Barrel Strength

Marci McDonald’s dimwitted expose of the vast conservative and Christian plot to change Canada is a classic example of a very narrow mind encountering people who do not agree with her, and recoiling in shock . Glendronach nailed it a few days ago. Marci McDonald manifests the curious and increasing phenomenon of the left bigot; the side that used to believe in the inexorable triumph of their brand of rationalism is frightened that the tide has turned.

“Who are these revolting people, anyway?”, she seems to ask. The same people who voted for Reagan, honey.

 In an interview in the Toronto Star, she says:

“That showed the canniness of Harper’s strategy,’’ explains McDonald. “Most people saw it as, ‘Oh yes the neocons don’t like government-funded social policies.’ What they didn’t realize was that he was also pandering to social conservatives who don’t believe that the government should have any role in child-rearing, who believe that mothers should be at home bringing up their children or who send their children to religious daycares and schools. It was one of those policies that cut across both of his constituencies, economic and social. That would characterize most of his policies.”

“This was not a polemic I wrote; I do not reveal that Stephen Harper has a secret altar in his basement. But I did try to connect the dots because everybody was telling me this isn’t happening here, not in nice, tolerant, moderate Canada,” says McDonald.

For a conservative (or sensible moderate, for that matter), it would appear normal that governments have a highly restricted role in child-rearing, that mothers as much as possible be enabled to stay home to raise children, having regard to women’s free choice and economic opportunities, and that the family, not the state, have the preponderant if not exclusive voice in religious education. This has been the way societies of all religions have modelled themselves, since time out of mind.  The late 19th and 20th century  fixation on the state as the levelling, progressive, and liberating vehicle for social progress is the exception in millennia of human history.

The challenge to all those folks down in Toronto’s Beaches area is that they have inherited a civilization whose tolerance in based in the evolution of Christian thought, and who believe that Christianity is per se the enemy of that nice, decent moderate Canada in which they live.  As far as I can see, their anti-Christianity  is to the polity as carpenter ants are to a house. They seem to believe that belief in our creaturehood by a higher power, who is also the author of this universe, is something that should not be allowed to inform politics, but their “nice”, secular, “moderate” beliefs are to be the exclusive legitimate basis of both  political participation and set of goals which politics seek to achieve.

As Charles Lewis observed in the National Post, if McDonald wished to find intolerance in Canada, she need only look at her face in the mirror.