A couple of days ago I wrote a longer post about the way that religious believers have of hiding the real, religious reasons for their support for legislative programmes. They will bring up practically every conceivable reason for doing or not doing something except the one that is foremost in their minds, namely, that the things done or not done are mandated by their religious beliefs. This morning, in a special to the National Post, we are given another glimpse into this dark world where religious beliefs hide, beliefs which are reasonably thought to be the primary justificatory reasons behind certain legislative proposals, beliefs which are, all the while, carefully hidden from sight. We are invited to consider the vital importance of legislative proposals without being told why their supporters think them so important. And McKay (the author of the special to the National Post) heightens the sense of importance, by characterising the mood of the House of Commons after the vote on Woodworth’s Motion 312, as somber, almost funereal. “In fact,” as McKay tells us,
I said to a colleague it was like exiting a funeral. Conversation was muted. The shrillness that characterized the debate was silenced.
I have no way of telling whether this gives us an accurate assessment of the mood in the house, or whether this was simply the colour given to the scene by someone who was religiously committed to the proposal that had just been defeated. If it was the latter, as I suspect, McKay really should reconsider his role, for it is inappropriate, in a democracy, for religious opinions to be determinative of legislative outcomes. Take a look at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada page where the religious basis of the move to “fix” Canada’s abortion law is made very clear. At the same time, however, it is also disingenuously claimed that Motion 312 was “a motion that any Member of Parliament could have supported in good conscience. It was not a “pro-life” motion – it was a “humanity” motion.” The duplicity of that is clear.
My last post on this issue was fairly long; this will be relatively short and to the point. In a special op-ed to the National Post — a newspaper which itself tends to give liberal support to conservative religious causes — the Liberal Member of Parliament for Scarborough-Guildwood, John McKay, writes an article under the head of “A lost opportunity to fix our abortion laws.” He is, of course, speaking about the defeat of the Woodworth motion to strike a parliamentary committee to define the beginning of personhood, which he describes in the following way:
The motion was really nothing more than a carefully worded and quite innocuous attempt to fill a legal void left by the Morgentaler decision. The Supreme Court had anticipated that its decision would unbalance the law and the various rights claims, and therefore specifically asked Parliament to respond. But the rhetoric over the motion was amped up so much that it became a litmus test for one’s position on abortion rather than a discussion on when life should be recognized in law.
Now, I don’t pretend to be a constitutional expert. However, it is not at all clear that what McKay says is correct. It is not at all plain that the Supreme Court (in R v. Morgantaler anticipated an imbalance in the law that needed to be righted by Parliament. Nor is it at all clear that such an imbalance exists now. Indeed, in the written judgement of one of the Supreme Court justices,
[t]he decision whether to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision, a matter of conscience. I do not think there is or can be any dispute about that. The question is: whose conscience? Is the conscience of the woman to be paramount or the conscience of the state? I believe, for the reasons I gave in discussing the right to liberty, that in a free and democratic society it must be the conscience of the individual.
In a later case brought before the court, Trebley v. Daigle, it was determined that the foetus had no standing as a person in Canadian law. There is simply no obvious reason to believe that these judgements are wrong, and that women should not be left to make these decisions for themselves without the intervention of the law.
In other words, contrary to John McKay’s claim in his contributed op-ed to the National Post, Canada’s abortion laws do not need to be fixed. Indeed, it is justly held that the decision whether or not to abort should be left up to the individual judgement of the woman concerned. There is nothing, to use McKay’s word, innocuous about a legislative proposal which is designed to take that judgement away from women and hand it to others. But that is just what John McKay, and a host of other evangelical members of parliament, want to do. For, amongst Liberals, John McKay is exceptional in that he is an evangelical Christian, regularly attends prayer breakfasts for MPs, and, as a Christian, clearly would like to see the laws acknowledge the personhood of the foetus.
The problem is, of course, that there is no bright line in the course of the development of the foetus, such that we can say with reasonable certainty that on one side the foetus is not a person, and on the other it is. And that is precisely the murky ground in which people like McKay would like to ensnare us, for once we acknowledge that there is an issue here in need of settlement, the logical step would be the Catholic one, of claiming that personhood begins at conception, and this would rule out not only abortion, but the “morning after” pill, the IUD (or intra-uterine device), and other means used to prevent implantation of a conceptus in the uterus. Thus we would be back to the straightforward criminalisation of abortion, and perhaps also of the birth control methods just mentioned.
The dishonesty behind McKay’s lament about Parliament’s failure to “fix” Canada’s abortion laws is palpable. He does not point any of this out. He merely tells us that the law needs “fixing,” without telling us what about the law needs to be “fixed,” nor what the implications of trying to “fix” this aspect of the law would be. Again, we have a Christian hiding behind his role as an MP and a maker of laws, without so much as mentioning the religious presuppositions which are driving his appeal. Much of his op-ed piece is devoted to describing the somber attitude of the members as they left the house after defeating Woodworth’s bill. He ends with these words:
Parliament was asked to speak on when life begins, and it refused. Maybe at some level the sombre atmosphere exiting the Chamber reflected more than merely friends and colleagues being at odds with each other. Maybe it reflected MPs’ realization that they had just taken themselves out of a very important game.
The problem is that he nowhere tells us why he, in particular, thinks of it as a very important game. Indeed, he doesn’t think this is a game at all. As a member of an evangelical church in Toronto there is no doubt that he has to give an accounting of himself to his fellow-believers. This is one way to do it, and we can imagine how pleased they will be to read his op-ed piece in today’s newspaper.
They should be more concerned about the disingenuous way in which McKay is carrying out his Christian mission. We should not have to search for McKay’s Christian credentials. They should be stated as a competing interest. His failure to do so says more about McKay and his intentions than does his article. He deprecates the polarisation over this issue, but it is his kind of dishonesty that contributes to it, for it is clear, simply in his failure to say what about Canadian abortion law needs “fixing”, in his judgement, that he occupies a position which is the polar opposite to the one in which it is held that reproductive decisions should be left in the hands of the individual, and that the law should not interfere with those decisions. He should not be surprised to find, in the polarised black-and-white moral world in which he dwells, that people are deeply suspicious of his intentions, and of the intentions of others like him who represent Christian dogma on the issue of the moment when personal life begins. The dishonesty of McKay’s position should be obvious, and it is to be deeply regretted that Christians think it appropriate to act in this deceitful way.
There is no “moment of conception”. It’s a long complex process from the time the electron cloud of the sperm approaches the electron cloud of the egg, to implantation in the uterine wall.
An “entity” with no neural tube is no “human being”. It’s a “potentiel” human being.
Most abortions are not “moral choices”. Assuming there is even “such a thing”, they are acts of desperation, and THAT has been proven. A position of “desperation” does not allow for a “free moral choice”.
Realbuckyballs. You really do need to make an effort to cite evidence in support of these claims:
I should think that most abortions are not acts of desperation at all. A woman chooses even before she becomes pregnant that she is not prepared to raise a(nother) child so, if the thing happens anyway, say her birth control fails, then the abortion is a logically derived correction in her life plan.
It’s only a moral choice if you believe that the foetus is a person, which it isn’t.
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The “big deception” of the moment here in the USA is that excessively wealthy and excessively compensated individuals and corporations with excessive tax loopholes are “job creators” and that all of these groups should continue to have their current tax cuts extended as well as to have additional tax cuts so “they can create even more jobs”. All evidence is to the contrary for as far back as measurements have been made correlating corporate and high income individuals’ taxes with job creation.
It seems to me that many conservative political positions are taken from “principles”, whether biblical, theological or ideological and whether from an earlier era or from our own. And it seems most liberal positions are taken from “what works best”. It is clear that the state making decisions about individual liberties rather than the individual does not work best. It never has, never will and can’t. Yes, but a conservative would reply: it’s the principle of it, never mind the science or the individual liberty question and never mind any question that conflicts with their sacred “principle” however it is derived.
Here the principle is “no new taxes” whether it wrecks the government, the economy or people’s lives; the results don’t matter, it’s the “principle”.
Conservatives can hide anything behind that stratagem and facts become unnecessary. All they have to do to keep in line their followers (many of whom rely on “faith” in their politicians) is to “prove” that their opposition is “unprincipled” and therefore “other” and “evil”.
I suspect Canada in not plagued by as much faith based politics we have here. We have a sitting Congressman, Todd Akin of Missouri who is running for senator and he believes there is a distinction between a “legitimate” rape and some other undefined rape, where in a “legitimate” rape the woman’s body actively prevents pregnancy and hence no child results, so abortions in the case of rape are unnecessary. He also made remarks in a 2008 speech on the House floor that doctors who provided abortions are terrorists and suggested that it was “common practice” for them to be “giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant.” He sits on the Science, Space and Technology Committee!
Please pity us and keep up your good fight.
Well said, Eric.
I’m in two minds about religious beliefs affecting public life. As a god free person I distrust the value of religious views… and yet in practice I suspect anyone who has a firm position on anything. Whether it is religious views, left or right-wing politics, AGW or AGW critics, philosophical positions or even most charities. It seems to me that most of these people have opinions rather than any reasoned position. Opinions which are often unexamined in any meaningful way, yet most of us have them in some parts of our lives and each of us feel the need to champion our opinions in public debate.
I suppose that religious opinions tend to be hardened into faith by repetition and social pressure, which makes religious opinions infexible. But I would like to see rather more humility and doubt in public discourse and more open-ended debate. Well, I can dream can’t I?
Eric,
Do you think that these people are consciously deceitful? I’ve met people who have lost their faith but still insist that a foetus is a person. They don’t believe that it has a soul but still think it should have human rights.
Why is it “inappropriate, in a democracy, for religious opinions to be determinative of legislative outcomes?” If it is a democracy, then shouldn’t people be allowed to vote their own consciences? And if someone like John Mckay has an opinion about a matter such as abortion, should he argue that the civil laws of Canada should conform to a divine standard of morality, or should he try to find a secular rationale for the proposed legislation? And if he takes the latter course, is he being disingenuous by “hiding the gears and levers of belief”?
Kevin, I think that many of them are. For instance, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is on record — don’t ask me to find it at the moment — as using secular argument quite consciously as a technique of getting their real point — which is a religious one — across. That doesn’t mean that everyone who uses secular arguments is deceitful. Of course not, but very often I think it is quite consciously so, and this becomes very evident from the way that arguments are used which are known to have been effectively rebutted. Jose Pereira is an example of this, and there are many others. Margaret Somerville is often deliberately misleading in her arguments against assisted dying, for example.
Of course, there are some, like Christopher Hitchens, who rhapsodises on his newly born daughter’s ears, and refers equally rhapsodically on sonograms of his unborn child, who are not being deceitful, but are, I think, influenced far more than they would like to think by abandoned religious convictions and quite sentimental attachments to their own wanted children, who cannot see someone coldly aborting the potential that is obviously there when you have spent the nine months of expectation and then hold your own child in your arms. The problem is that it is hard to separate here the joyful expectation of a child from the other factors involved in bringing a child into the world, factors which might very well militate against doing so in some cases and for good reasons.
As Kelly Hills says in an op-ed in yesterday’s Guardian, referring to Mehdi Hassan’s claim that being pro-life doesn’t make him less of a lefty (see the New Statesman here ):
Precisely! And this is just what Hasan and Hitchens miss, that they are speaking from a “faith” standpoint (Hasan almost certainly is, in any event), whether religious or not, the belief that this child matters — because it did, to them.
Bob the answers to your questions:
are: (i) no; (ii) neither; (iii) yes.
No, legislators should not simply vote their consciences, if, in fact, they believe things which others are not bound to believe. In other words, no one should be forced to act according to someone else’s conscience, unless it is a matter of harm to others.
Neither. No religious person has a right to impose his suppositious “divine standard of morality” (for which there can be no evidence) on others, nor should he try to replace this with a rationale which backs up his religious presuppositions. He should argue the case as a strict matter of public policy, and what the coercive power of the state can legitimately impose on its citizens. The use of the state’s coercive power is something that can only legitimately be used to protect citizens from harming each other, and there is no sense in which it makes sense to speak of a foetus as a citizen.
Yes, he is being disingenuous, if his rationale is just another way of putting his religious beliefs, and not a genuine attempt to determine the limits of the state’s legitimate use of coercion.
Bob,
Would you want legislators from a religion other than yours to be able to impose their beliefs on you with no justification other than their religion proclaims those beliefs to be true?
Bob: Divine standards? As interpreted by who? You? Do you know, Bob, that there are plenty of religious people and plenty of religions who do not believe in your “divine” interpretations with regards to abortion?
Let’s be clear: THERE IS NO DIVINE. Not. One. Thing.
That which you call divine is some repressed, bitter, hollowed-out shell of a person with zero empathy or humanity trying to impose their personal opinion on the rest of society.
Don’t you DARE try to impose “divine” anything in my secular government, Bob.
There is no god, and I’ll thank you to quit trying to speak for an imaginary creature.
Every two years, I vote in state legislative elections and in my U.S. Congressional district (House of Representatives) election with the expectation that the state legislator or Congressperson who is elected (either with or despite my vote) may end up voting his or her “conscience” some of the time or much of the time, and where that “conscience” will be, to a greater or lesser degree, unconstrained by evidence and dispassionate reason.
I think it would be unrealistic for me to expect that my elected legislator would refrain from voting his or her conscience when the going gets tough and when the arguments for and against a particular bill are polarized and entrenched. But I do expect to be able to get a good inlking, during election campaigns, about which candidates seem most likely to “vote their consciences,” and to do so in directions close to 180 degrees opposed to what I’d prefer.
I am particularly watchful for signs of religious conscience as a motivator for a legislator or a candidate. When I see good signs of it (e.g., too much “I am a person of faith” goddy talk to be shrugged off as lip service or insincere pandering, or an earlier voting record in the legislature), I vote against those candidates, and when some of them get elected anyway, I do my best to fight the laws that they try to enact with their religious “consciences” as the primary justification. But I’m enough of a realist to concede that many legislators will consistently vote their consciences, regardless of what reason and evidence should impel them to do, and even if a significant minority of their constitutents would prefer that they not be led by their consciences in a particular direction.
I would say that the religious ‘conscience’ and the secular ‘conscience’ both lead to tyranny, in their own ways. The secularists or atheists here, have yet to realize this, and so persist on with their secular values, not realizing the tyranny of the state is upon us.
The religious see the tyranny of the state and think that it needs a good dose of God as the cure, and it’s their misguided sense of morality which leads back to the tyranny of Holy Rome or Holy Mecca. No surprise that whenever secularism is in trouble, the religious turn to the only morality they know, the slave morality of their scriptures.
I think most of you still believe you’re living in a ‘free’ society, and if you happen to be rich enough or educated enough, then no doubt you will be rather comfortable and have that sense of freedom. But it is not the truth. Those who really care about truth and freedom, must start to realize the reality of the world, and only then will they see the real enemies.
I suspect that Egbert is right. Much of the world lives under tyranny, either state tyranny, religious tyranny or an actual tyrant. In some parts of the world the tyranny is *comparatively* benign and as long as you live within the constraints of that particular society you don’t feel as if you are in bondage. Arguably some form of tyranny is a practical *necessity* because there are simply too many people, living too closely together, too dependent on each others activities, for any significant number to ‘do their own thing’. You wouldn’t expect to drive on the ‘wrong side’ of the road, would you?
One difference in tyrannies which I think Eric is reaching for though is that in a god-driven tyranny (either a theocracy or a democracy where many people have religious beliefs) when the leaders justify their activities by ‘because God says so!” there is no appeal short of schism and bloody uprising or the very, very, slow overturning of religious principles. I’m sure you can think of countries where this is the case.
A tyranny (democratic or not) which does not reach for Holy Scripture in every argument has a greater chance of making decisions in the light of natural events, and if not willing to change may still be convinced by reasoned debate. It can still be a slow slog, but at least the possibility of change exists.
I think there are a number of misunderstandings here about the uses of coercive power, and Egbert is, I think, unhelpfully speaking of tyranny, when he should really be making some finer distinctions. That, for example, since 9/11, there has been a loss of liberty in the great democracies is, I think, undoubted, some of them unfortunately necessary for the detection and prevention of terrorism. Along with that go all the different kinds of surveillance technologies that are available to governments and law enforcement agencies. So there is certainly truth in the claim that there has been a severe threat to personal liberty over the last decade or two or more, even in the Western democracies. That is something about which AC Grayling has written helpfully in his little book Liberty in the Age of Terror, where, I might point out, he takes John Gray to task for his unhelpful pessimism and lumping all things carelessly together, so that it is hard to tell religion from politics and tyranny from freedom. But if one were to go to, say, Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, or Uganda under Idi Amin, we would have a clearer idea about the nature of tyranny and its unlikeness even to the threatened liberties of the West.
It is important to see that the political problem of problems has to do with the use of coercive power, something which, as Hobbes pointed out, is in need of control and justification. I don’t think we want to take Hobbes’ advice on this, but the problem he faced was very real, and he lived at a time when there was a problem with the use of coercive power, and no clear understanding of how this could be managed effectively and justly. It’s still a problem, of course, and will always be, so that there is no sense that we will ever achieve that blissful state of perfect freedom, where nothing that we want to do is restricted, and everything that is harmful is rendered ineffective. Plato thought, because that was his experience, that democracy led to tyranny, but it is not clear that there cannot be constitutional controls (if not guarantees) which will limit the misuse of coercive power by governments. There are no guarantees here, and constitutional arrangements can subverted by forces that are sometimes overwhelming. Nevertheless, there are arrangements that can contribute to greater freedom which do not unnecessarily limit the freedoms of citizens. As John Stuart Mill understood, actions which cause harm to others are justly restricted, but, where no one is harmed, the use of the law to restrict freedoms to do such things is unjustified.
Of course, some people see the mere existence of certain things as harmful, as is the case with those who support blasphemy laws, laws regarding pornography, laws against homosexuality, adultery, divorce, and many other things having to do with sex (there are still states in the US which outlaw sodomy, which is generally understood to be anything but male-female genital to genital contact), but in general there is no reason to use coercive force where harm is held to lie in the existence of such things as religious mockery, pornography or various consensual sexual acts. That is why secular laws, that is, laws not based on particular beliefs, are to be preferred to laws which reflect the beliefs or preferences of only a segment of the population, no matter how big.
This is where the very slippery concept of human rights comes into play. It is hard to demonstrate that there exist such things or states as human rights, but it is a good shorthand way of speaking about the limits set to the legitimate use of coercive power. Positive rights “to” something are a bit more difficult to establish or defend. Thus, for example, while women should have the right to live as they wish, wherever they are, regardless of the feelings of those who may find some of those wishes either blasphemous or licentious, to say that they have a right, say, to meals of a certain quality, healthcare, security in old age, education to post-secondary level, etc., is a more difficult set of rights to justify or to satisfy. Nonetheless, the more extensively a society can provide for the needs of its citizens, without endangering the initiative that adds to the spectrum of life opportunities that people in that society will enjoy, the better, overall, life in that society will be taken to be.
But it is hopeless just to talk wildly of tyranny without any sense of what constitutes tyranny and what it is about it that causes it to be so. Religion is one thing that we do know leads to uses of coercive power where none is needed, and that is why it is so important to keep a check on religious voices seeking greater control over the lives of others. But those who think that unbelief cannot also lead to tyranny should recall, with appropriate regret, that Stalin or Mao’s lack of religious belief did not lead them to act with any greater humanity than so many religious tyrants who preceded them. Nothing that I have said is supposed to suggest that atheism is a panacea for the problems caused by the inappropriate uses of coericive power, and no one should think that religion is alone responsible for the crimes against humanity of the past. However, it seems to me, as DiscoveredJoys has said, that where argument, based on reasoned premises, and not on religious texts or beliefs, is the source of political enlightenment, we stand a better chance of controlling the inappropriate or excessive uses of coercive force. I would not want to make a stronger claim than that.
For the record I would want to state that I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state. The role of the state is strictly to maintain order in society, to keep people from hurting each other. The government cannot legislate matters of religious doctrine or belief.
That being said, the whole reason we have government in the first place is precisely because people do have a natural propensity to hurt each other, and at times will even use the levers of power to do so. Genuinely devout religious believers should have a desire to see justice established in society. If you exclude religious motivations from the political process, then what is left? Power and money! And in our modern plutocracies God only knows how few politicians are motivated by conscience! The U.S. Congress certainly doesn’t seem to be in any danger of being overwhelmed by a surge of religious conviction. (Will Rogers famously quipped, “It’s the best Congress money can buy!”). Perhaps the members of the Canadian Parliament have cleaner hands.
If the primary duty of the state is to preserve human life, then the question of whether or not a fetus is a human being can hardly be ignored by the electorate.
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” (Edmund Burke, Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 1774).
People are being jailed here in England for making offensive remarks on twitter. I mean, how much more crazy do things need to get before people start opening their eyes? It’s not that I’m growing increasingly bizarre or controversial, it’s that people are falling further and further into denial. The EU was last week awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I mean how much more absurd do things have to get before people smell a rat?
Bob: How about a genuine desire to help one-another? Never thought of that one, did you?
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison…this list goes on and on. Non-religious men who banded together to create a secular government not to glorify god but to help their fellow humans. None of them expected rewards in heaven. Jefferson specifically disavowed the concept of an immortal soul.
Please crawl back under your rock, Bob. Your presence is making me physically ill.