Paul Tuns: Conservative MP Kelly Block (Carlton Trail-Eagle Creek) introduced a conscience rights private member’s bill in Parliament. If passed, Bill C-230, “An Act to amend the Criminal Code (intimidation of health care professionals),” would make it a criminal offense to compel a medical professional from taking part, directly or indirectly, in euthanasia or assisted-suicide or firing any such medical professional for [...]
Paul Tuns: The New York Times ran a long article on Jan. 1: “When they warn of rare disorders, these prenatal tests are usually wrong.” The examination by the New York Times found that non-invasive blood tests taken in early pregnancy that look for missing chromosomes are wrong 17 out of 20 times when they indicate a genetic problem other than Down [...]
Interim Staff: Catholic Canadians have joined a global movement of praying the rosary in public to ask Mother Mary to intercede to end COVID restrictions such lockdowns, forced masking, and coercive vaccine mandates. Canada Prays is a weekly recitation of the Rosary in a public place in 50 communities across the country. The first one took place on Jan. 26 at 6 [...]
Emma Castellino Review: The Lenten Cookbook by David Geisser with essays by Scott Hahn (Sophia Institute Press, $29.95, 224 pages) In the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, set in medieval Norway, we are told about one nursing mother who was exempted from her Lenten obligations. She took her accommodations just as seriously as she had previously observed the fast, and thrived. I was struck [...]
Abortion leading global cause of death WASHINGTON -- Worldometer is a database that keeps track of statistics on health, the global population, and other metrics in real time based on data obtained from the World Health Organization. It has released its 2021 causes of death for a number of health categories globally. If you watch the news, you would be forgiven for [...]
Interim Staff: Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said that on March 9 his country will declare itself the pro-life capital of Latin America with a solemn act pronouncement. Giamattei has already instituted pro-life laws including the Public Policy for the Protection of Life and the Institutionalization of the Family for 2021-2032, which guarantees the right to life. Guatemala also bans any organization “that [...]
Commentary By Donald DeMarco: An important factor that has been ignored in the ongoing discussion concerning the constitutionality of abortion is the U.S. Constitution’s Preamble. While this important statement is part of the Constitution, it does not specify on how the government should operate, but it does allude to its goals thereby providing a context for what the Founding Fathers were aiming [...]
John Carpay: Have Canada’s Catholic bishops seriously evaluated lockdowns and vaccine passports through the lens of the Catechism of the Catholic Church? The Catechism teaches that a law is just only to the extent that it accords with right reason, and otherwise it “has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence” (1902). Are lockdowns and vaccine [...]
Andrew Lawton: Two years into the Covid era it may seem fruitless to call for nuance, let alone compassion. I hope you’ll permit me the opportunity to nevertheless try. In law, there’s a nifty tactic known as arguing in the alternative, in which counsel can advance one (or several) backup arguments with which a judge might agree, on the off chance his [...]
Rory Leishman: Jesus admonished: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” What, though, should a faithful Christian do if Caesar decrees a law that conflicts with the natural and divine law of God? Sir William Blackstone addressed this issue in his magisterial Commentaries on the Laws of England. The natural and divine law, [...]
Special to The Interim: By Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak: In a short piece published recently in Nature, Stanford University professor emeritus and “Population Bomber” extraordinaire Paul R. Ehrlich worries that overpopulation, “one of the most important factors in the hunger nexus,” is not discussed by the Scientific Group for the UN Food Systems Summit 2021. This is a mistake, he writes, [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey One of my many pet peeves is critics showing what they’re lambasting others for showing. (Don’t show it!) The CitizenGO petition to “STOP the blasphemous film Benedetta” very helpfully displays the offending lesbian kiss that petition signers apparently don’t want viewers to see. I can’t tell you how many screengrabs I saw [...]
Paul Tuns: I began my review of Ted Byfield’s 1999 collection of columns, The Book of Ted: Epistles from an Unrepentant Redneck: “The American columnist George Will once said that before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, before there was Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was William F. Buckley … The Canadian equivalent [...]
Paul Tuns: Pope Francis created a bit of a stir after he briefly commented about people who have pets instead of children. It was two sentences in a longer address on Jan. 5 about adoption and predictably the media reaction missed the forest for the trees. CNN ran a column by Alistair Currie who complained, “The Pope’s suggestion that failing to have [...]
Paul Tuns: While supporting vaccinations for COVID, Pope Francis has urged pharmaceutical companies to pursue ethical vaccines that do not utilize cell lines derived from aborted fetal tissue in either the manufacture or testing of their treatments. Even before Health Canada approved a vaccine in Canada, Campaign Lifte Coalition urged the government to only approve ones that were sourced from ethical research [...]