A dark day for Canada; the Liberal government’s “same-sex marriage” legislation [url=http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/06/28/samesex050628.html?print]passed in the House of Commons[/url], and will doubtless soon be passed in the Senate, and become law…
16 thoughts on “Canada approves homosexual ‘marriage’”
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VFR’s comment is spot on…
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/003628.html Here.
Prime Minister Martin never stops dazzling us with his wisdom
Will S., as for Martin’s statement, is anyone really surprised that the man who officially as Prime Minister of Canada literally performed the kowtow before a Sikh altar in public could come up with a brainless statement like that?:
“In justifying the law, Canadian prime minister Paul Martin said: ‘The vote is about the Charter of Rights. We’re a nation of minorities and in a nation of minorities you don’t cherry-pick rights.’ “
I agree Lawrence Auster’s response to that head-scratcher went right to the heart of the matter:
“A nation of minorities. That is a new and interesting way of describing the multicultural society, a society with many ‘equal’ cultures but no common or dominant or national culture, except for the all-dissolving anti-culture of liberalism itself.”
And Martin considers himself a devout Catholic? At this point, the most charitable thing that can be said of Mr. Martin is that in carrying out his duties as Prime Minister he’s committing the Rocco Buttiglione fallacy (is knee-deep in it, in fact)—and things go downhill from there …
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Long live Flanders!
no surprise, Fred; and now Spain has capitulated, too…
… sadly, we’ve lived with this sort of rhetoric for some time now – former Conservative Prime Minister Joe Clark (a conservative-in-name-only) called Canada a “community of communities”, which is only a hop, step and a jump away from Martin’s “nation of minorities”…
And now http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/003632.html Spain has followed suit… One by one, the dominoes fall…
Peter Hitchens (courtesy of “The Ambler”) gets it exactly right
This isn’t about Canada or Spain (it’s about Britain) but it seems very à propos:
“On the great battlefields of marriage and the family, education and culture, morality and law, the Tories have been utterly outmanoeuvred and bypassed. Because they did not fight, they cooperated in the destruction of their own electorate. To this day, they have no idea why it is that they are so despised by the young, and their wretched attempts to toady to fashion—in such areas as civil partnerships for homosexuals—manage to offend or puzzle their supporters while utterly failing to convince their opponents that they are genuine. It would be perfectly all right to be the Nasty Party if they knew why it was necessary to be nasty and meant it. Millions long for a truly Nasty government, that will be thoroughly horrid to the wicked, the criminal and the dishonest, and to the European Union. But to be Nasty without meaning to is worse than useless. And to be Nice about these things is to let down the besieged, oppressed, vandalized, burgled, mugged people of Britain.”
— Peter Hitchens [quoted Friday as The Ambler‘s “Thought for the Day”]
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Long live Flanders!
I don’t know if Martin is
I don’t know if Martin is in fact a “devout Catholic,” but I know many Christians who not only find no barrier to gay marriage within Christianity, but actually claim that Christianity requires the approval of gay marriage. The converse is, of course, that those Christians who oppose gay marriage are “hateful” or are just poor Christians, and are in need of a healthy dose of repentance.
A new theology has infiltrated Christianity in the West, and it is usually called the “theology of acceptance,” as opposed to the more traditional theology of redemption. Under the theology of acceptance, God/Jesus is love, and love requires acceptance, so God accepts you (and everyone else) just the way you are, and to dispute this is to challenge the primacy of love (and of God) itself.
In contrast, under a theology of redemption, we are sinners whose fondest desires and schemes are typically corrupt in the extreme, that we are unable to behold our true condition, that we cannot save ourselves from our own delusions, and only through the saving acts of Christ in history are we redeemed from ourselves and our sin.
Note how the “theology of acceptance” fits perfectly with the premises of liberalism. Liberalism affirms the sovereignty of individual will and desire as the ultimate good, and demands that society itself should be structured to give the greatest latitude and accommodation to this “good.” If the individual will is the greatest good (within liberalism), how could God possibly disagree? Indeed, God not only agrees with this premise, he affirms it by the power of His love!
So, the individual’s greatest task, within liberalism and within the theology of acceptance, is to “be yourself” to the maximum and “empower” one’s individual will, and the more one embraces and enhances one’s own will then the more one is likely to be accepted by God’s love.
It’s a nice circular argument, and fits nicely within the moral and spiritual sloth of modern liberalism. It also makes the liberal image of God the mirror-image of our delusions about ourselves.
The Episcopal Church is the best example of this kind of theology, but one can find Christians in all denominations who preach it.
MD touches on a major flaw in today’s Christianity: too liberal
“It’s a nice circular argument, and fits nicely within the moral and spiritual sloth of modern liberalism. It also makes the liberal image of God the mirror-image of our delusions about ourselves. The Episcopal Church is the best example of this kind of theology, but one can find Christians in all denominations who preach it.” (—MD)
After reading Jim Kalb’s essay, Liberalism and Its Meaning for Christians, I wandered over to browse the readers’ comments thread where to my surprise I saw that about two-thirds of the commenters were fundamentally liberals—which I found remarkable considering the New Pantagruel is, if I’m not mistaken, supposed to be a conservative (Catholic and Protestant) site.
There’s some way in which Christianity degenerates into outright liberalism if the faithful and their leaders aren’t careful. Part of the cause is very simply the female influence on Christianity, women being natural liberals; why so many men go in for this particular misinterpretation of Christianity I don’t understand.
Nietzche in criticizing Christianity—which was what the majority of his output amounted to—was really criticizing liberalism, or the end-of-nineteenth-century version of it, at any rate, which was pretty close though not identical to the version that afflicts us today. As I view it, it was not necessarily Christianity he hated but this horrible effeminate liberal deformation of it that he couldn’t stand.
(Check out the comments in that readers’ thread by someone signing as Jerah Kirby.)
What can be done about it I’m not sure, but think of Renaissance Catholicism or the Protestantism of Martin Luther, the Pilgrim Fathers, or Peter Akinola to know that a balanced Christianity, one which is not excessively effeminate as today’s John Spong/Rowan Williams version is, is possible.
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Long live Flanders!
For any who check out that
For any who check out that readers’ comments thread, be aware there are six pages of comments—click at the lower right of each page to go to the next.
(And, of course, it’s spelled Nietzsche with an s.)
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Long live Flanders!
Maybe Miss Kirby was onto something without realizing it?
That Jerah Kirby individual over in the New Pantagruel readers’ comments thread referred sarcastically once or twice to normals’ wanting society to return to the medieval period. With that in mind I noticed this today over at Dienekes‘ site:
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THE DECLINING RATE OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION
The New Scientist has a news item on Entering a dark age of innovation, reporting on the research of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist who claims that “the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since.” His main finding is that the per-capita innovation of humanity has been in decline, it is currently at ~1600AD levels and will soon (by 2024) plummet to medieval levels. Dr. Huebner proposes that technological innovation is limited both physically (e.g., it is impossible to transcend the limitations of natural laws), but also economically (it may be possible, but not practical to do something). According to his interpretation, the observed trend due to economic limitations, although he does leave open the possibility that it may be cognitive, i.e., that the human mind may have been pushed close to its limit.
Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Article in Press)
A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation
Jonathan Huebner
Abstract
A comparison is made between a model of technology in which the level of technology advances exponentially without limit and a model with an economic limit. The model with an economic limit best fits data obtained from lists of events in the history of science and technology as well as the patent history in the United States. The rate of innovation peaked in the year 1873 and is now rapidly declining. We are at an estimated 85% of the economic limit of technology, and it is projected that we will reach 90% in 2018 and 95% in 2038.
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[There have been several threads recently over at Majority Rights discussing “peak oil,” a predicted peak in worldwide oil production which some are claiming is imminent, which is expected to be pretty calamitous for our ability to sustain current high standards of living and perhaps to preserve societal modernity in general. If there’s anything to “peak oil” and the above Dienekes log entry Miss Jerah Kirby’s cracks about a return to a medieval existence may not have been mere idle sarcasm after all, figuratively speaking: it may not be out of the question that the spurt of unbroken living-standard increase we’ve known since the Industrial Revolution could level off—i.e., come more or less to an end—and with it the somewhat frenzied continual increase in wealth and rising living-standards we’ve lived through without interruption, and with that in turn, the frenzied, bewildering almost non-stop social and moral innovations known as modernity. The whole process of abruptly or gradually slowing down could conceivably return us not, of course, to Miss Kirby’s sarcastic mention of the “medieval period,” but to something morally and socially more similar to, say, the sixteen and early seventeen hundreds after we’ll have had time to “digest” modernity a bit and arrive at more rational attitudes and views than the breakneck speed of innovation has permitted us to do at any time since James Watt’s invention of the steam engine.]
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Long live Flanders!
Excuse me, the link I gave
Excuse me, the link I gave above to Dienekes’ blog doesn’t work. This should. (The other link I gave works—the one to the specific log entry I discussed, linked where I put the entry’s title.)
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Long live Flanders!
Murray’s last book
Murray’s last book (“Human Accomplishment” is I believe its title) made the same argument: that human achievement has slowed markedly since about 1850. Of course, the common propaganda is to the contrary, to the effect that we live in a gilded age of achievement, advance, progress, etc.
interesting…
… five and half years ago, someone wrote an article in a Canadian magazine, arguing that nothing new of much significance had been created since about 1955; that all of the things we think of as late-20th c. inventions – computers, TV, microwave ovens, etc. – were actually invented in the first half of the 20th c. (computers being just slightly after, in 1955), and that one could define the century from about 1850 (from electric light’s development) to about 1950 as being the period of the most rapid technological advancement thus far, but that since 1950, while we’ve refined things, tweaked them, made them faster and more efficient, etc., we haven’t come up with a whole lot of completely new inventions. I found this thesis fascinating, because, if true, the timeframe of decline in technological innovation would correspond almost precisely to the timeframe of Western civilization’s great moral and social decline, from the advent of rock’n’roll and the Sexual Revolution, and easy divorce, and women working outside the home, and Dr. Spock and his “don’t hit kids!” pseudoscience’s popularity, through the eras of radical racial and sexual egalitarianism, “gay rights”, multiculturalism, animal rights, and the demonization of white, males, straights, to the vicious anti-Christian order of today – these timeframes would more or less overlap. I can’t remember the article’s title or author, and it isn’t online at the magazine’s website, alas…
[B UPDATE, 11:48 pm EDT: the author’s name is Jay Teitel; the essay is called “Progress? What Progress?” in Saturday Night Magazine; unfortunately, it’s not online anywhere that I can find with Google or another search engine I tried; it was in the December 1999 / January 2000 issue of [I Saturday Night magazine (the cover is shown http://www.saturdaynight.ca/magazine/thisissue.cfm?issue_id=207 here, but the article isn’t linked, alas).
An excerpt:
In 1900, four of the greatest killers among human diseases were tuberculosis, pneumonia, syphilis, and diabetes. By mid-century, every one of these had been either eradicated or controlled. It didn’t seem outlandish, with that track record, for people to assume that by century’s end the greatest remaining killers – cancer, heart disease, stroke – would be rendered toothless. If you had told the average person in 1959 that by 1999 the number of people dying of cancer every year would be virtually the same, that the common cold would remain uncured, that a lethal new venereal disease would have appeared that would still be lethal after twenty years of research, they would have told you to take a Valium (invented in 1933). But that is, in fact, precisely what has happened.
Among the other ailments we’ve failed to cure in our half of the twentieth century are arthritis, asthma, and a host of other autoimmune conditions. By contrast, Frederick Banting et al. discovered insulin eight months after they set out to find it in 1921. Modern researchers did stumble on the cause of ulcers in the 1990s, but the cure, antibiotics, turned out to have been stumbled on first by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928. The most widely prescribed medicines today, analgesics, steroids, and antibiotics – were all developed in the first, not the last, half of the century.
The “invention gap” is prominent in the everyday, practical world as well. Look down at what you’re wearing. The zipper on your jeans was invented in 1913, the nylon in your sneakers in 1940. The Kleenex in your pocket? 1924. The microwave oven that heated up your roast-beef sub at lunch, 1946; the Pyrex dish it sat in, 1915.
Here are the birthdates of just a few more items you might have availed yourself of in the last twenty-four hours, not a few of which you might regard as things you couldn’t live without:
SOS pads – 1917
Dishwasher – 1914
Aluminum foil – 1947
Teflon – 1938
Plastic – 1900
Tupperware – 1948
Cellophane – 1912
Plexiglas – 1930
Vacuum cleaner – 1901
Paper towels – 1907
Hair dryer – 1920
Suntan lotion – 1940
Aspirin tablets – 1915
Contact lenses – 1877 (an honorary inclusion)
What items of similar ingenuity could we counter with for our half of the century? After a lot of rumination I managed to come up with these: the personal computer, the VCR, Post-It notes, and the stand-up toothpaste tube. This last is not facetious. In a recent survey a group of people were asked which twentieth-century invention they considered most indispensible to their lifestyle. The list included computers and VCRs. The winner? Scotch Tape (invented in 1930).
If the jury is still out it’s not arguing the facts of the case, but the verdict. The question isn’t if our talent for invention and discovery has gotten sidetracked on its way to the millennium, but why? And what can we do to get it back again?
Unlike Nietszche,
Unlike Nietszche, Kierkegaard was a Christian, and he also castigated 19th century Christianity, and for many of the same reasons.
As for today’s Christianity, and its peculiar variations, I attribute it to liberalism, and more particularly to liberals who confuse the values of liberalism with those of Christianity and then go about the business of conforming Christian theology to their internalized liberal values. They believe that once their church properly expresses liberal values, then it will be “truly Christian.”
Liberalism is also imperialistic: it invades all institutions that are vulnerable to its siren song, and then guts them of all content, reducing them to chimeras of their former selves and empty house organs for liberalism. Again, the Episcopal Church is a good case study of this process.
I read the comments also,
I read the comments also, and I was disappointed that most of the commenters misunderstood Mr Kalb’s central term, “Liberalism.” It seems everyone wants to construe it as some political program or set of policies or faction or party, instead of as an internalized way of experiencing and viewing the world that is actualized by implementing, prima facie rationally, abstract concepts like “equality” or “freedom.” So,naturally, they think that opposition to liberalism or an alternative to liberalism must be political, and soon follows empty talk of civil wars, revolutions, new parties, elections, etc.
I didn’t see a single comment (other than a single cryptic comment that cited the self-sacrifice of Jesus) that disputed, with reasons, the central thesis of liberalism as cited by Mr Kalb, that is, that personal preference is the highest good for the individual and that society should be structured to rationally accommodate all such personal preferences.
Fish rarely notice, if at all, the water in which they swim.
and so it goes…
… It indeed http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/07/20/samesex050720.html?print passed in the Senate, and http://www.canada.com/components/printstory/printstory4.aspx?id=4f1d4af8-3e69-443e-a067-93354b0ce8bc received royal assent, and is now Canadian law…
Are the homosexuals charitable and magnanimous, having achieved their victory? http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/jan/05011906.html Of course not ; http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/LondonFreePress/News/2005/07/21/1140503-sun.html not in the least…
Note what the CBC article above said:
[I B.C. Senator Gerry St. Germain, an outspoken critic of the bill, fears judges are determining policies that should be decided by conscience.
“If we don’t stop this … I know what the next steps are. Euthanasia. Decriminalization of marijuana,” said St. Germain.
In light of that statement, see http://antitechnocrat.net:8000/node/1363 this.
Marriage
A news report I saw on the Massachussetts experiment with “gay marriage” leads me to make one short comment.
In both Massachussetts and Ontario, with the advent of “gay marriage,” traditional heterosexual marriage, and all its artifacts, have been abolished.
Thus, birth certificates can no longer list a “mother” or a “father” (as if every child ever born didn’t have both a mother and a father). Of course, the terms “Husband” and “wife” have also been banished from the lexicon.
So, to those who ask “What possible effect does a gay marriage have on my life or my marriage?”, well, for starters, you’ll never be a “husband” or a “wife,” and you’ll never be a “father” or a “mother.” And your child, at least in Canada, will never be a “natural child,” it will forever remain a “legal child.”
“Gay marriage” is not an expansion of rights for gays; it’s the aboliton of traditional heterosexual marriage.
Legal Notice:
In a post by Will S.,it is falsely claimed Bishop T D Jakes,is member from anti-Trinitarian United Pentecostal Church,if you no writes an apology just now to Reverend Jakes,you will be object from a lawsuit by deffamation.