It is partly because of laziness, and partly because there is so much on which to comment, that I offer less a column than a number of notes, observations and questions: Reacting to an Alberta priest's decision not to allow a Planned Parenthood employee to get married in his church, Planned Parenthood Alberta executive director Melanie Anderson told the Medicine Hat News [...]
A History of Canadian Catholicism by Terence J. Fay (McGill University Press, $27.95, 400 pages) Terence J. Fay is a Jesuit priest and author of A History of Canadian Catholicism. The latter fact you would know from looking at the cover of the book. The former is impossible to find anywhere in the book, so great are the efforts to hide Fay's [...]
In May, the House debated the private member's motion (M-392) of Garry Breitkreuz (CA, Yorkton-Melville), which sought to have the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights review the current definition of human being to comply with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, with the hope of including the unborn child under Criminal Code protections. Predictably, abortion supporters [...]
Charles Krauthammer is a Uruguayan-born, McGill University-educated medical doctor cum Washington D.C.-based political pundit whose work appears regularly in the American press. An ethnic Jew (it is unknown whether he practices) and confined to a wheelchair, he is a moderate conservative who has reservations about embryonic stem cell research. However, in the April 29 issue of The New Republic, he laid out [...]
A Canadian Press story inadvertently proved a recent Leger Marketing poll about media practices correct. The story, which appeared in the May 6 Toronto Star, began, "Canada may have the reputation of being somewhat bland, but a new poll suggests many Canadians think their media are sensationalist and biased." How ironic is it that a news report about a poll on the [...]
The 20th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was cause for much liberal self-congratulation. The federal government announced it would spend $1.5 million in pro-Charter propaganda and Jean Chretien praised the document, calling it "the most profoundly democratic declaration in our history." What was curious about Chretien's self-congratulatory remark (as Trudeau's Justice Minister he was one of the framers of [...]
Liberal MP Paul Szabo (Mississauga South), an outspoken and active pro-life parliamentarian, has written a book on The Ethics and Science of Stem Cells. Szabo told The Interim he wrote the book "To promote discussion among parliamentarians and the public about this very important and timely topic." It was distributed to all MPs and senators and is available to anyone who requests [...]
With the announcement by Stephen Harper on national television that he is "moderately pro-life," it seems that each of the four contenders for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance supports a pro-life position, at least to some degree. As LifeSite has reported: "While former leader Stockwell Day and Dr. Grant Hill were clear on their pro-life stands from the beginning of the [...]
Pro-life and religious groups and opposition parties generally praised the House of Commons Health Committee's recommendations on reproductive and experimental technologies, but condemned its support for the destruction of human embryos for research purposes. The committee, while opposed to the creation of embryos for the purpose of research, would permit licensed researchers to use so-called surplus embryos from fertility treatment (in vitro [...]
Responding to public pressure organized by supporters of Robert Latimer to have the federal government grant a royal prerogative of mercy negating his mandatory 10-year sentence for the murder of his daughter Tracy, a Nova Scotia MP presented a private member's bill opposing the granting of leniency to killers of people with disabilities. Wendy Lill (NDP, Dartmouth) presented Bill M-372 on Oct. [...]
In an Oct. 2 ruling, the British Columbia Supreme Court upheld marriage as the union between a man and a woman, thus barring homosexual unions from the institution. Justice Ian Pitfield stated in his decision that the common law definition of marriage, which is the union between a man and a woman only, cannot be extended to include same-sex relationships. Janet Epp [...]
This past summer, the French high court ruled in favour of a family of a severely disabled French teen in a lawsuit against medical authorities that in effect says the child ought never have been born. The decision in this "wrongful birth" lawsuit implicitly accepts that Nicholas Perruche, who has heart problems and is deaf, dumb, partly blind, and mentally disabled, should [...]
A conversation between U.S. Christian leaders Pat Robertson and Rev. Jerry Falwell on the 700 Club Sept.14 provoked strong media reaction. Both Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, and Falwell, a Baptist minister and chancellor of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., said that God had lifted his hand of protection from the country and that Americans must repent. Robertson listed insults to [...]
During the Sept. 14 National Day of Mourning, Prime Minister Jean Chretien said, "Words fail us." Especially one word - God. It was a word that was not uttered during the official ceremonies on Parliament Hill. Many Canadians of faith were appalled by government services that failed to mention anything greater than or outside ourselves, reminiscent of other public ceremonies that expunged [...]
A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Mary Ann Glendon (Random House, $38.95, 333 pages) Mary Ann Glendon, a professor of law at Harvard, leader of the Holy See's delegation to the Beijing Women's Conference and usually one of the clearest thinkers on the issue of human rights, has penned a fascinating but ultimately disappointing [...]