Oh, Canada - Chapter 7 - Tongs for Tweezers

“There is a sphere, nonetheless real because it is impossible to define its limits, within which law and public opinion are intruders likely to do more harm than good. To try to regulate the internal affairs of a family, the relations of love or friendship, or many other things of the same sort, by law or the coercion of public opinion, is like trying to pull an eyelash out of a man’s eye with a pair of tongs. They may put out the eye, but they will never get hold of the eyelash.

James Fitzjames Stephen – Liberty Equality and Fraternity

More than one friend has commented, “Why put so much intellectual energy and effort into this redefining marriage and other socio-political issues”? Each seems genuinely interested in my well being, whether they agree with my position or not – and I have many friends who don’t share my viewpoint.

Quite simply, for the first time in 40 years I have the time to do the reading and reflecting necessary to inform myself on a variety of subjects unrelated to my education or my professional life. This newly accessible reservoir of time has allowed me to pursue a goal I have had for many years. This is to better understand what are the mores, ideals, philosophies we possess as Canadians which distinguish us from other nations. How did we acquire them, how have they evolved and why? What does it mean to be Canadian?

When I look at Canadian society I see many alarming signs of decay and its suppurative qualities seem to be in ascendancy. The latest controversy over redefining marriage to be something which easily 80% of Canadians would have rejected only 5 years ago is but the latest symptom of this collective malaise. We now have the spectacle of a bill being tabled in the House of Commons which contains extensive language aimed at reassuring religious authorities that they will not be compelled to perform same sex marriages. Would the thought that the Canadian state could ever contemplate such a thing have crossed one’s mind only a few short years ago? Now we need to be reassured! Why not add a clause to reassure those of us who oppose the redefinition of marriage, that we won't be sent to a Gulag in Iqaluit, or we won't have our taxes audited for next 5 years. The needle of Canada’s moral compass looks like a propeller.

I draw a harsh image I know, and some will be offended but we need to rediscover our Canadian frankness and boldness and abandon the obsequious nature we have taken on. The joke – “How do you make a Canadian apologize? Kick him again!” – seems all too true. We have become the “whatever” society, where no matter how intuitively wrong an idea or behaviour seems to us, if it doesn’t impact directly upon my well being, I simply shrug and say “whatever”.

James Fitzjames Stephen wrote: “If people neither formed nor expressed any opinions on their neighbours’ conduct except in so far as that conduct affected them personally, one of the principal motives to do well and one of the principal restraints from doing ill would be withdrawn from the world.”

Where are we now in Canada? What courses of conduct are of concern to us, and what can we do to change them?

As a nation we are living on the fumes of past glories. We pride ourselves on being honest international brokers and peace-keepers, yet we have no real influence on international affairs and our peace-keeping capabilities rank us somewhere around 40th in the world. When we do have peace-keepers available to serve we need to hitch a ride to the troubled spot with some other country. When we finally arrive it is usually too late to make a real difference. How smugly we deride the instability of Italian politics with the yearly changes of government, yet they managed to get their specialty relief team into Sri Lanka in two days. It took Canada almost three weeks.

Canada is no longer able to walk the talk when it comes to international responsibilities despite the fact as a nation we emerged from WWII as one of the strongest western nations economically, and were blessed with an enormous reserve of goodwill capital based on the heroic actions of our armed forces in both great wars.

In the domestic political realm many branches of our federal government are known to have been fiscally corrupt for perhaps decades. Abuses of power for the benefit of politicians, bureaucrats and their supporters are admitted, the only question is how high up the chain of command will the evidence lead.

Our vaunted pillars of social benefits, health and education are vastly underfunded and burdened with bureaucracy and internal conflict between provincial and federal branches of government. We have serious regional conflicts and one of our founding provinces continues to be represented overwhelmingly at the federal level by a party whose sole objective is to separate Quebec from confederation.

In place of honest intellectual discourse aimed at resolving this conflict, our governments have chosen to fawn over and attempt to appease the separatist elements through financial incentives and by handing over important levers of government and industrial power.

In the social and moral realm Canada has rapidly moved toward secularism and immodest liberalism. Strong arguments can be made that large segments of Canadian society now embrace the new state religion of secularism. Traditional religions are on the wane as measured by attendance and the influence they bring to bear on the daily lives of ordinary Canadians; yet opinion polls show a majority of Canadians consider themselves Christians and an even greater percentage believe in a supreme transcendent being.

Since 1982 and the enshrinement of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a greater and greater responsibility for establishing the boundaries of freedom and tolerance and the extent to which the aspirations of special interest groups to achieve what they deem to be equality, has devolved from the legislative branch to the judicial branch of our liberal state.

The Trudeau years brought the first “slight inner adjustments of which we were barely conscious” which led to decisive changes in our perception of what should be the bedrock of our Canadianism. Fundamental human rights, government having no place in the bedrooms of our nation, these became catch phrases that resonated with Canadians. We strove to become a kinder and gentler nation. We did not adequately think through the consequences of moving toward an unthinking acceptance of every conceivable “right”. As philosopher David B. Hart sees it: “the history of modern political and social doctrine is, to a large degree, the history of Western culture’s long, laborious departure from Jewish, classical, and Christian models of freedom, and the history in consequence of the ascendancy of the language of “rights” over every other possible grammar of the good. ”

The move out of the bedrooms of the nation manifested itself most prominently in the removal of criminal sanctions against people participating in homosexual acts. Seemingly unable to recognize the difference between tolerance and approbation, Canadian society adopted the attitude that not only should homosexual activity be tolerated but now it should be celebrated.

Overwhelmingly Canadians have shown themselves to be tolerant of homosexuals, though persons of faith continue to believe homosexual activity to be sinful. The acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle has advanced to the point where judging by popular culture it is far less outré to be homosexual than it is to be an evangelical Christian. A Christian Pride parade would draw fewer observers and far greater obloquy from the popular press than any Gay Pride parade even in its earliest incarnation. “A Christian Eye for The Straight Guy” would not be a hit television program.

As a group, homosexuals have advanced to the point where they dominate if not in pure numbers then certainly in influence, more than a few significant bastions of popular culture. Theatre, visual arts, the CBC, and many branches of the academy all resonate with advocacy,not just tolerance for the homosexual lifestyle. Not infrequently, heterosexuals today recount stories of feeling marginalized in workplaces where the culture has become one dominated by homosexuals and their supporters. And yet those who resist this disproportionate influence are accused of trying to impose the will of the majority on a minority. Few seem to be troubled by the tyranny of the minority.

The homosexual agenda is firmly entrenched in our universities. Here is an introduction to a paper presented by two Canadian law professors at a Seattle University Law School conference – Assimilation and Resistance. The emphasis in mine.

Moving from the Back to the Front of the Classroom:
Queer Pedagogy in Law
Kim Brooks (Queen's University Faculty of Law)
Debra Parkes (University of Manitoba Faculty of Law)

"We intend two meanings in choosing our proposed title. First, as recent graduates of LL.B. and then LL.M. programs, and recent appointees to Canadian law faculties, we intend to draw in our paper on our experiences of "queer pedagogy"¹ while moving, at least symbolically, from the back to the front of the classroom. Second, the paper raises questions about whether and how a queer pedagogy might operate as a situs of resistance both in the classroom, but also (possibly) by extension in the practice of law.

Borrowing from the work on pedagogy undertaken by queer and feminist legal academics, as well as by theorists in other disciplines such as economics, we hope to raise questions about how queer theory, broadly understood, can assist in developing legal education that resists assimilation. In writing and presenting the paper itself, we hope to examine and employ some of the pedagogical methods and theories advanced in the literature on critical pedagogy surveyed, in an effort to shed light on their possibilities and challenges. We also suggest that by imagining ways to move beyond the boundaries of inclusion alone in legal education, we may go at least some way toward transforming law itself."

There is no subtlety about their purpose. Inclusion and acceptance is not enough, they wish to transform the law itself to suit the desires and objectives of “queer theory.” What else does one find growing in the social petrie dish at the Faculties of Law at Queens and University of Manitoba and surely most other Canadian law schools?

Surely this helps explain why the homosexual lobbyists are not content to merely aquire all the civil benefits accruing to married couples. They will not be content until they have transformed the law and the social structures which they perceive to deprive them of their rights to be truly "equal". Different but equal won't do - an unusual demand from a group that identifies itself and claims to take pride in its difference, in its queerness!

Any political organizer could not help but admire what a fine job these queer theorists have accomplished to date in Canada. Having first successfully co-opted the courts, they have now succeeded in convincing our Prime Minister and our Justice Minister to lead the charge to redefine marriage and thus in Mr. Cotler’s infamous rhetoric this week, “define who we are as Canadians.”

Who are we as Canadians? We are the master franchisor for the North American social laboratory for experiments in unbounded muddle-headedness. We think tolerate means advocate, we think if the sky hasn't fallen since gay marriages have been approved by the courts, we can safely carry on in our Alfred E. Neuman naive innocence. We will worry later about how parents will answer their school aged children's questions about sex education classes which compare the relative merits of vaginal versus anal intercourse. We will give due consideration later, probably appoint a Royal Commission to examine the impact of the dramatical decline in the birth rate n Canada.

But that is all for later. For now we lament the loss of NHL hockey, but could care less if tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were siphoned into the hands of Liberal party hacks in Quebec. After all it saved the country didn't it, and as Mr. Chretien proudly pointed out in his testimony today it even made Mr. Gomery and Mr. Roy richer by increasing the value of their Montreal real estate.

We are a nation of rubes! The tongs are nearer to our eyeball than ever. Will we just blink and hope for the best, or should you leap out of your comfortable chair and question the qualifications of the hovering social beautician? The choice is yours.