Magistrates across the country are fining and jailing pro-lifers who defy court injunctions. In Vancouver, Judge John Bouck handed out sentences of six months jail on July 14. In Calgary, on September 5, Judge Ernest Hutchinson fined one pro-lifer $500 payable in 15 days, or six months in jail. In Toronto, Judge A.E. Charlton imposed a $750 fine, payable in 60 days, or fifteen days in prison.
These judges and others who have sentenced pro-lifers before them have one thing in common: they reject the idea that law, in order to be just and true, must be in harmony with the law of God.
The judges speak of how important it is to preserve the rule of law. Refusing to comply with the terms of a court order invites anarchy, they say. It only encourages others to do the same thing, they say.
Pro-lifers, they believe, are another group of people whose sincere moral beliefs prove incompatible with the law. If society allows them to follow their conscience today, they argue, it will have to grant their opponents the same rights, tomorrow. In this matter, anarchy will be the order of the day.
The same argument was heard when the Metro Toronto police dismissed Constable David Packer. If one officer is allowed to refuse service outside an abortuary, so it ran, then tomorrow a second might refuse to serve in the ball park, a third might decline to patrol a union picket line, and on and on. For police officers, sheriffs, crown attorneys and magistrates then, “conscience” means whatever comes into one’s head and a law is a law is a law, no matter what.
It is the “no matter what” which is at the heart of these travesties of both conscience and law. Those who uphold them are following in the footsteps of the 1969 politicians who first reduced the objective moral order to private religious opinions and then dismissed these as of no consequence to society. The result of this attitude was summed up in the last two sentences of the book Morality and Law in Canadian politics (1974):
“To legalize abortions is to corrupt the law and, thereby, ultimately corrupt society. It will prove far more difficult to stop that corruption than it will be to stop illegal abortions.”
Today both the notions of conscience and the law have been thoroughly corrupted because they have been separated from the objective moral law. The law prohibits killing unborn babies.
And, yes, like their counterparts of the pre-Nazi period in the Germany before 1933, politicians continue to play with fire and even some churches refuse to uphold the simple truth: abortion is forbidden by God’s law. Politicians may not vote for a law legalizing it. Christians cannot accept abortions and still continue to be followers of Christ. Religious leaders may not approve “compromises” without endangering their eternal salvation. People who have no faith cannot condone abortion without contradicting the nature of human society, reason and science. Law and conscience must be brought in harmony with God’s law in order that the true law be upheld and respected.
This, and only this, is the task of the Mulroney government and the Members of Parliament when they discuss new abortion legislation in the House of Commons this fall.
