What an illuminating combination on today’s National Posts Letters and Comments pages. Several letter writers attempt to banish the pro-life position from Conservative policy by associating it with a religion, and especially Catholicism, on the unproven premise that no religious views belong in politics. Committed secularist (and committed Conservative) Hugh Buckley basically tells a previous letter writer, pro-life and Conservative Patricia Maloney, to go jump in the lake with her opinions. “The moral facts of abortion are not the purview of the state,but are the responsibility of religion and Ms. Maloney should look to her religion to rectify this tragic situation.” Now, as you can see for yourselves, Patricia Maloney wrote nothing about religion at all. Buckley assumes her motivation is religious in order to discredit her opinion. Another letter writer, Sybil Fretz, goes further. She assumes Maloney is Catholic, and launches into a list of Catholic politicians who supported abortion: the Trudeaus, Chretien, Mulcair. It is hard to know for certain what her point is, but I guess it is that Maloney is a hypocrite or at least inconsistent because she, a Catholic, differs from these other Catholics. It is an indefensible argument. In fact, it is not an argument at all. To state it is to demolish it.
More important is the two-part argument that goes: you must be religious to argue for life; therefore, your argument can be dismissed. Coincidentally, columnist George Jonas cleverly debunks this linkage on the facing page of the Post with a story of a female fish that bit his toe when he interfered with her egg laying, drolly noting, “I don’t even think the fish was Catholic.”
(Just how silly Fretz’s argument can also be illustrated this way: I think Fretz’s views have no place in the public square because I believe she is a lesbian. I believe this first because lesbians are usually pro-abortion. Fretz is pro-abortion, so could she be a lesbian too. And then there’s her name. It sounds lesbian. Not that there’s anything wrong with lesbians per se. But is public policy really the place for arguments motivated by one’s sexual desires?)
In fact, of course, lesbianism aside, the pro-abortion side is largely motivated by sexual desire—that is, by the desire to enjoy sexual activity unrestricted by the natural consequences attached to it by human biology. Should public policy really be argued on the basis of maximizing sexual pleasure without restraint?
Since neither Conservative supports the contention that religious motives disqualify political arguments, I won’t bother to refute it.
The second thing going on in these letters is what isn’t going on. Policy. Neither writer cited addresses the question. Regardless of the presumed religious motivations of pro-lifers, is it good for Canada to be ending 100,000-plus lives in the womb each year, both in terms of our population needs and our values around the dignity of human life? Suppose the Conservative government considered these questions and decided, entirely free of religious factors, that permitting and, indeed, financing abortions in this volume or at all is bad public policy (as Jonas the secularist argued in his first column), then what remain are tactical questions, chiefly: How do we change the mind of the Canadian public? But also, when do we do this? And how important is this compared with other policies? The idea that the unpopularity of a policy precludes it even from consideration is bad politics and bad Conservatism.
Vancouver Island Christian News 