By Paul Tuns When the pandemic spread from Red China to Europe and then North America, there were news stories predicting either a baby boom as couples spent more time together or a baby bust as families worried about their future economic prospects. Most demography experts predicted the latter, putting further downward pressure on declining fertility rates in most of the western [...]
By John Carpay Pastor James Coates spent more than a month in the Edmonton Remand Centre, after being arrested and jailed on Feb. 16, 2021. He and his Grace Life Church are charged with failing to comply with Jason Kenney’s unscientific and unconstitutional health orders that restrict the freedom of Pastor Coates and his church to worship God as God calls them [...]
By Paul Tuns Pastor James Coates of the Grace Life Church in Spruce Grove, Alberta, spent a month in jail, after being arrested on Feb. 16, for allegedly violating provincial public health measures that severely restricted the size of church gatherings. He led a service where congregants exceeded the 15 per cent capacity limit. The RCMP had been monitoring the church on [...]
Paul Tuns An open letter to the House of Commons' Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics signed by 104 survivors, 525 NGO’s from 65 countries regarding the "Protection of Privacy and Reputation on Platforms such as Pornhub" is a comprehensive indictment of PornHub's corporate owners MindGeek, and its executives. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has posted the complete letter, [...]
BY ANDREW LAWTON Interim writer, Andrew Lawton, Laying Down the Lawton In keeping with the theme of the last four years of politics, the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency were needlessly eventful. A protest against the process by which Joe Biden was declared the winner of last year’s election turned into a siege on the United State Capitol, which [...]
Even before the Capitol chaos, tech giants were purging conservatives BY PAUL TUNS Within 48 hours of the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Facebook and Twitter banned President Donald Trump -- the former indefinitely, the latter permanently, saying they feared the President might incite his supporters to violence ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration of Joe Biden. Facebook, which owns the [...]
BY PAUL TUNS Republican President Richard Nixon referred to the “silent majority” in 1969, but it was a liberal Hollywood producer who gave it voice in a sitcom that would dominate television for a half-decade in the 1970s. Norman Lear created All in the Family after hearing about, but not seeing, the British sitcom Till Death Do Us Part. The British show [...]
BY PAUL TUNS In his under-rated and under-appreciated sociological treatise, Passion and Social Constraint, Ernst van den Haag, notes that “though the culture of each society differs from that of others, some institutions are needed in all societies to perform, in however varied ways, functions essential to any social life.” He observed that “all societies that have offspring have the institution of [...]
By Interim Staff After a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof appeared early last month, there was tremendous pressure on one of the world’s largest websites to finally take down videos featuring “child rape, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering,” and other illegal or otherwise concerning material. Pornhub, owned by Montreal-based MindGeek, has long been criticized for profiting from [...]
Interim writer, John Carpay, Law Matters By John Carpay Editor's Note: The statistics in this column were accurate when the print edition went to press on Dec. 20, 2020. A friend wrote me recently, stating “There are times when personal freedom has to be limited for the greater good. I was a small child in World War II, but well [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements By Rick McGinnis The recent Netflix adaptation of J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy begins with a flashback – a vignette of working-class life that resonated with me, perhaps more than with most viewers. We begin with a montage where the camera glances over scenes of life in ramshackle rural Kentucky, the “hill country” where [...]
Paul Tuns Commentary There is a cynical saying in politics about never letting a serious crisis go to waste. The idea is simple enough: to use an unusual situation as a pretense to implement an agenda that might otherwise prove unpopular. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns imposed by governments have presented an opportunity to some to ensure we do not return [...]
Canada—like the rest of the world—is in the grip of a dangerous epidemic. This sickness is transferred from person to person, and often travels on the spoken word. Yet, unlike COVID-19, its reach is more pervasive and its effects more pernicious. This plague can propagate through modern modes of mass communication, a spiritual contagion which combines a “viral” ability to spread with [...]
Michael Haynes Special to The Interim A Christian medical student in Manitoba has been expelled from university for expressing anti-abortion views on Facebook. Rafael Zaki is a Coptic Christian, who left Egypt along with his parents, in order to be able to practise their religion freely. His parents are both successful in medical careers, The Post Millennial (TPM) reports, and as Zaki [...]
The Interim invited a number of pro-life leaders and contributors to the paper to suggest a book or two that would make a great Christmas gift. Joe Campbell When, as a student, I told an aging priest that I had never read anything by G.K. Chesterton, he declared, “If I had tears, I would cry for you.” I was so impressed by [...]