National Affairs Rory Leishman In a significant seven-to-two ruling in Masterpiece Cake Shop Ltd. v. Colorado on June 4, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a ruling by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that a Christian baker had no right in law to refuse on grounds of sincere religious conviction to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. That [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman On April 23, Alfie Evans, an infant afflicted with a devastating neurodegenerative brain disease, was removed from a life-sustaining ventilator in Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital over the strenuous objections of his parents. Five days later, he died aged 23 months. Notwithstanding all the rumours and misinformation beclouding this intensely controversial case, there is general agreement [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry in the John Hopkins School of Medicine, relates in Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory and Mind, that he has often put this question to himself and others over the past few decades, having “repeatedly witnessed how faddish misdirections of thought and therapeutic practice sweep across the field to [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman On Jan. 31, the Ontario Divisional Court held in The Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada v. College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, that pro-life physicians have no constitutional right to refuse to collaborate in killing or assisting in the death of a suicidal patient upon request. Who bears primary responsibility for this appalling [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Following a much-publicized campaign to obtain medical assistance in dying, Aurelia Brouwers, a 29-year-old, Dutch psychiatric patient, killed herself on Jan. 26, by drinking a lethal potion served up by a physician affiliated with a roving Dutch death squad, the Levenseindekliniek (an end-of-life clinic) in The Hague, the Netherlands. Brouwers was not terminally ill. Neither was [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Over the past few decades, most people in Canada, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have chosen to rely on their own unaided reason as a guide to morality with the result that they now condone everything from legalized abortion to assisted-suicide, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. John Calvin, the founder of Presbyterianism, would have been [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Madam Justice Sheilah Martin, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest pick for the Supreme Court of Canada, will probably be just as bad as – if not worse than – former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and all the other judicial activists on the Court who have treated the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a [...]
W Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin hen Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin announced her impending retirement in June, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lauded her as “a judicial leader and trailblazer for almost four decades” who ranks as “one of Canada’s very finest jurists” A host of other politicians, lawyers and law professors have praised McLachlin in similar terms. In one respect, they [...]
Jacob Rees-Mogg Jacob Rees-Mogg is a remarkable British politician: although he is well known in Britain as a wealthy, old-Etonian and Catholic aristocrat with no cabinet experience, he rocketed last summer into the lead in popularity among potential Conservative successors to Prime Minister Theresa May. The ascendancy of Rees-Mogg is all the more remarkable in that he has never made [...]
In Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life, Jessica Nutik Zitter, a Montreal-born physician and specialist in critical care medicine, gives a graphic insider’s account of how well-meaning critical care specialists like herself are all-too-apt to inflict futile, unnecessary and agonizing suffering upon dying patients in an intensive-care unit (ICU). To begin with, Zitter describes her first attempt [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman In a widely acclaimed new book, Sex and the Constitution, Geoffrey R. Stone, former dean of law at the University of Chicago, commends the Supreme Court of the United States for revising the laws and the Constitution to conform with contemporary values. Laurence H. Tribe, professor of law at Harvard University, lauds Sex and the Constitution [...]
Rory Leishman As recently as 50 years ago, it was still a serious criminal offence punishable by up to life in prison for anyone in Britain, Canada or the United States to commit an abortion. And much the same was true everywhere else in Western Europe where stringent laws protected human life in the womb Today, of course, that is [...]
Thanks to judicial distortion of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms over the past 30 years, freedom of religion in Canada has come under such severe restriction that an otherwise law-abiding, and conscientious citizen could now lose his livelihood or even end up in jail simply for steadfastly upholding the traditional principles of Judeo-Christian morality. Faithful bakers, florists, printers and Christian [...]
Rory Leishman National Affairs How could the Netherlands, a country which heroically resisted the Nazi euthanasia program during the Second World War, now embrace one of the most extensive regimes of legalized euthanasia in the Western world? Most people in the Netherlands would resent such a question: They insist that there is no moral equivalence between the current Dutch model [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman In recent years, there has been an appalling increase in the number of newborn Canadian babies who suffer acutely from opioid drugs that were passed on to them in the womb by their drug addicted mothers. According to a recent article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, literally thousands of Canadian newborns have suffered in recent [...]