But It's The So-Cons Who Are Crazy

Reasonable accomodation:

A religious social conservative group is targeting 15 Conservative MPs who — at second reading — voted in favour of a controversial transgender rights Bill.

Canada Family Action (CFA), which claims to represent tens of thousands of Canadians, wants to stop Bill C-279, a private members bill introduced by NDP MP Randall Garrison, which would essentially protect gender rights via the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.

Well that's an even handed news story. Here is an excerpt from the actual bill:

Subsection 3(1) of the Act [Canadian Human Rights Act) is replaced by the following:

3. (1) For all purposes of this Act, the prohibited grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for which a pardon has been granted.

The wording seems perfectly unobjectionable. Who could be opposed to banning discrimination on the grounds of gender identity and gender expression? No doubt only a craven bigot. As with Section 13 of the very same Canadian Human Rights Act, the devil is in the interpretive details. The law is not simply what is written down by government lawyers and passed by legislators, it is what judges on the bench say the law is in a particular circumstance. 

At some point a judge is going to have to define what constitutes gender expression. Considering the products of modern Canadian law schools that's a thought that should fill ordinary people with fear. Keep in mind that Hugh Owens was charged with hate speech for quoting from the Bible. A Human Rights Tribunal decision that was initially upheld by the courts. People who can view quoting a foundational text of western civilization as a hate crime are quite capable of interpreting "gender expression" in a highly expansive manner.

Campaign Life Coalition has a pretty good run down on the potential fallout from this bill. If only a fraction of the potential harm they suggest comes through it is reason enough to oppose it. Government should not be in the business of telling private organizations who they can or cannot deal with. Every individual and every organization discriminates in someway. I discriminate by inviting only my friends to a party. An office building's management discriminates by allowing only people who work in the building, or those on business, to enter. When the government passes anti-discrimination laws it is dictating to private individuals how to run their private affairs. The state is deciding what motives and thoughts are legally worthy of respect.

If you regard an organization as being bigoted, then you have the peaceful tools of boycott and protest. To demand state intervention is to impose your views by force on others. It is social engineering passing itself off as compassion and enlightenment. It is also largely futile. Underpinning all anti-discrimination laws and tribunals is the notion that governments are wiser and more humane than the people. Such an argument is absurd in a democratic government where the legislators are drawn from the people. We get the governments we deserve. 

In the case of C-279 it seems we are a nation of gullible fools. There are already protections in the Canadian Human Rights Act on the basis of sex. This amendment would allow protection on the basis of personal feelings. If a man feels like woman, then the courts must respect that belief and accord them equal rights. This may sound absurd, but again remember that we are dealing with Canadian courts, absurdity is their special gift to the nation.

Canada Family Action has a campaign to name and shame the 15 Tory MPs who voted for C-279. You may want to take a look and see if your local MP has backed this proposed amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act. These members should be reminded that key to being a conservative is to conserve certain values, among those oddly enough is the right of women not be followed into the bathroom. I never thought I'd have to write those words, but we live in very interesting times.

As long time readers will know I'm not much of a social conservative. I must, however, reproach my fellow free marketers and say that we are often remiss in fighting back on cultural matters. Culture is far more important than economics for it is culture that determines economic systems. You cannot have a strong and vibrant economy if the family life of the nation is in tatters, no matter how low the taxes and how light the regulation. The progressives have an agenda to destroy the family as it is the ultimate bulwark against an all encompassing state. An individual in a loving and supportive family is unlikely to go running to the state for assistance.

Aside from the immediate danger posed by C-279 there is also the long-term repercussions. Creating a legal regime where men can feel like women, with nothing more than their feelings as proof, is one more step in the de-normalizing family life. It is one more barrier the state has removed from peering into the private lives of Canadians. 

 

Comments

[nomdeblog]

“You cannot have a strong and vibrant economy if the family life of the nation is in tatters.”

Correct! Which is why that culture will collapse eventually, like the Berlin Wall did.

The Arab Spring is about a culture collapsing because it behaves in an Islamo/fascist 2-class system that won’t work in a global economy with large populations. It will keep collapsing until the economy finds its equilibrium and has a strong enough middle class to support the recently explosive growth in population in the ME.

Economics drives culture/religion which drives politics. In Europe and North America secular extremist zealots (especially in the MSM and academia) have turned progressivism into a culture/religion which weighs down on the economy until people fight back and say “enough” of this. The economy will always dominate culture but there will be leads and lags where it appears to be the other way around and currently we have politicians trying to artificially change the economics and culture of the land. That won’t hold up any more than the Berlin Wall did.

From Breitbart: "Politics is downstream from culture".... it may be one of the most important phrases of the New Media Age, and it's vital that people understand it.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2011/08/22/Politics-Really-is-Downstream-from-Culture

[John Chittick]

Nomedeblog

Although admittedly sometimes difficult to separate, I think you might have it backwards. Culture trumps economics. The ME is now reverting to the retrograde culture of tribal Islamism which has held that region is near economic stasis since Mohammad. Most modern economic development in the ME has is roots in the Western (Judeo-Christian) cultural sphere from colonization, imperialism and more recently, global capitalism.

Similarly, the disintegration of Western culture has been from: replacing self reliance and thrift with altruism, state dependency and sloth; replacing individual rights with collective rights; replacing faith-based anthropocentric religion with faith-based green pantheism and anti-industrial statism. This has resulted in slower economic growth, politicized science and education, accelerated rent seeking, regulatory inspired stasis, and unsustainable and growing coercive leviathan.

The return to statism more resembling the historical norm of feudalism is approaching. Capitalism and liberty were a cultural revolution.

[nomdeblog]

“The ME is now reverting to the retrograde culture of tribal”

JC how is it reverting? It never left tribalism. It never created a middle class. To the extent it ever copied a Western system of government it was Nazi Germany and the USSR...2-class systems. No different than the tribal chief and the goat herders.

The only reason the ME looks somewhat like the West is because Western economic investment went in there and dug up their oil for them and left them a massive surplus so their Princes could buy our 747’s with mirrors on the ceiling.

The economic surplus in the ME was in the ground. So let's add a 4th dimension. It all starts with the ecology which leads to economics which leads to culture/religion which leads to politics.

Their Islamist culture never evolved in pace with their population exposure. They are still in a tribal mentality. We propped them up with our economic surplus. Ditto Quebec. That culture would just die out. But the economic surplus in the ROC props it up.

“Most modern economic development in the ME has its roots in the Western (Judeo-Christian) cultural sphere from colonization, imperialism and more recently, global capitalism.”

Exactly! That is outside surplus money that went into the tribal areas. Israel is the exception which has indeed utilized its reformed Judeo roots to change its tribal culture to allow it to adapt and hence Israel is an economic dynamo which is why Apple chose it as the first research lab to set up outside the USA. The key to all that is the separation of religion and state. Islamofascism does not do that, religion and politics are the same...e.g. the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Ditto the progressives let their culture/relgion drive their poltics. Climate change is their religion of redistribution and that religion and politics are not at all heeding to the separation of church and state which as you describe is leading to “the disintegration of Western culture” because the 2-class system of government in Europe and now under Obama is leading to massive debt which has to tap excessively into the private sector hence we have economic sclerosis.

That is all hitting the wall. The math is not working. The 47% (Mitt’s unfortunate but accurate term) in the cart is just too heavy a load for the private sector to pull. We're in for sweeping changes and economics will drive the culture/religion back to sanity. The politicians will be the last to catch up.

[ETAB]

I agree with nomdeblog. The ME never left a two-class or tribal economic and political infrastructure.

It was the West, which already had a middle class, ie, an economic/political non-hereditary class defined by the private individual freedom-to-generate wealth (and new technology)..that went into the ME, found the oil, extracted and processed it.

The ME did not and does not have the technology to do this. The Ruler Class simply used the profits/wealth, not to develop its own middle class of private small businesses but to subsidize, by distribution, the stable, no-change dependent lower class population. That population has grown, over the past four decades, beyond the carrying capacity of a Statist Redistribution Economy - and that's why it's imploding.

I also don't agree with John Chittick's explanation of the West's technological movt to the ME as 'colonialism, imperialism'. It was a diffusion of technology and could only take place by the West's actions since the ME refused to educate its own population to raise them up to take charge of the technology.

Ditto, I reject the putdown of globalism. Globalism is a natural growth of a modern technological and economic infrastructure. It is naive to think that with our information age, technologically advanced nations should deny modern technology to other nations because they 'didn't invent it themselves'.

I also disagree that we will return to statism, because it cannot, economically, support the world's population. Statism rejects individual freedom and innovation - and can only support no-growth size populations. It can't support growth or massive populations.

Certainly, we will go through phases of ATTEMPTING statism, for the desire-for-power, the power to rule over others, is a basic psychological characteristic, and we've seen Obama messiahs before and will see his pathology again. And, we'll see plenty of people focused on the desire to get something for nothing.

But, reality always trumps our desires and imagined utopian worlds. Reality says that magic doesn't exist; the economy trumps culture - and if your population is impoverished, then, no messianic Ruler's words mean a thing.

[John Chittick]

I don't disagree with either comment. To clarify, what little economic development that existed, thanks mostly to Western influence, is now, as a result of a return to more fundamental Islamist (cultural) ideology, on the the decline in the ME.

I stand by the Western creep back into statism, as with the brief exception of a few Thatcher/Reagan era setbacks, the road back to serfdom remains intact, even in Harper's Canada. "Reality" might trigger a financial collapse but fear and envy drive politics and the West has a solid record of giving up liberty for the false elixir of security. It wasn't liberty that followed the "reality" of runaway inflation in the Wiemar Republic.

[Cytotoxic]

The Western Progressive project has the wind to its back and fumes in its gas tank. All the culture in the world can't make up for being broke. This will precipitate a crisis. A real crisis and I think parts of the west will radically diverge. Some freer, a lot not. Parts of Europe are going to get really ugly.

It's not clear at all that the ME is turning to tribalism/Islamism. Only Egypt's revolution made it solidly worse off. And that could change.

[nomdeblog]

JC- “but fear and envy drive politics and the West”

That is what progressives with their identity politics and class warfare are counting on. And it will work until we go broke or the “we the people” wake up and say “enough”.

Meanwhile we place way too much trust in politicians ever leading us out of this mess, we have to decide we want to change back to a less interventionist government model and hire politicians to get us there; politicians do not lead, they follow ...us.

Most people intuitively know politicians don’t lead which unfortunately is why they don’t bother to vote. That has to change. Taxpayers need to get more involved politically especially locally where they can see and understand what is happening. That seems to be happening in the US with GOP Governors rolling back government bureaucracy.

Economics used to be able to quickly trump culture and thus downstream influence politicians more efficiently when the masses were all part of an agricultural age and everyone could understand investment. Investment was in the land, easily understood. But then along came a more complicated industrial age and now a digital or knowledge age and people can’t seem to understand what investment entails anymore.

Teachers whose very pensions are locked up in capitalist investments are teaching the classroom progressive anti-capitalist ideas. They can’t seem to connect the dots to their self interest. Because they don’t understand basic economics.

Cy -“It's not clear at all that the ME is turning to tribalism/Islamism.”

It’s not turning to it, the masses stayed tribal in their thinking thanks to Islam. And like our First Nations, tribalism is fine in small populations set apart. If you are saying that the ME with its recent massive populations can’t stay tribal and they might actually turn toward something that works (a dominant middle class where entrepreneurs can work freely in some form of democratic capitalism) then agreed, that will have to eventually happen.

Meanwhile let’s become oil independent because we don’t know the timing of how events will unfold in the ME.

[Leacock]

It is interesting to know that there is a website actively campaigning on the topic, the only other organised resistance to this Bill that I was aware of was Rob Anders' petition.