National Affairs Rory Leishman Who would have thought that it might take a crass narcissist like United States President-elect Donald Trump to curb the greatest moral catastrophe in the history of the United States: namely, the deliberate, mass slaughter in the womb of more than 50 million babies over the past 40 years. Trump has got off to a promising [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman The vise of oppression is closing ever so tightly on pro-life physicians in Canada that they are liable soon to be drummed out of the profession for steadfastly refusing to collaborate in the deliberate killing of patients. That seems to be just fine with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal colleagues. In the government’s recently [...]
Rory Leishman Like other trendy Protestant Churches, the Anglican Church of Canada has conformed its teachings over the past few decades to the current pattern of the world on everything from contraception and abortion to same-sex “marriage” (SSM). This once influential denomination has lapsed into a state of theological confusion, ecclesiastical disarray, and near-terminal decline. The chaos came to a [...]
In It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies (Harper, 192 pages), Mary Eberstadt documents how faithful Christians throughout the Western world are now living in fear of escalating religious oppression. Of course, Eberstadt readily acknowledges that persecution of the faithful outside the West is vastly worse. In particular, she cites the agony of Christians in the Middle East and Africa where, [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Time and again over the past 30 years, the Supreme Court of Canada has proceeded under cover of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to violate its own precedents, amend the Constitution, and overturn long-standing laws duly enacted by elected representatives of the people within the jurisdiction of Parliament and the provincial legislatures. Now with [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman For nearly 50 years now, Canadians have lived with a perverse legal regime that allows some hospital-based physicians to engage in the mass slaughter of perfectly healthy babies in the womb, while mandating other physicians in these same hospitals to do whatever they can to save the lives of the frailest and most vulnerable of human [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Parents of young Canadian children should beware of the potentially catastrophic advice in a Guide for Educators issued by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation on the care and treatment of children with a gender identity disorder in elementary and secondary schools. To begin with, the CTF explains: “Transgender individuals normally identify with a gender that is different [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman What do Church leaders in Canada think about the legalization of physician-assisted death (PAD)? Not so long ago, the answer was clear. At Christmas in 1996, the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC), a group which includes every major Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant denomination in the country, issued a Statement of Convergence of Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman On Jan. 26, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario decreed that any physician who declines for reasons of conscience or religion to provide physician-assisted death upon request must promptly refer the patient to a readily available physician who has no compunction about killing a patient or assisting a patient in committing suicide. A similar [...]
In his latest book, Telling Lives, Ian Hunter, emeritus professor of law at Western University, presents an entertaining and inspirational series of sketches of 10 people with “effective, forcible, striking” personalities. The book begins with an intriguing essay entitled “Jesus: The Evidence.” Drawing upon decades of experience as an award-winning teacher and practitioner of criminal law, Hunter applies his expertise on the rules of [...]
Few Canadians have been more widely revered for a lifetime of benevolent accomplishments than Dr. L.L. (Barrie) deVeber, professor emeritus in Paediatrics and Oncology at Western University. So who, exactly, is this exemplary intellectual and physician -- some kind of saint? Well, not quite. Just ask his younger brother George. In Barrie: The Memoirs of Dr. L.L. deVeber as told to S. [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman More than 70 per cent of voters in the 2015 federal election supported candidates and parties committed to unrestricted abortion on demand. What can account for such appalling disregard for the sanctity of human life? While politicians, intellectuals and journalists bear much of the blame, church leaders should also be called to account. According to Statistics [...]
Rory Leishman Following a lengthy and sometimes impassioned debate on the euthanasia issue, the British House of Commons resolved on Sept. 11 by the crushing margin of 330 to 188 to reject a private member’s bill to legalize assisted suicide for mentally competent and terminally ill adults. In a genuine democracy, such a decisive vote in Parliament should settle the [...]
But there is hope that new batch will be better While pro-life leaders are delighted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s elevation of Justice Russell Brown from the Alberta Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, trendy proponents of judicial activism are appalled, and understandably so: Brown subscribes to the traditional judicial doctrine that judges should refrain from legislating from the [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Given the dramatic drop in birth rates throughout most of the world over the past 50 years, it is amazing that so many doom-and-gloom academics still cling to the false and pernicious notion of global overpopulation. Prominent among these persistent doomsayers is Stephen Emmott, professor of computational science at Oxford University. In his recently published and [...]