Time Immortal

Warren Schmidt writes, in reference to this article:

Hi Ken and Grace,

How are you both? It’s been a long time since I’ve visited your site, although I really admire what you’ve done with it. I see you changed up the design a bit. I created a new blog at www.catholiccanada.wordpress.com, while keeping my old blog at Blogster going. The new one has mostly the same articles, and all the recent ones, but the new blog has more pictures, especially from Colombia, and is more visually appealing, I think.

I will keep you in my prayers as your due date and your first anniversary approach. Congratulations!

I’m settled in here in Windsor. The novitiate is going well. I find it hard to believe that I’ve been in Windsor for 2 months already!

More to the point of your post, yesterday was a sad day in Canada as Morgentaler received his Order of Canada. This is horrible and disgusting, and it was all done in secret — the ceremony was moved to Quebec City to lessen the inevitable scrutiny of having it at Rideau Hall, I’m sure. I don’t care what excuses the Governor General wishes to offer. There is no defense for awarding the country’s highest honour to a self-serving moral deviant like Morgentaler. He’s not out to help women; Morgentaler has earned more than $11 million from his macabre clinics, according to a Le Devoir study in 2002. I call that sickening!

A recipient of the Order of Canada here in Windsor (unfortunately I don’t remember his name) has begun a legal challenge of Morgentaler’s award. He’ll also return his medal, whether the award succeeds — that’s unlikely — or not. I commend him for making a statement. Anyway, there’s still a lot to be thankful for in this still-great country. Happy Thanksgiving if I don’t write to you again before then.

God Bless,
Warren

It is good to hear from you, Warren, and it’s great to hear that you’ve both begun your novitiate (that’s the first step on the road to becoming a priest, good Reader) in earnest and settled into Windsor. The new blog looks great, as do the pictures! Hopefully yours was a happy Thanksgiving.

Grace and I are doing well, for the most part. We’re counting down the days now: as can be seen above, the due date is nearly here, and we’re expecting that the little one will arrive a bit short of projections. One friend even suggested, in jest, that the situation had become a race between the wedding anniversary and the baby’s birthday, and that does indeed seem to be the case here. But the most important part, I think, is that Grace is doing very well, as she has been throughout this pregnancy. And it has been a great learning experience for me as well, and an opportunity to be a caregiver and a person of compassion. The baby also seems to be in good health, and we are waiting on its decision to get things moving, so to speak.

As to Henry Morgentaler, yes: it is both sickening and disgusting that he was awarded the Order of Canada, and then in secret. An argument could be made that the violation of several “norms” concerning the award says volumes about how unworthy the man is of the honour bestowed upon him: it is almost unheard of for an Order to be awarded with a less-than-unanimous vote by the award committee, and it is almost unheard of for an Order to be awarded outside of Rideau Hall. Both things happened in the case of Morgentaler’s award, however.

Still, even such things — though they are strikes against the overall process and against the award itself — do not erase the shame that Canada has brought upon itself by awarding this butcher anything more than a swift kick in the ass. That abortion hurts women and relationships has been amply demonstrated (see here, here, here, here, and here), and Morgentaler only helps to perpetuate a system that, when it does not inflict catastrophic physical or psychological damage on women, reduces them to little more that masturbatory objects for men to exploit, whose inadvertent fertility can be easily cast aside if appropriate emotional pressure is applied.

To say nothing of the fact that much of society — possibly even a majority in Canada, and definitely a majority in the United States — favours placing very tight restrictions on abortion service provision. Modern feminists, and pro-abortion adovocates (Morgentaler is certainly in the latter category, and may consider himself a member of the former for all I know), seem more and more out of touch with the opinions of the women they purport to represent and/or defend the rights of. This award, then, ultimately not only communicates the contempt of the Canadian state for those citizens of Canada who just happen to be women, but also communicates how very out of touch the Canadian state is with the opinions of women in Canada.

In addition to being a grave moral travesty, of course.

Good on your friend for taking a stand against this, and hopefully his legal challenge will amount to something. If not, it will serve only to de-legitimize the Order of Canada even further. But then, that might not be such a bad thing — some things deserve to wither and fade.

Canadians will go to the polls on October 14th.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will visit Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean early Sunday morning and ask her to dissolve the 39th Parliament, Canwest News Service has learned. Canadians will vote Oct. 14, after the shortest campaign permitted by law.

Harper will begin campaigning immediately after leaving the Governor General’s residence at Rideau Hall, touching down in at least two cities and possibly three before day’s end Sunday.

The general election will supersede four scheduled byelections — two each in Quebec and Ontario. Voters in three of those ridings were set to vote Monday.

Harper’s decision to ask for a general election ends one of the longest minority Parliaments in the country’s history.

So…majority this time ’round?

Former Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick, Gilbert Finn, has sent notice to the Prime Minister and the Governor General of Canada that he will be returning his Order of Canada in protest over Dr. Henry Morgentaler being inducted into the Order.

Finn was the second person of Acadian descent to be appointed to the office of Lieutenant Governor in New Brunswick, and held the office until 1994. He’s a respected businessman, and was the head of Assumption Mutual Life Assurance; his leadership transformed that business into one of the premiere companies in Eastern Canada.

He is joined in returning his award by the Directors General of Madonna House, a Catholic lay apostolate training foundation, who have personally returned the Order of Canada awarded to their foundress, Cathering Doherty (may she rest in peace), to Rideau Hall.

Now, I am not the occupant of Rideau Hall. Were I that occupant, however, I think I would at this point be questioning — deeply, harsly questioning — the wisdom of bestowing the Order of Canada on a man like Henry Morgentaler. Is it really worth decorating an abortionist when doing so will tarnish the decoration itself so profoundly?

Mind you, were I the resident of Rideau Hall, the closest Morgentaler would ever have gotten to the Order of Canada would have been the distance between him and the exhibit thereof in a museum somewhere. But that is another matter, O Reader.

Here are two examples of his salient, clear and rational thinking on issues facing Canada today.

First, on the nature of the committee decision that saw Henry Morgentaler awarded with the Order of Canada:

Like many, many, many Canadians, I took the appointment of Henry Morgentaler to membership in the Order of Canada — proclaimed on “Canada Day” — as a stick in the eye for everything we believe in. As a gratuitous insult to the memory of three million aborted babies.

It was intended as that.

…

A very dark thing was done, as such things are always done — in a very dark way.

Yet I think it may be for the best, in a longer view of things.

We might often grumble that the “ruling class” in Canada — the smug, self-serving, “progressive” political, legal, academic, and media elites, including that prime example in Rideau Hall — belong to some other world than the one from which they suck taxes. But seldom is there an event so stark, that we see them as they are. The Morgentaler award revealed that to so many Canadians.

The whole issue of Morgentaler getting the Order of Canada smacks of duplicity. It was obviously not a popular choice for many Canadians, and (what is more) the Governor General’s office had explicitly denied, back in February of this year, that he was being considered for the award.

The sudden reversal is enough to give one whiplash.

And as noted here and elsewhere, the decision to award Morgentaler — ostensibly for humanism — was not unanimous, a first for the committee that decides who does and does not receive the Order. At every step of the way, it seems, there has been a slippery, eel-like activity that has brought this travesty about, and perhaps that is somehow fitting for someone of Morgentaler’s character.

It’s still repugnant, and tells us something very troubling indeed about those who are “in charge” of this nation.

But then, we knew that much already from the travesty of the human rights commissions, and Mr. Warren has something very profound to say about them as well:

In the course of this last grim week, the Ontario government of Dalton McGuinty quietly announced a huge expansion of the , giving its apparatchiks enhanced powers of intrusion, removing the cap on fines, providing a new class of lawyers to assist in prosecutions, and opening 22 new “hearing and mediation rooms” around the province where these star chambers will conduct their quasi-legal proceedings.

As a writer who does not subscribe to the “politically correct” ideology, it is reasonable to expect that, sooner or later, they will come for me. Of course I also realize that, in making this statement, I will be mocked by the usual leftwing jackals. But in light of what has already happened in this province and country, my assertion is reasonable. Moreover, I write with the sincerity of a man who has already tasted the New Canadian tyranny, and the threat of imprisonment without due process, under the feminist rewrite of Ontario family law.

I was born a free citizen of the Old Canada, and before her God I declare, that I will go to jail rather than acknowledge the legitimacy of any “human rights” commission. I invite other journalists and indeed, every other Canadian, to declare likewise.

In the wake of Canada Day, one could not ask for a more stirring call to action than that; if there is anything left to feel proud of in Canada, it is that some Canadians — like David Warren, like Ian Hunter — are still able to articulate a clear moral standard in opposition to the received wisdom of the day, to the wind-blown sentiments of progressivism.

I take Mr. Warren’s closing sentences as my own here.

Update: Welcome, UnAborted readers!