Not Since Canaanites Gathered Around the Altars of Baal 3,000 Years Ago

In just one sentence, Calgary Herald columnist Nigel Hannaford has put abortion into historical perspective: "Abortion has been around forever of course, but not since the Canaanites gathered around the altars of Baal 3,000 years ago has anybody actually defended child sacrifice as an intrinsically good thing."

The current abortion regime really is something extraordinary, unprecedented in Western Civilization. Like it or deplore it, abortion-as-we-know-it is not just an incremental adaptation of previous practices.

Calgary Herald
Social conservative face shown at last
By Nigel Hannaford

Talk about stirring things up. After Finance Minister Iris Evans delivered off-the-cuff comments about family life, much combustible gas erupted from the bottom of the pond as the left jumped all over her. Yet, all she said was that going to work and letting somebody else raise your children wasn't ideal. Wow. There's subversive.

Come on. She didn't say working couples were wicked, and until quite recently a parent at home for the kids was what just about everybody did. More would do it today if they could afford it. But, the left piled on. Liberal Leader David Swann called it "outrageous," a "black eye for Alberta." The NDP said she was out of touch with reality, and much else besides. It was an Alberta example of what the left everywhere loves to do: Use walls of sound to try to shut down opinions it doesn't like. Often, these are positions that have been mainstream for centuries, if not eons. In the case of Evans, it's state-run day care that's the left's real issue with her. Socialists everywhere dream of when all little kid-dies are dropped off at the government mind-meld facility, where people who really know how to make children into good, compliant citizens, will have their way with them. (Not a new idea, by the way: Prussian academics were promoting it 130 years ago.) So, how dare Evans encourage parents who want to do the job themselves? What next? Kind words for home schoolers?

The left has made effective use of the co-ordinated yell to topple one motherhood issue after another as those of us who have lived long enough can attest. Oddly, the first to go was the one that should have been impregnable: The bond between mother and unborn child. But, somehow enough women became persuaded that it wasn't a baby they were carrying, just fetal tissue, and that their choice of convenience superseded its right to be born. Abortion has been around forever of course, but not since the Canaanites gathered around the altars of Baal 3,000 years ago has anybody actually defended child sacrifice as an intrinsically good thing.

Bizarre, but now a politician who so much as proposes limits on abortion, makes him- or herself a magnet for vile personal attacks. So did those who argued without success that thousands of years of past practice and the consensus of the world's religions suggest the institution of marriage was and should remain exclusively heterosexual. And for environmental conservatives, there's the ultimate slander - to be called Nazis. Ellen Goodman for instance, a liberal columnist who has many imitators, wrote in 2007: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers." Let's see. Tim Ball is like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Of course not. However, no less a Kyoto skeptic than Stephen Harper (who in 2002 wrote in this paper that as environmental policy, Kyoto was "a fraud") has, since becoming prime minister, been obliged to prescribe policies he once scorned. Such is the power of the left's green scream.

Conservatives need to sort through their issues. The right has a long history of blending authentic truth with some mean-spirited attitudes: Liberty for some, but not for all; condemning people instead of behaviour, drive-by misogyny and so forth. The attitudes, they need to lose. However, they should have more confidence in their truths. Evans's family ideal is well-founded and requires defence, not excuse. Within its abilities, it should be her government's objective to use tax and benefit policies so Albertan families that want to keep one parent at home for the kids, have that choice. As for Alberta's left, Evans should remember a party that hasn't formed a government for 90 years could hardly claim to understand today's realities itself: Nor could one that not one Albertan in 10 will vote for. The noise is not coming from the moral high ground. The government shows its social conservative face? About time.