Bloggers note : extract from article::
While the ranks of abortion opponents traditionally have been dominated by religious Christians, it’s the pro-choice side that now channels the spirit of inquisition   

 https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jonathan-kay-why-progressives-desperately-stifle-any-dissent-on-abortion-even-from-elizabeth-may

Jonathan Kay: Why progressives desperately stifle any dissent on abortion (even from Elizabeth May)

While the ranks of abortion opponents traditionally have been dominated by religious Christians, it’s the pro-choice side that now channels the spirit of inquisition

Green Leader Elizabeth May, seen in Toronto on Sept. 3, 2019, has backtracked on earlier remarks concerning the possibility of allowing a Green MP to reopen the debate on abortion.

If a single politician can be said to symbolize the strange way we talk about abortion in this country, it would be Elizabeth May. Speaking to Vassy Kapelos of the CBC last week, the federal Green party leader said that her “personal hero” is “Jesus Christ.” Why?

 “Because he led a revolution that was non-violent. He inspired people for a mil … it’s been 2,000 years. I rely on … I rely on his advice. A lot.” On the other hand, May added, she is a fully committed supporter of abortion rights — a position she says she has maintained consistently “since I was, like, eight years old and realized what was going on when I heard my mother arguing with people about the issue.”

To the extent there is any contradiction in these two ideas, it is one of those officially permitted fudges that have been an accepted part of Canadian political life for decades. If Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin could be practicing Catholics while leading a pro-choice party, Elizabeth May should be allowed to have, and eat, that same cake.

It is one of those officially permitted fudges that have been an accepted part of Canadian political life

 

But things got more complicated on Monday, when that aforementioned Sept. 4 CBC interview was published. In it, May had been asked about the possibility of “a backbench Green MP (who) came forward and wanted to introduce a private member’s bill that reopened the (abortion) debate.”
“I could talk to them,” she answered. “I could try to dissuade them.

I could say it would be unfortunate … but I don’t have the power as leader of the Green party to whip votes, nor do I have the power to silence an MP … Frankly, I think that’s a good thing, because democracy will be healthier when constituents know that their MP works for them and not their party leader.”

In this regard, May was channelling the founding spirit of the Green party, whose oddball charm traditionally has been linked to the ideological latitude afforded its members, its tolerance of heterodoxy, and, sometimes, its flat-out weirdness.

 Certainly, there is no other federal party whose leader could survive politically after delivering a gonzo dinner speech about Omar Khadr to the parliamentary press gallery that sounded like something out of a Leslie Nielsen movie.

 May also once went on Twitter to tout crackpot warnings about Wi-Fi technology and household smart meters damaging our brains with “electromagnetic frequencies.” The only other Green party MP in Parliament, Paul Manly, won his B.C. seat after being bounced by the NDP for his hard-left views on Israel.

 The Greens have a tendency to give their folks a mulligan or two. And in this age of “cancel culture,” I respect them for that.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduces Vancouver Kingsway candidate Tamara Taggart at a rally in Vancouver on Sept. 11, 2019. The Liberals do not accept as candidates individuals who are opposed to abortion.

On the specific issue of abortion, you also could say that May was following the traditional spirit of Canadian politics more generally — at least insofar as that spirit existed before Justin Trudeau brought cancel culture to Ottawa in 2014. To their credit, both Chrétien and Martin recognized that abortion was a subject on which reasonable people may disagree, and generally tolerated the handful of pro-lifers within their caucus.


As recently as 2002, four Liberal MPs appeared on stage at the annual March for Life in Ottawa — which would be an unthinkable act of heresy under the leadership of Trudeau, who explicitly banned incoming anti-abortion candidates from his caucus.

May herself reflected this modern shift toward abortion dogmatism on Monday, when she shamelessly walked back every word she’d said to Kapelos about making democracy “healthier.” Just hours after the interview was aired, the Green party responded to the social-media backlash with a statement declaring that “there is zero chance an elected representative of our party will ever reopen the abortion debate.”

And when it was determined that two Green candidates had made extremely unambiguous declarations of pro-life beliefs on social media in their pre-Green years, a party spokesman used the same three words — the candidate “does not remember” — to describe the dreamy wormhole into which any memory of either thoughtcrime had escaped.

Trudeau explicitly banned incoming anti-abortion candidates from his caucus

For good measure, the party mandated that all Green candidates must “wholeheartedly agree that the abortion debate is closed in Canada.” And a Green party social media post went even further, declaring that Green candidates must additionally commit to “expanding” the right of women to abortions — which would be a tall order, given that Canada is currently the only country in the OECD with no abortion law whatsoever.


While the ranks of abortion opponents traditionally have been dominated by religious Christians, it’s the pro-choice side that now channels the spirit of inquisition. An observer from any other country would find it completely bizarre to watch a Canadian national party leader pivot 180 degrees on a profound bioethical issue that she claims to have thought deeply about since tugging on her mother’s hem 57 years ago.

 But in Canada, this kind of abortion confession kabuki now is seen as perfectly normal. When it comes to “electromagnetic frequencies,” Israel, or Omar Khadr, let a hundred flowers bloom, we say. But on the existential question of when human life begins, on which philosophers have disagreed since time immemorial, there’s “zero chance” of discussion.

A March for Life rally winds its way through the streets of Ottawa on May 10, 2018. Julie Oliver/Postmedia News

It should be said, at this juncture, that there really are some issues on which “zero” discussion is a perfectly defensible policy. I don’t have much problem with party leaders putting the kibosh on private member’s bills demanding the “truth” about how the Twin Towers fell, or quoting long passages from the oeuvre of David Irving. But abortion doesn’t fit at all into this category, because opposition to the current state of Canadian law on abortion isn’t exactly a fringe position. Just the opposite: Polls show that a majority of Canadians — 61 per cent, according to a 2018 Angus Reid survey — agree either that (a) “there should be some laws on abortion in Canada, especially in areas such as late-term pregnancies” (49 per cent of all respondents); or (b) “we should have abortion laws in Canada which severely restrict availability of abortion except in cases of sexual assault” (12 per cent).

These numbers haven’t changed all that much in recent years, which will seem surprising to those Canadians who have followed the issue casually in the media, and so may be under the impression that Canadians overwhelmingly support a hardcore libertarian legal regime permitting unfettered access to abortion, at any stage of gestation, for any reason whatsoever. As noted above, this extreme libertarian approach, embraced emphatically by the Liberals, Greens and NDP, actually represents a minority view in Canada. I’m pro-choice in my own personal outlook. But as a journalist, I find this state of play to be shocking: I know of no other policy issue that features such a massive disjunction between elite-enforced orthodoxy and the actual views of ordinary Canadians.

I know of no other policy issue that features such a massive disjunction between elite-enforced orthodoxy and the actual views of ordinary Canadians

Of course, my own profession is much to blame. While pro-choice orthodoxy may be embraced by only 39 per cent of Canadians, the figure among prominent journalists in major urban media centres is closer to 100 per cent. To the extent that the abortion issue is covered at all, it is usually so that pundits can raise the hue and cry over the latest evidence that those troublesome 61 per cent are trying to assert their hillbilly concerns. In July, when an anti-abortion movie named Unplanned played a week-long run in about 50 Canadian theatres, Toronto Twitter responded as if Triumph of the Will were playing to sold-out goose-stepping audiences at the Rogers Centre. A headline featured in one local outlet was — and I am not making this up — “Unplanned Is a More Terrifying Movie Than You Think.”


That’s why it’s absurd for the Greens to tell us “there is zero chance an elected representative of our party will ever reopen the abortion debate.” The debate doesn’t need to be reopened because it never closed — as evidenced by the fact that May herself was forced to call herself a liar for words she uttered only last week. It’s just that it’s a very different kind of “debate” than that which you see in countries with less parochial and clannish political cultures. The Canadian abortion “debate,” if you can call it that, isn’t about the rights of women or unborn children. It’s about enshrining a fashionable minority viewpoint as immune from critique.

It’s about enshrining a fashionable minority viewpoint as immune from critique

In the countries of Europe, national laws typically stipulate that a woman can get abortions for any reason until X weeks of gestation, after which she must get a doctor’s permission. And so a national debate might centre on whether X should be 16 weeks, or 18 weeks, or 20, or 22. Which is to say, a very real and important debate about the difficult question of how to balance the rights of a woman with the rights of a fetus. In the hyper-liberal democracies of Scandinavia, this debate goes on all the time without any of these countries ever transforming into the sort of misogynistic hellhole that, Canadians are told, will be their inheritance if they ever utter so much as a syllable about implementing any kind of abortion law.


Canada’s own bizarro-world abortion debate — which plays out every election cycle, especially when a progressive party has a scandal to bury — is actually a meta-debate about whether anyone should even be allowed to hold a real debate about abortion in the first place; and what political consequences should befall those who dare raise a peep about it: should the aborto-heretics be thrown out of caucus and excommunicated altogether … or merely made to submit to a humiliating confession ritual? On your typical CBC panel discussion on the subject, that pretty much defines the acceptable range of viewpoint.

Pro-choice and pro-life demonstrators rally outside Brantford-Brant MPP Will Bouma’s constituency office in Brantford, Ont., on May 13 2019. Brian Thompson/Postmedia News

At various Canadian universities, student governments have tried to ban pro-life groups from campus for years, on the theory that advocating for restrictions on abortion is tantamount to misogynistic hate speech. And to some extent, the climate in Ottawa is a natural consequence of these graduates growing up and imposing similar taboos on the world of politics more generally.


 In 2017, the Liberals and NDP claimed that a woman with pro-life views wasn’t fit to chair a House of Commons status-of-women committee. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has promised repeatedly that he wouldn’t legislate on abortion. But that didn’t stop a Maclean’s writer from warning us of the sinister agenda lurking in the hearts of Christ’s soldiers.


 At the Toronto Star, the newspaper’s most conservative columnist, Rosie DiManno, actually felt compelled to write a column insisting that Unplanned shouldn’t be banned from public exhibition. This is what now passes for conservative commentary on abortion: a defence of the right to even discuss the A-word.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer greets supporters in Trois-Rivieres, Que., on Sept. 11, 2019. Scheer has promised repeatedly that he wouldn’t legislate on abortion.

 

 

The party line on the enshrined view is that Canadian politicians are merely protecting a woman’s right to choose. In a country like the United States, where state politicians really are trying to roll back abortion rights, that is indeed an urgent task. But Canada isn’t the United States, and even a Conservative government is no more likely to ban abortion outright than it is to legalize a concealed-carry handgun law for every Canadian adult. And the pundits warning us hysterically of the horrifying contents of pro-life cinema, or the years-old content of a candidate’s Facebook page, know this full well.


The only thing that left-of-centre politicians and pundits are seeking to “protect” is their own self-pronounced monopoly on the conversation about abortion. And the reason for this ongoing culture-war stunt isn’t had to fathom: the statistics I’ve cited above aren’t exactly secret. Progressives know that once people in positions of power or influence — hey, even some no-name Green candidate out in the sticks  — start flouting the taboo against discussing abortion policy, it may become public knowledge that (audience gasps) there are millions of Canadian centrists who would openly welcome just such a discussion.


And if that should be allowed to happen, then — who knows — we may go down the same hellish road as Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. The word “terrifying” barely seems adequate.
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Jonathan Kay is Canadian editor of Quillette.