Remember when that bogus coalition tried to smack down Beverley McLachlan for her alleged role in getting Henry Morgentaler his Order of Canada? Well, it looks like the religious right is back playing that game again. The subject du jour is the Albertan “parental rights” legislation, which I’ve covered before, as have many others, and which would – the premier and at least one minister have argued – let religious parents take teachers before the Human Rights Commission for discussing evolution or sexual orientation in the classroom.

Yesterday there was a new development when a self-described “coalition of five family organizations” issued a press release through CNW, declaring their support for the legislation, which is still being debated. According to the press relesae, “family is the fundamental unit of society and parents have the right to choose the kind of education that shall be given their children.” I wonder whether that includes the parents of this girl in Winnipeg.

Anyway, like in the McLachlan incident, there is some funny footwork going on here. (Also some fuckery over at Equipping Christians’ blog, by the way, where Tim Bloedow says the coalition is “mostly Albertan conservative organizations,” when in fact they’re national organizations and a provincial chapter.)

For one thing, as in the McLachlan affair precisely in fact, REAL Women is actually listed twice: once as REAL Women of Canada, and again as REAL Women of Canada Alberta Chapter. Now unless those two organizations have oddly divergent policy positions, which I find unlikely, there are actually only four organizations here.

As for the others, well, United Families of Canada is listed, and I’m not even sure they exist anymore. Their website doesn’t seem to, anyways. The phone number listed for “Jill Cahoon, President,” is actually registered to David Cahoon, who is presumably her husband, which presumably means that the organization is fallen on hard times and this is a home telephone number.

That’s not conclusive, mind you – REAL Women of Alberta President Corry Morcos’s number is registered to Fawzy Morcos, again presumably her husband. Ditto with the number of Michele Dow of United Mothers and Fathers, though in that case, at least, it seems that she actually owns her own phone.

REAL Women and the Catholic League, of course, have their own phone numbers. And offices. Which is good for them. And United Mothers has a website, at any rate. As for the others, if I were them, I’d be grateful right now about the fact, as you so frequently and paranoidly assert, that the mainstream media “ignores” you. After all, you wouldn’t want reporters deluging your house with phone calls this evening, would you?

Pro-lifers in B. C., on the other hand, decided to adopt a different approach. Building on the success of their compassionate Focus on Life television campaign, they made some creative changes last June. They adopted a new name, Signal Hill, and featured a woman-and family-friendly look to their Web site and printed material. It all goes along with a new educational and service-oriented approach to help women make informed choices when they are in a crisis pregnancy.

The real news in O’Neill’s piece is that Reform wiseman Preston Manning, currently of the Manning Centre in Alberta, has leaped on board to advocate for the group, including giving a speech to supporters.

But there’s a hitch. What O’Neill dances around in that quote, without really saying, is that Signal Hill is not a new group per se, but simply a new mask for an old one, Pro Life BC. At some point they might even have thought about making the link explicit, judging from the tattered remnants of their old website. But no longer! Their new site scrupulously avoids references to the organizational roots.

Dammit Janet!, which opened the blogging world’s criticism of the O’Neill piece, made the connection immediately, and helpfully linked to some previous work done by that blog and by Unrepentant Old Hippie in January when Signal Hill first announced its existence to the world. Put briefly: this is little more than a re-branding effort

The Albertan controversy, which has been discussed previously on this site as well as at other blogs, is being covered regularly by Big City Lib, who writes that the Stelmach government now seems open to looking at some amendments to address concerns from teachers over chilling effects in science classrooms:

You know, one thing politicians know how to do better than anyone is count votes. The Stelmach government looked around and realized that the over-haul of their Human Rights Act would involve balancing the demands of the Gay and SoCon communities. If Speechies got stiffed (and they did), that’s because the Stelmach government realized there weren’t enough of them to be worth the fuss.

Another perspective, critical of the implications of Bill 44, has also been offered in the Calgary Herald by pundit Rob Breakenridge. Views from the other side have been offered by blogs such as No Apologies, which recently accused a Religious Right Alert author of being “McCarthyite.”

Meanwhile, over in Québec, religious right forces are gathering in opposition to
the new Ethics and Religious Culture which is intended to replace existing religious instruction on morality with a new comparative look at various world faiths’ approaches to moral questions. The course has been controversial among many parts of society, not just the religious right, but it is from religious sources that a pair of legal challenges have recently originated.

Several organizations have emerged in support of the legal cases. One, naturally, is the Catholic Civil Rights League, which recently released a press release on the matter here, in which it defends “the right of parents to direct the education of their children, and in particular to choose the religious education of their children” (thanks to No Apologies for the link).

Another supportive organization is the Canadian Constitution Foundation, currently led by former Reform candidate John Carpay. In a Globe and Mail op-ed, he argues that the course is superficial, “inherently anti-religious,” and a case of “state-imposed… relativism.” As RevDave of Terrible Depths observed, Carpay’s foundation is funded by the Donner Foundation and Aurea Foundation, and draws personnel from Civitas, the Physicians for Life, the Montreal Economic Institute, and the Fraser Institute.

Religious Right Alert will continue to follow developments in both these disputes.

Dammit Janet! summarizes some of the media back-and-forth.

Are you going (or were you at) the march? Drop us a line or a link to let us know how it went.

It’s not partisan. It doesn’t have a website. There is a chairman – normally two – and possibly even an independent staff of assistants. It’s been operating on Parliament Hill for the last decade, maybe more, and there still hasn’t been a public listing of its members.

The “it” I’m referring to is the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, a theoretically non-partisan (though mostly Conservative, with a Liberal minority and pretty much no one from the other parties) group of MPs who are pro-life and would support reconsidering the current lack of national laws banning or restricting abortions. Once in a while the group pops up and garners a couple of headlines, but for the most part, it toils in obscurity. Those members who achieve political success, like Jason Kenney, probably had to sever their ties to the Caucus on their way up the ladder.

The encouraging thing about that is that it suggests, at least for the time being, that the anti-choice movement is having minimal success. Its representatives on the hill can’t even operate in the open, let alone put up legislation beyond a few disturbing fringe bills like Epp’s “murder of the unborn” law last year. This despite the fact that Lloyd Mackey, at least, believes our current prime minister might even be a former member of the Caucus. So, what do we actually know about this group?

The Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus seems to operate in the shadows as a sort of open secret organization. After chairman Rod Bruinooge’s inflammatory “kidneys outrank fetuses” op-ed was published last December (h/t Dammit Janet, Unrepentant Old Hippie), Ignatieff’s spokesperson refused to answer whether he would permit Liberal MPs to sit in the Pro-Life Caucus, and even suggested the group might not exist. This was, as socon blogger Big Blue Wave immediately pointed out, probably a lie: there’s no way the Liberal leadership wouldn’t know about the caucus. But no membership list was forthcoming, either. Bouquets of Gray expressed some well-deserved disapproval:

A secret AA chapter? Fine. A quilting klatch? No problem. A Dungeon-and-dragons cell? Whatever. MPs have a right to keeping their personal lives personal. But Bruinooge’s caucus advocates a change to public policy, and as such it should be operating out in the open.

Indeed, it is rather surprising that they do not want to operate in the open, because they can hardly hope to change public policy otherwise. If they are not going to argue their case in public, how do they expect to persuade anyone? win any votes? pass any laws?

Personally, I find it particularly bizarre that the group operates in secret and doesn’t get called on this. Its leaders claim this is because MPs who are members fear retaliation from their party leaders and from the public. The first I can understand. Maybe. But the second? If it’s something so seriously unpopular that you have to do it in secret, then as an elected representative you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. We wouldn’t stand for such convenient cynicism in other issue areas. Why should we on this one?

In honour of next month’s swiftly approaching March for Life parade, put on by the Campaign Life Coalition (a close ally of the Pro-Life Caucus), I intend to dig a little deeper into the mystery of the caucus. This is the sort of occasion when bloggers like myself just can’t match the resources of the declining mainstream media. I’m sure a few well-connected members of the press gallery could find out what I’m looking for in a single afternoon. I wish they’d do their jobs instead of leaving it to people like me and Unrepentant Old Hippie. Nevertheless, she called on bloggers to “ferret them out,” and that’s what I’m going to do.

The first Pro-Life Caucus emerged in the 1980s, during the first debate over abortion surrounding the Morgentaler decision in 1988. It collapsed in 1991 during debate over the Mulroney government’s failed Bill C-43. In 1998, Campaign Life Coalition president Jim Hughes played an unknown role in bringing together chairpersons for a new Caucus: Progressive Conservative Elsie Wayne, Liberal Tom Wappel, and then-rookie, now-immigration minister Jason Kenney, whose reactionary views at the time are probably best expressed by this article from his San Francisco Catholic university’s newspaper.

Tim Bloedow, then a Campaign Life lobbyist and writer for its paper The Interim, remarked that his group planned to step back and “work more behind the scenes” in the work of the new caucus. These intimate connections to Campaign Life may remain in place, though it is unclear. CLC is certainly an active defender of the Caucus; it fell to Mary Ellen Douglas to defend the group’s secrecy in December 2008. For his work in this regard, president Hughes was given a Catholic Civil Rights League award in 2007.

Reflecting its close connections with Campaign Life, the most significant event for the Caucus appears to be the annual March for Life demonstration, during which its chairs – and, from time to time, a few members – hold a special press conference highlighting an issue related to abortion. In 2003, the trio of co-chairs (Elsie Wayne, Paul Steckle and Maurice Vellacott) demanded the outlawing of embryonic stem cell research.

In 2005, Vellacott and Steckle suggested that an unknown but enormous number of women were being forced into abortions by abusive partners. The next year, they argued that abortion causes breast cancer, backed by American surgeon Angela Lanfranchi. Vellacott later added that the Canadian Cancer Society was refusing to study this link because it was funded by pharmaceutical companies and therefore did not genuinely want to prevent cancer. In 2007, they were criticizing sex-selective abortions, using research supplied by Andrea Mrozek of the Focus on the Family Canada-funded think tank, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada. In none of these cases have firm statistics on the alleged Canadian “violence” been presented. In their last conference together, in 2008, Steckle and Vellacott brought in Alveda King to speak on abortion as a civil rights issue (fetus civil rights, not women’s civil rights, naturally).

While scientifically dubious, these sessions are arguably less provocative than the comments some Caucus members come out with in their speeches to the annual March – Cheryl Gallant, for example, once notoriously claimed that abortions in Canada were “absolutely no different” than beheadings of Western journalists by terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other than being a clearinghouse for information and a hosting service for pro-life speakers, it’s unclear what function the Caucus currently serves, however. Information on the website of Conservative MP Gerry Breitkreuz implies that in 2002 the Caucus canvassed all thirteen provincial and territorial governments, asking whether they had officially defined “medically necessary” abortions. That was followed in 2003 by a letter to health minister Anne McLellan “on the topic of medically necessary abortions.” Given Breitkreuz’s comments at the end of the page, the letter probably argued that public funding for abortions should be withdrawn in the absence of a definition of medical necessity.

The merger of the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties reduced the number of chairs of the Caucus from three to two – though according to Lloyd Mackey, the caucus did consider naming a third from the New Democratic Party, Bev Dejarlais, which would suggest that at least at that point there were NDP members of the caucus. In fact, several writers, like Kady O’Malley, believed that longstanding NDP MP and United Church minister Bill Blaikie was a member of the Caucus.

In 2008, Vellacott stepped down and was replaced by Winnipeg Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge. Bruinooge linked his pro-life stance to his aboriginal heritage, and was welcomed warmly by the Canada Family Action Coalition, the Association for Reformed Political Action and the Campaign Life Coalition.

Bruinooge announced his new chairmanship in November, then, on December 29, published a widely reported and controversial op-ed in the National Post, “Why I Am Pro-Life,” in which he suggested that abortion was hindering population replacement and that fetuses had less rights than kidneys, because you can’t take out your kidney and sell it on eBay. (You can’t actually do that with your fetus either, by the way.) The article was welcomed by such writers as Andrea Mrozek of ProWomanProLife and the Institute of Marriage and Family, panned by more pragmatic conservative bloggers like Raphael Alexander, and angrily denounced by Shameless, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, and others. In a particularly odd post, Dr. Roy suggested that “radical feminists” would dismiss Bruinooge’s remarks because he was of First Nations descent!

In running the caucus, the co-chairs are assisted by one and possibly more staffers, paid by a pool of money submitted by the MPs out of their legislative office budgets and given a desk in one of the chair’s offices. In 2001 Campaign Life Coalition lobbyist Tim Bloedow took the job, which he held for at least three years, though he remained in Vellacott’s office until 2007, moving over to John Earnshaw’s job as legislative assistant.

Bloedow’s Conservative Party duties were not so onerous, it seems, to prevent him from also running as a Christian Heritage Party candidate in 2004. He then went on to write the extremist website ChristianGovernment.ca, and is now the president of Equipping Christians for the Public Square. Bloedow, it must be said, has always been good at getting into apparent conflicts of interest: he worked as a Campaign Life lobbyist while also as a religious journalist, and more recently published grand praise of Vellacott on the website of the Association for Reformed Political Action without mentioning that he was working in Vellacott’s office and had been for years.

After Bloedow moved over to become Vellacott’s personal assistant, Barbara McAdorey, administrator of Canadian Physicians for Life, then moved in to take over some of his former duties. Among her activities as the caucus administrator, it seems, was supplying information to Lutherans for Life Canada in 2006 to help them in their attempt to win charitable status.

The caucus would also seem to maintain amiable relationships with various organizations within the religious right, and especially, pro-life, communities. Lloyd Mackey says that “pro-life volunteers” supply Caucus meetings with coffee and sandwiches. They have worked with, and heard presentations from, José Ruba of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, among others. Alberta Pro-Life has been invited, too. After Bruinooge’s National Post article came under fire, Joseph Ben-Ami of the Charles McVety-linked Institute for Canadian Values leaped to his defence, arguing unconvincingly that even though the Caucus’s membership was secret, the fact that it included both Liberals and Conservatives meant that it was open and bipartisan (great, more fucking bipartisanship).

Despite Bruinooge’s inflammatory and highly publicized remarks in December, the influence of the Caucus would seem to be waning – not that it was ever overly influential in the first place. Before the 2008 election, Campaign Life president Jim Hughes somberly lamented the loss of some of the caucus’s leading lights, including Wappel, Steckle, and Norman Doyle. Shortly after his retirement, Tom Wappel told a gathering of Catholic clergy organized by Campaign Life that the caucus had never properly cultivated relations with the Catholic community. It remains to be seen what will happen to this organization in the coming years.

Tomorrow I’ll be publishing a tentative list of known and suspected members of the Caucus as a public service, since the Caucus itself apparently feels no need to make that sort of information publicly known.

the defence team will concede that he indeed shot the couple, but argue provocation… It is not the eventual outcome of the trial that concerns me here. It is that such a defence is even permitted, based as it is upon patently false notions and premises. What’s next–the defence of necessity in a case of bride-burning? I shall be following this case with interest, and not a little anxiety.

Background on the case is provided by this article in the Ottawa Citizen. The Crown and defence, in the case, would seem to agree that the murders took place as well as that Sadiqi perceived them as honour killings: the question before the court is, does that justify reducing the charges to manslaughter?

If “religion” was going to be defined in the broad Gary Goodyear-ian sense, then it wasn’t hard to imagine what sort of trouble could result from this legislation: sexists objecting to women’s equality, atheist parents with kids in Catholic schools, or just “legal and administrative chaos.” In retrospect it’s not surprising that the government decided to cut its losses and get out of the “evolution is religion” game before things got out of control.

Even if evolution was out of the picture, though, “parental rights” – and by implication family authority – is near and dear to the religious right, so it wasn’t surprising to see a swarm of enthusiastic endorsements from that sector. The Canada Family Action Coalition is now in the game, for example. Equipping Christians has also leaped to the government’s defence.

There is, however, a deep irony here. The parental rights law is being introduced via the Human Rights Act, so presumably it would be enforced – if necessary – by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The Chumir Foundation, to its credit, has opposed the amendment for this reason. However, the Christian right is going to run smack into a wall on this issue.

The Human Rights Commissions first attracted the ire of the religious right on gay rights issues, and many organizations have more recently hitched their wagons to Ezra Levant’s public relations crusade against the Commissions. With the fallout from Shakedown, it actually looked like the anti-HRC battle was beginning to make some gains. The Commissions haven’t been totally discredited yet, but they’re probably closer than ever before. And now the religious right might have to defend the Commissions, after all!

Just this morning, Catholic right-writer Raymond de Souza was expounding on the “abuses” of the Commissions in the National Post. He also points the way to a factless but possibly effective way out of this problem for the religious right: he advances the rather paranoid notion that on the basis of “parental rights” the Alberta Human Rights Commission might be pushed by gay activists or other evil-doers into “radicalizing the curriculum.”

Cross-posted at Birchbark Bible.

• The Canada Family Action Coalition and Equipping Christians for the Public Square are endorsing Alberta’s Bill 44, which the government initially suggested would allow parents to pull their kids from “evolution classes” on religious grounds.

• Ezra Levant raised a few eyebrows last week with his deliberately provocative op-ed arguing that the Canadian Jewish Congress was responsible for the rise of the Canadian neo-Nazi movement. This week, Ontario Jewish Archives director Ellen Scheinberg responds in the Ottawa Citizen, politely saying that Levant’s work is spurious. (h/t Cracked Crystal Ball II

• As expected, Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Randy Hillier has promised to scrap the province’s human rights commission were he elected premier. Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor has published an interview with Hillier in which the two discuss, briefly, the emerging lightning rod issue for the religious right, the Human Rights Commissions.

• Buckets at Bouquets of Gray points out that new demographic assessments by the Wilson Centre establish that the West is not poised on the brink of “Islamification,” after all (h/t Creative Revolution)

• StageLeft takes on social conservative Kathy Shaidle’s recent remarks regarding Canada’s human rights commissions

• Another figure on the religious right, John Pacheco – along with his organization Social Conservatives United and blog SoCon or Bust – has publicly endorsed the Randy Hillier campaign for leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. (h/t Birchbark Bible)

• Dammit Janet! examines a new Pew Research poll suggesting that, at least in the U.S., churchgoers are more likely to support the torture of alleged terrorists. (See also Unrepentant Old Hippie.) Meanwhile, controversy is also spreading over U.S. soldiers apparently proselytizing in Afghanistan and being told to “hunt people for Jesus.” (h/t Canadian Cynic)

• A new website, ContactMPs.com, allows you to spam all Members of Parliament urging them to support a select list of pro-life and pro-family causes (h/t SoCon or Bust, Birchbark Bible)

• The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada are collaborating to defend the federal Assisted Human Reproduction Act, arguing that if it is struck down as unconstitutional, it would raise the specter of “designer babies, sex selection, ‘saviour’ babies…, improper screening based on genetic testing and so on.

• Human Life International president Thomas Euteneur, in commentary published by LifeSiteNews, links “swine [flu] and abortion.

• The breakup of the Anglican Church of Canada, elements of which were previously discussed on this blog, continues apace. Among recent developments is the awarding of $20 000 in legal costs to the Diocese of Niagara in an ongoing legal dispute over who will own parish churches now claimed by the Anglican Network in Canada. 1 Corinthians 6, anyone?