RULES AND RULER

December 28, 2003
Rules weren't meant to be broken
By TED BYFIELD -- Edmonton Sun

Canada's national newspaper of liberaldom, the Globe and Mail, has hailed the three Ontario Supreme Court judges who made the gay marriage decision as Nation Builders of the Year. They are lauded for courage, tolerance, sagacity and other fine qualities, and of course for "leading the way."

This implies that the Globe knows "the way," though Parliament has not decided the question and the polled support for gay marriage is in sharp decline.

No matter. The liberal assumption is always the same - that through ideological indoctrination and clever media manipulation, Canadian morality is being fundamentally improved. Intolerance is being prohibited. People are accepting what they previously rejected. Minds are being broadened. New rules for living are being legislated.

Oh yes, there will be hold-outs - pitifully narrow people, unable to cope with the new realities, entrenched in the values of yesterday with its prejudices, bigotries and hatreds. But these will dwindle away, leaving a new and enlightened populace, fashioned by the people who know into the utopian society.

So it has all been decided, except for one factor, which the moulders of the new society seem not to have taken into account.

Suppose that the Rules for human conduct - governing such things as marriage, sex, the raising of children, care for the aged, telling the truth, keeping promises, respecting human life - are not really of human manufacture at all. Suppose they are, as the old moralists said, like rules for the operation of a machine, the human machine, issued by the Maker.

If this were the case, if there is such a Maker, and he did issue the Rules, then all human societies would recognize them. The Rules would be much the same everywhere. Well, they are. Examine the moral codes of all unrelated ancient societies and the remarkable thing is not how unlike they are, but how similar.

Regardless of the society in which we were born, regardless of when we lived in it, we find much the same morality. We are supposed to keep promises, support our children, honour the aged, keep our hands off other people's wives and property, and so on.

Our judges, our luminaries of government and the media, our societal planners and other devotees of social revisionism plainly assume that these rules can be invented, repealed, changed at the will of a court. That is, they assume that the rules for human conduct are made by man, not for man. What they're doing, in other words, is grounded in a theology. If it's a true theology, all will go well. If not, things will start going very wrong.

We've already seen evidence of this. Back in the '60s, for instance, the gay lobby had the sodomy section struck from the Criminal Code, a clear victory. In the '80s they won wide tolerance, acceptance and respect for homosexuality. It became a "lifestyle," another clear victory.

The issue seemed decided. But it was not. No sooner had the social stigma been removed than a new disease appeared from nowhere and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of practitioners. It was spread, we were told, by the improper intermingling of "bodily fluids," the very thing the old taboo had forbidden. This is "everybody's problem," said the media. But it wasn't - it was a gay problem.

So it has been all along. Every time we amend the rules, we pay a price. We introduced the phenomenon of the working mom and were confronted with the impoverished single mom and the "latch-key" child. We have killed two million Canadian babies by abortion, then discovered that we could not maintain our population and economy without bringing people from other lands to produce the children we failed to produce. We abolish the concept of "punishment" for crime and discover that our streets are unsafe.

The real question is not how successfully the courts and Parliament have been manipulated. What matters is the Rules and who made them. That and nothing else will decide whether these judges were nation-builders, or nation-wreckers. So perhaps this celebration is just a trifle premature.