In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Here’s a hot topic we’ve yet to discuss, IC — at least, it’s generated some serious heat for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,
sufficient to rate an article in the New York Times.
At issue is the government’s determination
to tie federal funding for youth job programs to the expression of politically
correct opinion. It’s about $113 million annually, give or take, and
approximately 70,000 jobs are at stake.
The Prime Minister dismisses the very
predictable negative reaction from Canadian conservatives as a “kerfuffle”.
Three Paragraphs, Four References
Here’s the actual text that is causing objections from organizations like the
Toronto Right to Life Association (emphasis mine):
“CSJ applicants will be required to attest that both the job and the organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.
The employer attestation for CSJ 2018 is consistent with individual human rights in Canada, Charter rights and case law, and the Government of Canada’s commitment to human rights, which include women’s rights and women’s reproductive rights, and the rights of gender-diverse and transgender Canadians.
The government recognizes that women’s rights are human rights. This includes sexual and reproductive rights — and the right to access safe and legal abortions. These rights are at the core of the Government of Canada’s foreign and domestic policies.”
Now, let’s at least give them credit for
full disclosure, IC. Three paragraphs, four plain statements that they’re
looking for approval from Canadians for their views about abortion, even if
that approval has to be obtained by coercion.
Wrong About Rights
Immanuel Can: Well, their account of “rights” is all wrong.
There’s no moral or philosophical rationale for it, nor any wording in any Canadian
rights documents that says there is a “right to life, liberty, property, transgenderism
and abortion.” No such right exists or has ever existed. And there’s no
rational argument for a basis for any such thing. This is smoke and mirrors. Or
rather, brimstone and deceit.
Tom: Well, thanks; I’ve got my title now. Yes, let’s concede that tying
the ability to earn a living to mouthing the right words goes back millennia,
and it’s always rank wickedness at the root. “Fall down and worship the golden image,” said Nebuchadnezzar, who had effectively just declared himself a god. Sometimes
you just can’t do that, even if doing so would make your life a whole lot easier.
And earning a living is really what’s at
stake here, though it’s employers rather than employees (so far) that are
required to attest to their ideological “orthodoxy”, as I understand it. But
take away a Christian employer’s ability to hire kids without compromising his
views, and those jobs are lost, largely to Christian kids, I’d estimate.
IC: I’d love to have the statistics on that. But I suspect they won’t be collected by anybody.
Nobody really cares if Christians get hurt. If recent foreign policy and
immigration patterns tell us anything, it’s that the government doesn’t care if
you are a perpetrator of crimes against Christians; you’re welcome. And if
Christians are dying by the hundreds of thousands overseas, our government
doesn’t care to prevent that by intervention, or to favor Christians as
refugees in order to save them.
The government’s just not interested in the welfare of Christians right now.
Taxpayer Dollars
Tom: That’s fair. And we’re not all that savvy about promoting our own
welfare. Some readers — even some Christian readers — may object that
it’s not ALL jobs that are at stake here, only a few student positions. Like
the thin end of the wedge is no big deal. Or some may say, “If Christian
employers want to hire kids, let them pay them out of their own pockets and
there won’t be any problem. Tapping into taxpayer dollars necessarily demands
certain restrictions.” What would you say to that argument?
IC: Well, so much for government representing and serving everyone. So much for equal human rights.
So much for fairness.
Tom: Yes. Canadians tolerate every sort of diversity except for diversity of opinion.
IC: Not only that, but it puts all such employers at a competitive disadvantage: they pay for what
their competitors get for free. And wages are their biggest expense.
It would also be interesting to see what would happen if an employer put a sign in
his window, “Jobs for Christians available.” That’s what he’d have to do, so
that Christian applicants would know they had a chance in running against those
who are subsidized by the government.
Tom: It would be entertaining to see the media hostility that would generate.
A Liberal Win-Win
The elephant in the room is the question of how exactly our next generation of
believing children is supposed to make a living (hint: a new sort of black market). The sort of compelled virtue-signaling we are currently seeing may only be restricted to employers, but extending it to employees takes only the stroke of
a pen. And if you think the private sector will play their cards any
differently than what they see coming down from the federal government, you
have another think coming.
IC: No, of course. For unbelievers, there’s nothing really at stake: bow to the idol at the
doorway, and enter smiling. They get to keep the benefits, and have their own
secret opinions. I guess the only thing they’ll lose is the best
employees; because Christian workers are notoriously diligent and honest,
compared to the masses.
Tom: From the government’s perspective, a small price to pay for the sense that you have
managed to control the opinions of an entire nation. Here’s what you get from
this initiative if you’re Justin Trudeau: (1) anyone who signs on has
implicated himself in the taxpayer-funded abortion travesty our government
currently sponsors; and (2) anyone who doesn’t goes on a long list of
potential enemies of the state. It’s win-win for the Liberals. You either make
unwilling allies of your enemies or you force them to “out” themselves. That’s
a pretty smooth move. Given the stakes, framing the pushback as a mere
“kerfuffle” is even more disingenuous.
Main Actors and Bit-Parters
IC: Is it that intentional and devious, do you think, or is it just
that the current government has no idea what it’s like to be a person with real
moral convictions?
Tom: Honestly? I have no clue. Logic suggests some of these initiatives
are diabolic, while others are just the usual suspects in government going
along to get along. Movements like the Third Reich, Maoism and Stalinism
depended on the cooperation of a host of what are often referred to as “useful
idiots” — people with careers and families to worry about that just went
with the flow and didn’t think about what was happening around them too much.
They just assumed that if the government and the media said, “This is the way
to go,” then that was the way to go. So it’s difficult to determine at any
given point in time which are the main actors and which are just the
bit-parters.
In terms of the net effect, does it really matter what the motive is?
IC: No. It doesn’t really change anything. Even if the government’s
actions are more clueless than malevolent right now, in net effect they’re
still prejudicial. And they’ve certainly set up the situation for somebody
else’s malevolent actions later, using the laws and data they have created.
A Question of Time
So what now, Tom? What do we do?
Tom: It’s an interesting dilemma. It starts with those beholden to the
government for their salaries, and it cascades down to anyone working for a
business sufficiently large that they have a locally-staffed human resources
department. All of that is already in play. For those folks, it’s already bow
or starve. But it will definitely expand to include everybody in every field of
labor who fails to take the pledge of allegiance to our new overlords. It’s
just a question of time.
So I appreciate the folks who are stepping up financially to take this sort of legalized discrimination into the Canadian
court system in order to apply for temporary invalidation of the guidelines. They’re only staving off the inevitable, but I think they’re doing Christians a service.
Nominally, at least, we still live in a democracy, which gives Christians the right to
express an opinion on this.
IC: You know, I shouldn’t look at this as “some strange thing” happening among us. But in a country so deeply shaped by Christian values, it’s hard to realize how normal it is for the world to hate us. But
the time must come when we are not at all popular or well-treated by the
world. And maybe that time starts now: who’s to say?
In any case, so long as we have means and a government system in which protest from the populace is part of the normal
business of politics, we should perhaps object. But we have not got an infinite
lease on that. And when our comfortable détente
with the secular government is gone, the last thing we should be is surprised.
No comments :
Post a comment