Essays in Idleness

It is amusing, or alternatively it is desolating, to learn from some silly poll that four in five Canadians believe there are some laws on the books somewhere that limit abortions in some way. And yet they have the vote in our free elections.

No, Canada is unique, in having no such laws whatever.

Or perhaps we are not: it is possible this could also be said of North Korea, though I find the assertion impossible to check.

Soon, perhaps, it will be said of Ireland, where the vote to remove the constitutional restraint on baby killing will be held on the 25th of May, and the Irish will or will not take a decisive step down the road to perdition. (Not the first: the journey begins with open contraception and easy divorce.) It could also serve as the final, irretrievable betrayal of Ireland’s Catholic heritage; of that Ireland which was once the beacon of Christian civilization; which sent her missionaries into the heart of barbarous pagan Europe in a very dark age — foreshadowing universities, hospitals, cathedrals, and other Catholic inventions; Dante and Shakespeare and all that.

There, as here, the proponents of abortion argue that it is just a small step, a “baby step” as one of them said without thinking, to cancel a part of the Irish constitution and thus remove some “unnecessary paperwork” from the “decision-making process.” They wish to reassure sceptical voters that “there will be no big change,” only a slight “modernization.” They know this is a lie — a big black obvious lie — the point of which is to baffle persons of small brain.

Once the lock is blown off, the door is open.

The big lie has a further purpose, in spreading confusion and conflict among those who should surely have the brains to know that murder is murder, even when the victim is defenceless; and that the guilt of it, which cries to heaven for justice, cannot be reduced by tossing a few euphemisms around.

It is a strategic error not to fight these people with everything we have. Even if our side should lose, no one should be left in doubt what the stakes were. Or ever allowed to forget, until they discover the grace of repentance.

Ottawa’s annual March for Life was yesterday — Holy Thursday, the traditional Feast of the Ascension; now shifted to Sunday in liberal Catholic churches so it won’t interfere with the work week. There is some hope in the fact that this march grows year by year. For a brief moment today, passers-by may see what 100,000 pink and blue flags look like, around the Human Rights Monument: one for each Canadian child sacrificed since last year’s demonstration.

The liberal media, including the newspaper in that town that used to employ me as its “token conservative,” do their best to ignore what are by far the largest demonstrations that have ever converged on Parliament Hill; but the traffic chaos this year got the news in, contradicting their own “extremely conservative” estimates of the crowd size.

To the contemporary liberal mind, killing unborn babies is a matter of private conscience for pregnant women alone to decide, having been protected from “pro-life propaganda.” But a traffic jam is a real public evil. How they howl when delayed for work!

Or when someone shows a picture that plainly displays what abortion is. Such poor taste!