The vandalized nativity scene in front of Old City Hall in Toronto. A nativity scene in front of Toronto’s Old City Hall was vandalized for the sixth time in seven years. On the night of Nov. 27, two days after its installation, a woman saw a man walk up to the scene, break the glass, and tear the head off [...]
Shortly after Barack Obama won the 2008 United States presidential election, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan ruefully observed: “Whenever Republicans lose an election, a factional dispute arises about ‘economic issues’ versus ‘moral or social issues.’ ‘Traditionalists’ and ‘libertarians’ blame each other, each claiming Republicans would do better without the other.” Now some libertarians are back at it again, blaming the Republicans’ defeat in last [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell I don’t have a supple mind. Unlike some highly trained professionals, I can’t abide contradictions. When a British Columbia judge ruled that the right to life can also mean the right to death, I realized how inflexible my non-professional intellect is. I couldn’t hand down a ruling like that. Of course, I couldn’t. I’m not [...]
In a recent video battle against gay activist/sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins quoted an old headline: “Dan Savage Explains Why He Started ‘It Gets Better’ Project: ‘When a gay teenager commits suicide, it’s because he can’t picture a life for himself that’s filled with joy,’ columnist tells MTV News.” Incredibly, Perkins used the image of that headline as [...]
Journalist for Life Michael Coren There is so much discussion about the attempt to take Christ out of Christmas. The expunging of the word and the spirit is regrettable of course. I wonder, however, if we’re missing the point. One doesn’t have to be a Christian to be a supporter of life, but it’s impossible to doubt that most in [...]
Behind every legal fiction lies an ugly, brutal fact. The incoherent contradiction in Canadian law which maintains that life only begins at birth has allowed the silent slaughter of an untold number of nascent human lives; and, thus, for more than 40 years, unborn children in Canada have been extinguished behind the thin screen of a preposterous pretense. This contradiction has resulted [...]
In 2012, the conservative MP for Kitchener Centre, Stephen Woodworth, filed a modest motion proposing a re-examination of Canada’s seventeenth-century definition of human personhood in light of 21st century scientific knowledge. His motion proposed no new laws and merely recognized the fact that a 400-year-old notion of prenatal life might be a little out of date. Predictably, however, this sensible measure met [...]
Morality and the Law in Canadian Politics: The Abortion Controversy by Fr. Alphonse de Valk (Campaign Life Coalition, $15, 184 pages) One of the greatest finds in my book-buying adventures was discovering Fr. Alphonse de Valk’s Morality and the Law in Canadian Politics: The Abortion Controversy in a garage sale. For years, I repeatedly borrowed an office copy, unable to find a [...]
I doubt that I’m the only person who found the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy SEALS last year unsatisfying, both as a skirmish in an ongoing war and, looking at it a bit more flippantly, as a dramatic finale. For all the counter-espionage resources that it took to find the man, and the undeniable military skill of the SEALS [...]
Mark Warawa launches his campaign to have Parliament condemn gendercide during a Dec. 5 press conference. Immediately after Stephen Woodworth’s M-312 was defeated in September, Conservative MP Mark Warawa (Langley) announced he was introducing a private member’s motion condemning the practice of sex-selective abortion. The motion – which expresses the view of the House of Commons and does not affect [...]
12. Moral issues prominent in Alberta election: Alberta’s Progressive Conservative government was bleeding support to the upstart and more socially conservative Wild Rose Party in the April election when leader Alison Redford attacked Wild Rose’s libertarian leader Danielle Smith for supporting conscience rights and scrapping the Alberta Human Rights Commission and tolerating so many social conservative candidates. The Tories won 61 seats [...]
To help mark Fr. Alphonse de Valk’s retirement as editor of Catholic Insight, Campaign Life Coalition reprinted the historian-priest’s landmark book, Morality and the Law in Canadian Politics: The Abortion Controversy. Fr. de Valk wrote the book in 1974 and as Interim editor Paul Tuns says in a forthcoming review of Morality and the Law in Canadian Politics, it retells “the story [...]
Stephen Woodworth Seldom do Canadians discuss the status of preborn life. Parliament has not examined issues associated with abortion or matters related to or touching upon it, in a substantial way, since Brian Mulroney was prime minister. But thanks to the efforts of a Conservative backbench MP, for nine months, Canadians, their political representatives, and the media talked about whether [...]
Canada Abortion has generated discussion among columnists in The National Post. Matt Gurney suggested that the reason why a recent Forum Research poll indicated 60 per cent of Canadians thought abortion should always be legal was the abortion controversy surrounding M-312 and the U.S. election campaign. “Fiery rhetoric will kill your cause,” he counselled, looking at supposed gaffes by Republicans south of [...]
The awarding of the Diamond Jubilee medal to Mary Wagner and Linda Gibbons, two pro-lifers jailed for counselling within the “bubble zones” of abortion facilities, has caused public controversy. In a statement, Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott, who nominated Wagner and Gibbons for the medals, said that they “are trying to protect defenceless, voiceless human beings in the womb from butchery and death, [...]