Michael Coren Journalist for Life
Author’s note: This is a slightly edited version of the monologue I delivered on my nightly television show, The Arena, on Sun News the day after Justin Trudeau’s decision to ban pro-lifers from running for the Liberal Party.
My friend Fr. Stefano Penna, a Yale philosophy Ph.D., is one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, and balanced men I know. He’s a native of Saskatchewan, a world traveler, and now the man in charge of training Catholic seminarians for virtually all of western Canada. He wrote this to me yesterday. “Hi friend, just sent this to the liberals: four generations of Liberal voters ended for my family today. Justin’s anti-freespeech and anti-life diktat is appalling. You just lost the 26 votes of my clan. I will have no choice as a lecturer and teacher who engages over 10,000 people a year across Canada but to vocally advocate against Trudeau Liberalism.”
This is not some angry anti-abortionist but a calm, liberal-minded academic. He is not alone. Oh no, he is far, far from being alone. There are millions of people who oppose abortion in this country and whether the Tories like it or not, many of them have long voted Liberal. They’ve had to hold their noses a little, but have explained and justified their choice by pointing out that while the Liberals have been dreadful on the abortion issue they have never persecuted pro-lifers or stopped them from running as MPs. Actually that’s not entirely true, but there were enough pro-life Liberal MPs – Tom Wappell, John McKay and Dan McTeague, etc – to make the Apocrypha appear genuine. They also argued that the NDP was worse – well of course – and that the Conservatives refused to address the issue. The latter is true, but there are hundreds of pro-life Tory candidates, dozens of pro-life Tory MPs, and several pro-life Tory cabinet ministers. Now this is important.
As a pro-lifer I am disappointed by Stephen Harper and his government, but he has never tried to prevent committed opponents of abortion from becoming MPs. The Conservative Party is a big blue tent, the Liberals have now become a little red cottage where arrogant boy Trudeau and his friends order people around, stifle debate, smother diversity and destroy democracy.
This is not the place for a long discourse about abortion. I’ve made the case before, I will make it again. But I will say that the scientific and moral arguments for life beginning at conception, and the political and economic arguments for not funding elective surgery while cutting back on essential procedures, are at least compelling if not overwhelming.
But how did the Liberal party become this dinosaur of old-style bullyboy politics? It’s supposed to be liberal, yes liberal. Yet the new leader has chosen candidates, rejected others, insulted people, contradicted himself, and praised murderous regimes and vile theocracies. Good Lord man, you say you believe in choice but you’ve just told about half the country that they can’t run as Liberal candidates and that Liberals who have any reservations at all about unbridled and fully funded abortion have no choice at all.
You claim to care about women but you have silenced pro-life women and told them to know their place. You boast that you believe in a woman’s right to control her body – an absurd misnomer – but you revere China, where women are ordered not to have more than one child and if they do become pregnant are forced to abort; especially if that child is female. Yes Justin, killing babies simply and only because they are girls.
There are layers of stupidity, arrogance, oppression, and illiberalism involved in this decision, and I also wonder if Trudeau came up with it himself or whether it’s his handlers trying to take the left-wing vote away from the NDP and move the Liberals to the hard left. This may, however, be for the best and may re-define the Liberals as a party of nastiness and massive central control. We’ll see. We will also see what the Catholic bishops in particular do and how they react. Liberalism runs deep in Canadian Catholicism. I know some pretty senior Catholic clergy who go weak at the knees at the mere thought of the Trudeau clan and the Catholic Church’s leaders have for too long appeared to prefer establishment acceptance to standing firm and loud on central issues. So in a way, Herr Leader Justin, we thank you for this authoritarian nonsense. “Not the church and not the state, a Liberal’s right to choose her fate”!
Michael Coren’s website is www.michaelcoren.com, where he can be booked for speaking events.