Out in B.C. they've finally summoned up the courage to lay polygamy charges against breakaway Mormons. Now let's see if all the right-thinking leftists who insisted that courts should not let elected legislators show disrespect to the romantic and sexual choices of consenting adults when it came to gay marriage will rally to the cause of polygamists and, if not, whether they'll honour us with the reasoning behind their apparently contradictory positions.
It’s Easter and time for the annual journalistic display of baffled hostility to Christianity. On cue the Roman Catholic archbishop of Ottawa, Terrence Prendergast, pops up with the suggestion that adherents to his church who don’t actually observe its rules should not expect to enjoy all the benefits of membership. A predictable chorus of howls erupted. The archbishop might be forgiven for wondering why. No one would think themselves entitled to join a chess club but refuse to move bits of plastic around an 8x8 square board. If they insisted on denouncing the game as a colossal waste of time for losers who couldn’t get a date using the Benoni counter-gambit (purely hypothetically, you understand), or showed up and played trumpet instead of chess, club officials would try to reason with them but, if that failed, would insist that they depart. And no one would think it odd. What, then, is so hard to grasp about the Catholic Church being a voluntary organization with rules that are meant to be enforced?
Remember, people who say they are Roman Catholics necessarily claim to believe the Pope is the heir of St. Peter to whom Christ gave the keys of the kingdom. This belief may be false or even foolish. But it’s no secret. And Canada is a free country so you are free to reject it. The one thing you can’t do is reject the authority of the Bishop of Rome yet remain in his Church, any more than you can go to a chess club and deny that its bishops move diagonally.
It is especially pitiful to hear politicians say they are obliged to represent their constituents, not their faith. They wouldn’t say that about their economic beliefs, and you’d think salvation mattered more than stagflation. An honest and lucid man would surely tell voters he holds certain fundamental beliefs that entail certain policy positions, and he’d invite only those who share most or all of those positions to vote for him.
Roman Catholics would then say they oppose abortion on religious grounds and welcome the votes of anyone who, for whatever reason, is also prolife. Atheists or agnostics would say they don’t know what God wants, if anything, but here are their policies; members of some faiths could say they think God is cool with abortion and so are they. In each case there would be no taint of hypocrisy. But anyone who says they know what God wants, they just don’t care, is acting like an idiot and should be denied political power on that basis alone.
Especially as Easter seems a particularly propitious time to ask whether your soul is not more important than your seat in Parliament. Certainly it’s a lot more permanent. Only if the result of this soul-searching is negative, if you conclude that winning an election is more important than standing up for things you claim to believe are the will of God almighty, creator of heaven and earth and our judge when time itself has ended, is it appropriate to say although I am Catholic I will govern as an atheist. In which case you’re in a pretty feeble position to object if sternly excommunicated.
There is nothing oppressive about this statement. The Inquisition put away the thumbscrews years ago. No one is suggesting introducing theocracy, making it mandatory to join the Roman Catholic Church, or illegal to oppose its teachings in print or on the stump, provided you have a willing audience. They’re simply saying you have no more right to make those arguments within the Church, physically or metaphysically, than to insist on playing jazz in a chess club.
Why would you even want to? I can understand a politician lying about religion to deceive the public, but that can hardly be the motive today. I don’t imagine that one voter in five knows Stephen Harper’s religion (Protestant), let alone cares. And in any event, if politicians were pretending to be Catholic to win votes, they’d presumably feign adherence to Church teachings. Something else is going on, and it’s not pretty.
What scandalizes moderns about the church, I think, is not what it believes but simply that it believes. We are perfectly at ease with Christian clergy who deny the divinity of Christ or the resurrection, don druid suits and praise shariah law, or claim they can be at the same time priests and imams. Just as we are happy to give tenure to academics who proclaim that there is no truth, and give large fees to artists who insist that their works do not communicate or uplift and are not meant to. But we are baffled that the Pope is Catholic and if you don’t like it you need to find, or found, another church.
So get all those bishops out of my way, and rooks. I’m gonna sing, loud and flat.
[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]
Rowan Williams should be fired as Archbishop of Canterbury for calling the arrival of aspects of Shariah law in Britain “inevitable” and desirable. But for once this silly man has actually done us a favour. Consider the harrumphing he provoked from the British government. According to the Daily Telegraph, the chairman of the ominously-named Equality and Human Rights Commission said, “Raising this idea in this way will give fuel to anti-Muslim extremism” while Home Secretary Jacqui Smith babbled, “‘I think there is one law in this country and it’s the democratically determined law. That’s the law that I will uphold and that’s the law that is at the heart actually of the values that we share across all communities in this country.”
It is babble, or worse, because just five days earlier the same newspaper revealed that “Husbands with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits following a year-long Government review. ... Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal. The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife. ... Ministers estimate that up to a thousand polygamous partnerships exist in Britain, although they admit there is no exact record.”
If that’s not an aspect of Shariah law, it will do until one comes along.
As for the tidbit that “Income support for all of the wives may be paid directly into the husband’s bank account, if the family so chooses,” I trust feminists will remind us how a power imbalance makes true consent impossible.
They can do it from here, since newspapers this week also reported claims by the president of the Canadian Society of Muslims that hundreds of Toronto-area Muslims draw welfare and social benefits for multiple wives. “Polygamy is a regular part of life for many Muslims,” he was quoted as saying. “Ontario recognizes religious marriages for Muslims and others.”
The Ontario minister of community and social services predictably huffed and puffed that, “Not knowing the law is not an excuse. They should know that in Canada there is no polygamy and that only one wife is covered.” And possibly the extra wives are claiming welfare not as spouses but as individuals who just happen to live in the same house as him, her and her, and his kids by all three. But the preamble to the Ontario Family Law Act explicitly says: “In the definition of ‘spouse,’ a reference to marriage includes a marriage that is actually or potentially polygamous, if it was celebrated in a jurisdiction whose system of law recognizes it as valid.”
It’s certainly a Shariah-like object. Why weren’t we told? And how dare you now deny it?
To be sure, the law in question mostly concerns divorce. But the B.C. government has long feared a Charter challenge from polygamous breakaway Mormon sects. Surely a man could now plausibly argue in an Ontario court that if the law imposes many of the obligations of marriage on him with respect to more than one wife, fairness requires that it also grant him the benefits and, as advocates of gay marriage successfully argued, validate the quality of his love into the bargain. As I warned in the Western Standard three years ago, “Guess who’s coming to dinner? Looks like Bob and Carol and Alice, but not Ted.”
I do not say that it is easy to avoid these consequences. Leaving aside any religious or Charter considerations, if a man lives with more than one woman and has children with them, and things go wrong, could any court award support only to the children of the woman who was first to move in or, alternatively, the first to get pregnant? Yet who among us today would dare argue for a legal ban on fornication or cohabitation?
In this respect there is a curious alliance between those who think anything goes and those who think only one thing goes. Both stand in opposition to the western tradition of ordered liberty, the first because they oppose order and the second because they oppose liberty. How can we stand up for our traditions if we dare not name them?
Don’t ask Rowan Williams, a self-described “hairy lefty” who donned a druid suit after being chosen archbishop and recently told the Daily Telegraph’s Rachel Sylvester that Britain is a “secular state” despite being a very senior cleric in its established church. But on Shariah he blurted out a truth politicians deny in vain.
Stick a thank-you note in with his pink slip.
[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]
It is not entirely clear whether you can vote with a paper bag over your head in Canada. But our MPs should consider it.
Unless you habitually go about with your eyes and ears covered, you’ll know the recent discovery that you can vote federally with your face concealed has caused great upset on Parliament Hill. Amid a flurry of denunciations, the House Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) unanimously urged Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand to reverse this ruling and, when he refused, unanimously summoned him to appear before them. To their shame, as it is their blunder, not his.
As Mr. Mayrand pointed out in a press conference this Monday, his job is to enforce the law not make it. The law as written does not require voters to unveil and, most crucially, as MPs just revised the Canada Elections Act this summer and didn’t incorporate any such requirement, it is not his place to read it in. Veiled voting was a prominent issue in the Quebec provincial election earlier this year and Mr. Mayrand personally drew parliamentarians’ attention to it in May, while the relevant Bill C-31 was before the Senate, and again in a conference call with representatives of the registered parties on July 26. Since MPs failed to act on it, he concludes, the constitutional protection of freedom of religion requires him to interpret the law permissively in this regard.
I found Mr. Mayrand less persuasive on two side issues. First, if MPs clearly indicate a determination to amend the law to forbid veiled voting at their earliest opportunity I think he not only can but must use his emergency powers to ban it in the Monday by-elections. Second, he told the press conference the rest of us could not vote with paper bags on our heads. But the Constitution protects freedom of conscience and speech as well as religion, so if veiled voting is permitted we should be able to wear other types of mask in, for instance, an orderly protest against bad electoral policy. Otherwise he was convincing.
Unlike MPs, who contrived further to disgrace themselves, no easy task in Ottawa nowadays. Tory Joe Preston said Mr. Mayrand should appear before PROC “and explain to us what he doesn’t understand about photo ID.” A Sept. 10 Bloc Québécois press release claimed (my translation) Parliament “has decided that from now on, all voters must identify themselves to vote at the federal level.” And the prime minister called C-31 “a law designed to have the visual identification of voters.” But it is they who do not understand, even after Mr. Mayrand publicly explained it, what the law they just wrote says.
Section 143 of the amended Canada Elections Act, for better or worse, specifies three ways of establishing your identity at the polling station. One is a piece of ID from some Canadian government bearing your name, address and photo, in which case you must show your face. But the second is “two pieces of identification authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer each of which establish the elector’s name and at least one of which establishes the elector’s address” but need not have photos. In which case there’s obviously no identification function served by showing your face. Anyway, the third is simply to be vouched for by someone who has established their own identity one of the first two ways. Plus, you can vote by mail which doesn’t involve photo ID or any other kind.
I do not think MPs should have written the law in this fashion. While Canadians are by and large honest, it is asking for trouble to permit voting with weaker security than you’d tolerate to rent a car. But that’s not the point here. Nor is the widespread and legitimate discomfort among Canadians with people who insist on covering their faces in dealings with strangers.
The point at present is that on an important issue most MPs seem incapable of perceiving their error, which speaks poorly of their intellect, or of admitting it, which speaks poorly of their character. To his credit NDP MP Yvon Godin has confessed that “maybe all parties should be kicking our own butts. We could have fixed it ourselves.” But the reaction of most of his colleagues has far more Bart Simpson than Edmund Burke in it.
One is tempted to ask if they cannot read the relevant statute. It’s not hard to find; Mr. Mayrand handed out copies at his press conference. But in any case the appropriate response is: Read the law? You wrote it.
If it turns out the paper bag is illegal, MPs could vote wearing dunce caps. I expect they’d fit nicely.
[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]