and then cast aside. The only way to protect the especially vulnerable from euthanasia is to not allow it in the first place.
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Euthanasia is a moral scourge on the level of abortion: the taking of innocent life is an evil that cries out to Heaven for justice. No regime governing euthanasia could ever be made responsible or respectable because euthanasia is always morally wrong. Yet there seems to be something especially pernicious in extending Medical Assistance in Dying to those suffering solely from mental illness which is scheduled to come into effect next year. The idea of health care professionals entertaining the idea of killing people suffering from psychiatric disorders seems entirely unbecoming of the health care profession, acting in complete violation and abandonment of the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. Vulnerable patients suffering psychiatric disorders are going to be preyed upon by unethical clinicians who truck in murder rather than healing. To stop this monstrosity, Parliament must pass Bill C-218, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Medical Assistance in Dying), the private member’s bill of Conservative MP Tamara Jansen that would permanently rescind the expansion of euthanasia for mental illness alone. A Parliamentary committee is currently hearing testimony on the bill so there is still time to contact your MPs to urge them to vote for C-218.
~ Paul Tuns
