This month marks The Interim’s 30th year of publication. Such anniversaries are always occasions for celebration and gratitude – but they are also bittersweet: as proud as we are to be Canada’s pro-life, pro-family newspaper, we regret the fact that pervasive media bias makes our existence necessary, that mainstream opinions about life and culture in our country are not represented in our mainstream media.
The Interim’s motto is “semper fidelis,” always faithful. This, our pledge, is born of a broken promise, the violated the contract between truth and language that makes abortion and every other assault on human dignity possible. The bad faith of those who should know better but instead spread social liberalism’s sustaining lies is now an assumption that goes unquestioned in our country’s newsrooms. Through omission or active commission, most reporters perpetuate the violation of their duty to the truth, preferring to file stories consistent with the biased world-views of their editors and colleagues rather than even attempt to put the plain truth into print. Thus, everything from uncontroversial biological facts about the unborn to the turnout at pro-life rallies are skewed and obscured.
The media’s concession to the anti-family ideology of our age lets language become a screen concealing horrific violence. But this, the fifth estate’s cowardly collusion with ideology, requires a total consensus; the fragile lie is shattered by a single voice. To raise the alarm, to declare a dissensus, to witness to the truth when no one else will – this is the mission of The Interim. Indeed, the strongest illusions are powerless against the weakest truth: even though all we have is, in the words of the poet, “a voice/ To undo the folded lie,” this voice – and its uncompromising insistence on the dignity of life and family – is all we need. To set a biased world aright, we lean against the wind of received opinion, and stand against the spirit of our time.
And ours have been times marked by radical change. In the last 30 years, we have witnessed, in the West, an enterprise of social engineering, without precedent in its perversity and its ambition. The concept of human rights has been systematically used to distort immemorial definitions of society’s basic unit, the family. The supposed discovery of new “rights” promises a more just society; but, actually, such “discoveries” quietly redraw the boundaries of cultural disputes so that the legal successes of social liberals are put beyond debate.
Such discoveries do not advance universal justice, but rather the specific agenda of ideologues; thus, the social fabric of the present is disfigured for the sake of a utopia that refuses to arrive. Against these constant redefinitions of justice, we offer values that endure. To their protean image of society, we propose definitions which are timeless. This makes the “news” which we report untimely – but, for this very reason – it is never out of date.
If the tradition of justice in our country remains unbroken even in this, its unfortunate 30-year fall from high ideals, it is because we persevere in our objection to this interruption, this horrible hiatus from Canada’s respect for human rights. So that justice may be honoured even in this breech, The Interim will continue its mission for as long as our nation’s lapse shall last. And so it is that, in the meantime, in the interim, we remain: semper fidelis, always faithful.
