And it came to pass in those days that a man was arrested and charged with raping a woman, an act prohibited by the Criminal Cod of the land. This man had many friends, including many in the political and medical establishment. Many of those who sympathized with his plight were engaged in a movement promoting what they were pleased to call “men’s rights,” in which they argued that a man has an absolute right to whatever form of sexual activity he might freely chose in order to gratify his sexual “needs.” The ultimate goal of the movement was to have a rape removed from the Criminal Code altogether, so that it would no longer be a legally prohibited form of sexual “preference.”
This movement took its more extreme form in specific pressure groups, known as the Ontario Coalition for Sexual Rights, and the Canadian Sexual Rights Action League. They were delighted when the court allowed a team of “jury selection” experts from outside the country to screen prospective jurors for the trials, in order to weed out any prospective jurors who might be inclined to respect the law against rape.
It should be pointed out that the rapist never denied committing the rape, and thus violating the law. Indeed, he boasted publicly that he had done so many times, and that no jury would convict him. His defence was that he had done so out of “necessity.”
In this event the rapist was “acquitted,” because the pro-rape jury, fully aware of his admission of guilt, did not want him to be convicted of a crime of which they approved, in violation of a law against it, of which they did not approve. The rapist celebrated his “acquittal” by calling a press conference, trumpeted his victory for the right of men to be in control of their own bodies.
This raised a pained eyebrow in the office of the Attorney General at the time who then appealed the “acquittal” to the provincial Supreme Court. While awaiting the outcome of this appeal, the rapist was left at large under no constraints, and was allowed to pursue his career as a rapist with impunity, in clear breach of the Criminal Code.
In time it came to pass that the Supreme Court of the province found that the rapists had not been acquitted legally, that the trial had been a travesty of justice, so much so that it could not be honestly said that a trial had taken place at all. (The costs of the travesty, of course, were borne by the somnolent taxpayers of the land, most of whom appeared not to mind very much.)
Now it was the rapist’s turn. He appealed this decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, and merrily carried on his rapist activities, completely unrestrained by those whose official responsibility it is to see that the provisions of the Criminal Code are respected and enforced. When protests were made to the new Attorney General, he muttered vaguely and sagely about certain procedural “rules” that he had to follow which apparently made it impossible for him to restrain the illegal rapist. All concerned seemed to have surrendered to the pretence that the anti-rape law had been automatically suspended by the mere fact of the rapist’s appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, ignoring the fact that it had never been heard of in that land that any law had ever been instantly abrogated by the appeal from a lower court’s decision. Some of the people, who knew that laws were made and unmade by their elected lawmakers and not by courts, began to wonder at the extraordinary indulgence afforded this particular rapist, and what relationship he enjoyed with the law enforcement authorities, that occasioned it.
Basic principles
A fantasy? Of course. Or is it? Substitute abortion in free-standing aboratoria for rape, and you have a thumbnail sketch of the Morgentaler case re 85 Harbord Street.
Now, no one is his right mind would expect a clearly criminal activity to be protected by the Attorney General’s office, even to the extent of causing nearly half a million dollars of municipal taxpayers’ funds to be spent in providing police protection for that activity. Protection against whom? Against those irate citizens eccentric enough to think that the law should be enforced. It is a basic principle of our civic culture that the common citizen has a legal obligation to enforce the law, notwithstanding the fact that this obligation is normally delegated to professional people we hire for the job, viz, policemen. Nor is the common citizen dispensed from his legal obligation by the mere fact that we have a police force.
No one in his right mind, that is. Not so Miss Christie Blatchford, who in her column recently criticized Constable David Packer (“I cannot stand by a place that is killing babies”), who has refused to lend himself to the violation of his personal integrity as a man and his professional honour as an officer of the law, manages to do an Orwellian flip-flop on the Morgentaler case, and reveals some peculiar, and sinister, ideas about the law, and about conscience.
Appearing in the Toronto Sun on May 15 and entitled, “He cops out of doing job,” the article slams Packer for differing “from the legal opinion of the moment – in other words, from the law…” (emphasis hers). Apart from her incredible definition of law, which effectively destroys the very possibility of law (laws are firm, framed, and factual, and not perpetually mutable in terms of “the legal opinion of the moment”), the fact is that Constable Packer has not challenged the law (Section 251 of the Criminal Code).
What he has refused to do is to violate the law by going along with the Toronto Police Department’s involvement in the Attorney General’s collusion with organized crime, i.e., the organized criminal activity of Henry Morgentaler and Robert Scott (“All complications are not avoidable”). In short, Packer refuses to pretend that being compelled to act as “enforcers” for brazen criminals, at taxpayers’ expense, is proper “duty” for Toronto policemen.
Miss Blatchford contends that Section 251 is “less than crystal clear, though she does not indicate in what manner it might be so. (The fact that it is quite clear to everyone else, and especially to the abortionists who are challenging it, does not seem to trouble her. In fact, it is because it is so “crystal clear” that they are challenging it). She says that it is “less than crystal clear” until a decision on the Morgentaler appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada has been handed down, implying that the law is somehow “on hold” until then.
If laws could so easily be abrogated or suspended, then we should have no law at all; we should have anarchy and no protection from criminals, not even rapists.
Blatchford is scandalized that any policeman might “feel free to make moral judgments about the laws they are supposed to be only enforcing” (she is referring to laws re breach of the peace, having in mind anti-abortion picketing at 85 Harbord Street, of course, and not to Section 251 and being accessories to its violation). On that principle, then, Blatchford could have no quarrel with all those policemen who enforced the Nuremberg laws against the Jews. For her, a policeman’s sole duty is “to enforce the law, whether or not he is comfortable with it, and all I car about is that he does it.
“A police force is a paramilitary organization,” she writes, with all that that implies about taking orders and not questioning them, whether about their moral correctness or otherwise…”
Well, “all that that implies” is a lot. The defendants at the Nuremberg trial would agree with her, so imbued were they with this Prussian-Nazi notion of blind, mindless obedience to superiors, obliging them to put their consciences into a state of paralysis in order to do so. As a defense, it was not accepted by the judges at Nuremberg, which dealt with Nazi war crimes. It is not accepted by Constable David Packer (who may now resign himself to never being nominated as Blatchford’s “Sunshine boy,” though his gutsy stand is saving the honour of the Toronto Police Department.)
Obeying orders
Nor is it accepted by democratic-minded Canadians. No policeman can ever be expected to obey an order that is essentially criminal in substance, nor be punished for reusing to obey an order. In such a case, refusal is a matter of moral, civic and legal obligation.
Blatchford has served notice that she doesn’t care what policemen think about “The police officers in Philadelphia who have been ordered to protect the abortion industry feel that they are working for the criminals, not the victims. And they have decided to do something about it. Robert Hurst, president of the local police union, has announced that at the next contract negotiation , he will seek a ‘conscience clause’ provision for pro-life police officers to that they will not have to accept assignments to arrest pro-life demonstrators. Hurst said that he himself is pro-life and is conscientiously opposed to arresting pro-lifers, and that he would lead the movement of those officers who feel likewise.
One must keep in mind that since the lunatic Roe vs Wade decision, all abortion from the moment of conception on, is legal in America. Not so in Canada: free-standing aboratoria are illegal, and no policeman should be ordered to protect such criminal operations. Such orders themselves constitute making policemen accessories to criminal activity (and since we are all paying for it, it makes us all accessories as well, until we put a stop to it). Schwartz asks ruefully, “What if Hitler’s SS had decided to follow their consciences instead of following orders?” What, indeed!
A better occasion will never arise for the Toronto Police Association to do what it should have done a long time ago: to pursue a “conscience clause” in its contract with respect to illegal aboratoria, in order to protect the professional honour of its members. The charges against Constable Packer are as improper and grotesque as the scandal of the Department’s collusion with Ian Scott’s official protection of the Morgentaler-Scott gang, a scandal which, in the eloquent words of Joseph Thompson in this paper last January (though in another context), “inculcates immorality in the weak, and discouragement in the strong.” number of crimes, among them, “drunk driving, or public nudity…or homosexual bathhouses,” which is another way of saying that she doesn’t care if policemen are on the side of the law or on the side of crime. One suspects that if she had been a Jew in Nazi Germany, she might have been a little more thoughtful.
Pro-life officers
The members of the Toronto Police Department should follow the lead of their colleagues in Philadelphia. As reported by Michael Schwartz (The Light, April 1986), “The police officers in Philadelphia who have been ordered to protect the abortion industry feel that they are working for the criminals, not the victims. And they have decided to do something about it. Robert Hurst, president of the local police union, has announce that at the next contract negotiation, he will seek a ‘conscience clause’ provision for pro-life police officers so that they will not have to accept assignments to arrest pro-life demonstrators. Hurst said that he himself is pro-life and is conscientiously opposed to arresting pro-lifers, and that he would lead the movement of those officers who feel likewise.”
One must keep in mind that since the lunatic Roe vs Wade decision all abortion from the moment of conception on, is legal in America. Not so in Canada: free-standing aboratoria are illegal and no policeman should be ordered to protect such criminal operations. Such orders themselves constitute making policemen accessories to criminal activity (and since we are all paying for it, it makes us all accessories as well, until we put a stop to it). Schwartz asks ruefully, “What if Hitler’s SS decided to follow their consciences instead of following orders.” What, indeed!
A better occasion will never arise for the Toronto Police Association to do what it should have done a long time ago: to pursue a “conscience clause” in its contract with respect to illegal aboratoria, in order to protect the professional honour of its members. The charges against Constable Packer are as improper and grotesque as the scandal of the Department’s collusion with Ian Scott’s official protection of the Morgentaler-Scott gang, a scandal which in the eloquent words of Joseph Thompson in this paper last January (though in another context), “inculcates immorality in the weak, and discouragement in the strong.”
