Michael Coren Journalist for Life Supporting and fighting for life is a broad and deep ambition. It necessitates, surely, a love and defence for all life at all stages and for all people. Our opponents claim that we are single-issue obsessives; let us show them that they are totally wrong. Which is how I justify what is I suppose a [...]
The slaughter of the cartoonists and staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by Islamic terrorists last month forced us to define precisely what we mean by “freedom of speech.” This was long overdue, and judging by some of the attempts made in the weeks after the murders, it would seem we have a long way to go. As everyone must [...]
With the precedent-shattering ruling in Carter v. Canada on Feb. 6, nine robed dictators on the Supreme Court of Canada not only struck down the longstanding ban on physician-assisted suicide in the Criminal Code: They also delivered a lethal blow to democracy and the rule of law in Canada. Consider the evidence: Gloria Taylor, the now deceased person who initiated the Carter case, was tragically afflicted with amyotrophic [...]
In “End of Life Decision Making,” a report issued in 2011, a so-called “expert panel” appointed by the Royal Society of Canada assured Canadians: “The evidence does not support claims that decriminalizing voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide poses a threat to vulnerable people, or that decriminalization will lead us down a slippery slope from assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia to non-voluntary or [...]
Dr. Atul Gawande is a renowned surgeon, public-health researcher and medical professor at Harvard. His latest book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, contains many valuable suggestions for improving the care and treatment of terminally ill patients nearing the end of life. To begin with, Gawande notes that as recently as 1945, most deaths in the United States, Canada, and [...]
I’ve always known that our situation is risky. I thought, though, that risk was about the chances of suffering ill fortune, like dying unexpectedly. It didn’t occur to me that it might be about the chances of enjoying good fortune, like escaping death unexpectedly. Risk is the downside of chance, not the upside, or so I assumed. My insurers gave me no [...]
I blame Karl Marx for a lot of things, but after inspiring some of the most destructive and blood-thirsty governments in modern history, his most abidingly destructive legacy is hobbling our understanding of the word “class.” For as long as I’ve been alive, when almost anyone talks about the class system they end up invoking images frozen somewhere in the middle of [...]
Michael Coren Journalist for Life I can’t pretend to understand transsexuals and those who believe they are born into the wrong gender but I don’t have the right to tell people how to behave and what to do with their own bodies once they reach the age of maturity, as long as they spend their own money on any surgery [...]
T hey say that computers are becoming more like us. I don’t care if they are as long as we don’t become more like them. I wouldn’t want us to treat our elders the way computers treat theirs. Why, new computers are so full of themselves they want nothing to do with the old ones and eventually don’t even communicate with them. [...]
Last month I wrote about the unease and apprehension that the internet and social media have inspired, within society and even in the precincts of Hollywood. The story so far is that, after marvelling at the massive new fortunes made by entities like Facebook and Twitter, we’ve begun worrying that moving parts of our social and emotional life online might not be [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Over the past 50 years in North America, faithful Christians – that is to say, those who look to Sacred Scripture as the ultimate authority on all questions of faith and morality – have endured one political calamity after another. In the United States, the process came to an early climax in 1973 with the calamitous [...]
With all of the talk about the deadly Ebola virus I have been reminded about how pro-lifers and Catholics in particular were treated when we dared to criticize conventional wisdom about how to deal with AIDS and HIV. We are condemned because many in the pro-life community highlighted the dangers of condom use in Africa in the attempt to prevent AIDS and [...]
No one’s really sure who coined the term “social media,” but there’s a loose consensus that it came about almost 20 years ago, in and around AOL and the small but vital nexus of tech companies that were busy birthing the internet as we know it today. What no one seems to dispute is the idea that, with social media, something wholly [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Prior to the 1960s, the great majority of Canadians deplored the immorality of fornication, adultery and abortion. Tommy Douglas, founding leader of the New Democratic Party, was no exception. In his master’s thesis in sociology for McMaster University in 1933, he called for the sterilization of “mentally defective” women on the ground that they are prone [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell I feel sic [sic]. Increasingly, I find myself reading sentences like: “Why hire someone, and invest time and money training them [sic], if you may be forced to fire them [sic] before they [sic] have proved themselves [sic] capable of doing their [sic] job?” The question, no doubt, is important. More important, however, is why [...]