Let me start this month by introducing a new columnist, Victor Penney. His “Sporting Life” column (on page 8 this month) will look at the intersection of the world of sports and life/faith/family issues. It is a bit of an experiment but I think you might enjoy the lighter side of these serious issues (although it might not always be so light). Victor has been a sports fan beginning in his childhood, watching Hockey Night in Canada with his dad and joining his father at Blue Jay games. He admits to “vague memories of Italy winning the Euro Cup in 1982” and is a “diehard Azzurri soccer fan” — at least every two years for the World and Euro cups He is a fan of the Dallas Cowboys so he is use to disappointing seasons and as an “angry” Leafs fan he is familiar with losing. He is starting to impart a love of sports to his children, including watching Formula 1 racing with his sons. In other words, Victor has the right sports credentials. So, too, with his news credentials, having worked in the broadcast industry for 12 years from 2003 to 2015, doing traffic for 680 News before a stint with an internet news channel, and time as a producer and writer at CTV News, CBC News, CP24, and the Sun News Network. He joined Campaign Life Coalition in 2015, where he now works on the Political Team doing election work. Victor has had articles published at LifeSiteNews and Church Militant. He has been married for a dozen years and has four children. When we both went into the office in Toronto, he worked on the other side of my office wall. We talked almost daily about politics and sports; those “conversations” are now by email. It was out of those exchanges that I came up with the idea for this column and I hope you find his monthly missive a welcome dose of something different in these pages.
Spiked Online is a pro-free speech, anti-Woke British website and on Oct. 13 it published a piece by Meghan Murphy, a Canadian writer, about the persecution of former Chilliwack, B.C. school trustee Barry Neufeld. Neufeld ran afoul of the liberal media, woke unions, and education blob when he opposed British Columbia’s SOGI 123 program. SOGI stands for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and the 123 means as easy as 1-2-3. In 2017, he posted criticism against SOGI 123 on his Facebook account. He took issue with classroom instruction that told children that their gender identity was independent of their biological sex, and the idea that gender identity was nothing more than a “social construct.” He then made clear that “I support traditional family values and I agree with the ACP (American College of Pediatricians) that allowing little children to choose to change gender is nothing short of child abuse.” Queue the rhetorical abuse of then-trustee Neufeld, to which he responded by apologizing that he did not intend to hurt anyone, that he was criticizing “an educational resource, not individuals.” But unlike many who apologize to the woke mob, Neufeld did not relent in his criticism of SOGI 123, insisting it be reviewed before being fully implemented. Murphy writes: “This didn’t happen, of course.” What did happen was multiple attempts to silence Neufeld. By January 2018, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) filed a complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT), which was followed by both the B.C. Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) and the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association filing similar complaints. These three organizations all claimed Neufeld violated the province’s human rights code and “created an unsafe work environment” for teachers suffering same-sex attraction. The complaints sought to silence Neufeld and fine him for transgressing LGBTQ orthodoxy. As Murphy writes any criticism of this LGBTQ ideology is viewed as unacceptable. The case also highlighted a pair of double standards. First, a counter-suit by Neufeld against CUPE was thrown out because, as Justice Andromache Karakatsanis wrote, “there is a public interest in protecting counter-speech” – just not, as Murphy observes, Neufeld’s counter-speech. Furthermore, in the BCHRT hearings, witnesses for the B.C. Teacher’s Federation will not have their identities revealed but those testifying on Neufeld’s behalf must. In today’s cancellation culture, this double-standard is certainly designed to intimidate experts who would testify on Neufeld’s behalf to show that his comments have a basis in sound science and shield the anonymous complaints of teachers who claim hurt feelings due to Neufeld’s comments. Homosexual and transgender activists, Murphy argues, are thus given “practical immunity to harass, bully, and threaten anyone who attempts to infringe” their so-called right not to be offended.
A pro-Kamala Harris “Creator’s Collective” released a video promoting “Real Men” for Harris. There was a rancher declaring he was “man enough to cook my steak rare.” A farmer says “I eat carburetors for breakfast” and admits to crying while watching the romantic comedy Love, Actually. A muscular dude at a gym says he is proud that he can lift 500-pounds deadweight and braid his daughter’s hair. (For the record, 336-pounds is considered an impressive deadweight lift.) A man on a motorcycle insists “I’m a man, man.” The whole production was so over-the-top in faux masculinity that it comes off as satire, but apparently it was not. Of course, these were not real ranchers, farmers, cowboys, and motor cyclists; they were actors. (Apparently the gym rat is an actual trainer, who also acts.) Ryan Mills at National Review Online noted, many critics observed they were “beta” males – limp-wristed sissies, not actual paragons of masculinity. He also hilariously rehearses the credentials of the actors, from Winston Carter, whose best credit is a low-budget film about a spaghetti-shooting superhero, to Wayland McQueen, who admits to being perpetually high on marijuana. It is unsurprising that the director of the short ad, Jacob Reed, was once a “former producer for the rabidly anti-Trump late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.” Unsurprisingly, Reed includes his pronouns on his social media accounts; somewhat surprising, his pronouns are he/him. More surprisingly, there are no transgender actors claiming to be manly men, although there are reports that two of the actors are homosexuals. Perhaps Reed thought it would be too much having women pretending to be men bragging about their masculinity. Reed did say that he wanted to release the ad to portray a less toxic masculinity than that which is allegedly portrayed by Republicans. He called the vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, who as Minnesota Governor signed into law the requirement that feminine hygiene products be placed into boys washrooms, and Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who is alleged to have had an affair during his first marriage, “role models.”
Last month Pope Francis once again muddied the waters of Catholic moral teaching. He has not said that the Catholic Church would or should end its opposition to sex-change operations, but he sent mixed signals, as he often does. He agreed to a meeting with advocates of “gender-altering therapy,” a meeting arranged by pro-LGBTQ nun, Sister Jeannine Gramick of New Ways Ministry, along with two individuals who identify as transgender, the parents of an individual suffering gender confusion, and the director of a so-called gender medicine clinic. Sr. Gramick stated after meeting Pope Francis that the Holy Father listened to “the voice of the Holy Spirit calling the Catholic community to break out of old, ill-informed teachings and practices.” Nor did the pope repudiate her comments. As Phil Lawler of Catholic Culture noted, neither did he issue any “public statement that would express reservations about the arguments the ‘transition’ advocates had made.” Furthermore, Pope Francis refused to reaffirm the teaching of his encyclical Dignitas Infinita which states clearly that “any sex-change intervention … risks threatening the unique dignity the person received from the moment of conception.” After the Oct. 12 meeting, Lawler wrote that if Pope Francis had any “moral qualms about the choices” his guests have made, “or the operations they promote, his reservations were not recorded.” A year earlier, Pope Francis had met with New Ways Ministry, after which Sr. Gramick thanked the pope for “his openness to blessing same-sex unions” – just before the Vatican issued Fiducia Supplicans which permitted the blessing of individuals in same-sex relationships, a nifty Jesuitical slight-of-hand. It should be noted, as Lawler does, that in 1999, the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, said that New Ways Ministry’s position on homosexuality was “incompatible with Christian morality.” Later, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sanctioned the organization, barring New Ways Ministry from identifying itself as Catholic. American bishops have stopped the group from speaking at events in their dioceses. But now, in Lawler’s words, New Ways Ministry “scored a major public-relations victory” by gaining a much larger and more prestigious platform, a formal meeting with the pope, the head of the Catholic Church. Pope Francis may not have explicitly endorsed New Ways Ministry’s pro-homosexuality and pro-transgenderism activism but he did meet “the critics of traditional Catholic teaching, given them a platform, offered no opposition to their public statements, and left us all to draw our own conclusions.” Indeed.
– Paul Tuns
