Small Talk was in Vidalia, Ga., not to sample the delicious onions for which they are justly famous, but for genuine pastoral reasons. The culture is rather distinctive. The comedian Jeff Foxworthy got rich telling redneck jokes about his native Georgia, but now I am not sure he was joking. While I was there the Associated Press reported that in Leesburg, a little town in the diocese I was visiting, a man shot his mother-in-law. You might think that is hardly newsworthy, but this shooting was accidental: "Larry McElroy fired his 9 mm pistol at the armadillo Sunday night. Deputies say the bullet killed the armadillo, but bounced off the animal, hit a fence, travelled through the back door of the mother-in-law's mobile home and the recliner in which she was sitting, striking her in the back." The mother-in-law was injured but recovering. No mention of what Mrs. McElroy thought of her husband shooting her mother. And the news prompted me to speak with the priest of Leesburg about his own pastoral issues, which include, sure enough, meddlesome armadillos on the parish property.
Local clergy are a fascinating source of information about all sorts of things. Take for example the pastor of Walnut Grove, Minn., whom I met while giving a lecture in the land made famous by the Little House on the Prairie books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She set most of her books further west in the Dakotas; only one of them took place in Walnut Grove. Why, then, was the TV series set there? Because the Walnut Grove book included Nellie Olson, the mean shopkeeper's daughter who passed for a villain in wholesome pioneer America. A good story needs a villain, and so Walnut Grove became famous.
What are the pastoral issues in Walnut Grove? Would you believe the integration and evangelization of immigrants? Only about 600 people live in Walnut Grove, but almost half of them are Hmong from Indochina. There is a big Hmong community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but when the newly arrived found too many villains for their liking in urban America, they decided to look for a more wholesome place to raise their children. They had seen Little House on the Prairie on TV, so thought Walnut Grove would be ideal. Wilder wrote about the danger of the "Indian territories" of her girlhood, never guessing that the Indochinese would one day seek them out because the cities were too dangerous.
Wholesome newlyweds from Catholic Christian Outreach, an evangelizing movement on Canadian university campuses, had a chance to meet Pope Francis a few days after their wedding in May. They presented him with a small bottle of maple syrup. The Holy Father thanked them for "the vegetable of Canada." I am not sure how that thought was originally formulated in the Spanish-speaking pontiff's mind, but I am delighted to have this (infallible?) judgment that maple syrup is indeed a vegetable. My doctor advises more vegetables in my diet.
We need more newlyweds. The National Post reports that "more than a quarter of Canadian children are born to unmarried parents. According to Statistics Canada, between 2006 and 2011, the number of common-law couples rose 13.9 per cent, versus the 3.1 per cent increase for married couples…. According to another Statistics Canada survey, the primary reason (at 33 per cent) that people don't want to marry their common-law partner is markedly passive: they say the 'current situation is fine as it is.'" A 2010 book described the trend, A Little Bit Married. A little bit married means a large bit not married. Be grateful this summer if you are invited to a few weddings. I might have to change my mind on the otherwise lamentable excess in wedding documentation — photographs, videos, MRIs. We may soon need evidence that people still get married.
How to find a spouse? Personal ads with their character-saving acronyms — SWF for single white female — are disappearing in the age of online dating sites. No need to abbreviate when online profiles can expatiate. Yet the classifieds may be dying only in North America. The Sunday Times of India has a whole matrimonial section, filled with ads looking for prospective spouses. It is organized by region, ethnicity, religion and… caste, with Brahmins leading the list. There is an acronym — CNB for caste no bar — for those who are not fussed about that kind of thing, but those ads are the minority. India's laws have sought to overcome the caste system's limitations, but affairs of the heart appear to be a different matter. Just as newspapers in North America long profited from ads for prostitution, there is still a profit to be made from the less lovely aspects of the search for love.
Politics too often requires mentioning unmentionables. The NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre, Pat Martin, thought it necessary to make parliamentary mention of his unmentionables. Having left his seat during a vote, Martin excused the breach of House of Commons protocol by explaining that he had recently bought underwear on sale. Alas, in his eagerness for a bargain, Martin did not realize that the briefs were too brief. The constraint was too much for Martin to bear manfully, so he had to seek relief. The Speaker observed that there was no "briefing" on the relevant precedent and declined to discipline the honourable member. Intrepid reporters discovered that there indeed was a 50 per cent off sale at the Bay on men's briefs. Martin now knows that it's no bargain if it's half off the price, and the size too.
MPs seem to be having some trouble voting. Liberal Yvonne Jones from Labrador was in favour of private member's Bill C-356 proposed by the NDP member from Nickel Belt, Claude Gravelle. Yet when the vote was taken on May 6, she forgot to stand up to be counted. The measure failed by one vote, 140-139. Bill C-356 would have established a national strategy to assist those with dementia.
I hope the new MLAs in Alberta are well trained on how to vote. After the NDP swept the province, there are a lot of them. It was more than 25 years ago that I left Alberta for university, back when the Alberta Progressive Conservatives had only been in power for 18 years. So it was a matter of some delight that the tired, corrupt, complacent, entitled PC machine went down to crushing, eviscerating, humiliating defeat on May 5. Albertans have freed themselves, at long last, from one of the most repellent political machines in Canada. That the spectacular self-destruction of the Alberta PCs (which were never all that conservative to begin with) was accomplished by the last two great protégés of Joe Clark (who never seemed very distinctively Albertan to begin with) — Alison Redford and Jim Prentice — was an added delight.
Tom Flanagan, former chief of staff to Stephen Harper and Wildrose campaign manager in 2012, wrote during the Alberta campaign that elections are about fear and loathing. The government was unabashed in generating fears about electing a new government. The opposition tried to maximize loathing of the PC government. It was a lovely thing that loathing won out this time.
Jim Prentice, the Albertan the central Canadian media love best — especially over those other Calgary politicians, Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney — now owns one of the greatest failures in the history of Canadian politics, exceeding even the bollocks his mentor Joe Clark made of his short-lived 1979 government. He appeared briefly at the wake being held at PC headquarters in Calgary to announce his resignation as leader, which was expected. Then he announced his resignation as MLA for the Calgary riding, in which he had just won re-election. No one expected Prentice to labour for long as a backbench MLA in the third party, but it was a little much to resign the seat while the votes were still being counted. A final act of denigration for democracy, characteristic of the PC party that Prentice was elected to save.
Prentice was not the most pathetic figure amid the smouldering wreckage of the Alberta PC oligopoly. That distinction belonged to Danielle Smith who, not six months ago, leapt upon the PC bandwagon in time for it to carry her over the cliff. Last October, Prentice swept four by-elections, including his own, dealing a devastating blow to the Wildrose Party. Not satisfied with a weakened opposition, he moved swiftly for its decapitation, which was made rather easier when its leader willingly laid her head on the chopping block. In December, Smith announced that she and eight other Wildrose opposition MLAs would cross the floor to join the new Prentice government. She had concluded that the wiser move was to join that which could not be beat. Alberta history, if not personal integrity and basic democratic hygiene, appeared to be on her side. Smith learned soon enough that the PCs who had denounced her only three years ago as dangerous now found her superfluous. While Prentice willingly secured PC nominations for other star candidates, he allowed Smith to lose her nomination. It was cold-eyed calculation and cold-hearted politics. The Prentice-Smith pact of December, where the premier and the leader of the opposition agreed that, in the proper order of things, Albertans should not have a choice about who governs them, was the critical event that marked the beginning of the final end of the 44-year PC dynasty. After the election, Smith implausibly argued that she was right to join the PCs because Alberta "already was an NDP province," claiming that Prentice was a progressive lefty, like Alison Redford before him, in the mould of Joe Clark. It was self-serving incoherence and also contradicted what she had said in December, which was that she was joining Prentice because he was the conservative premier she aspired to be. She is now what Prentice is, a failed former politician; but unlike Prentice, she managed to achieve that status by betraying both her principles and her party. In setting out to kill Alberta democracy in December, Smith unwittingly revived it in May.
The Alberta PCs were not the only royal house to experience transition this year. The House of Saud lost its king when Abdullah died. Money buys respect that has not been earned, so President Obama hustled to the desert kingdom to pay his respects to the oil sheikhs. People don't expect much better from Obama, but there was genuine surprise when free peoples the world over were conscripted into mourning the Saudi King. The flags of Australia were lowered to half-mast on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, apparently the protocol when the head of state of a country Australia has diplomatic relations with dies. More surprising was to see the Union Flag lowered at the Palace of Westminster, the mother of parliaments, in honour of a king whose court permits no parliament. At nearby Westminster Abbey, the standard flew at half-mast. It was novel for a Christian church to lower its flag for a Muslim monarch, even if the Church of England should feel sympathy for monarchy in general. The Abbey flag includes the arms of Edward the Confessor. If Edward confessed the Christian faith in the regime run by the House of Saud, he would be imprisoned or killed. Michael Coren (about whom you can read much more in Sea to Sea), please send to the dean and chapter at Westminster Abbey a copy of your latest book, Hatred: Islam's War Against Christianity.
On matters heraldic, civic flags are often religious, like Quebec's cross and fleur-de-lis or Israel's Star of David. The Union Flag is the union of St. George's cross (England), St. Andrew's cross (Scotland) and St. Patrick's cross (Ireland). The European Union flag is a Marian image taken from the Book of Revelation. Saudi Arabia's flag is green with a white shahada and sword. The shahada is the Islamic creed in Arabic: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." The sword is a sobering touch. Protocol forbids the Saudi flag from ever being lowered because of the shahada, which would be blasphemous. But the Saudis had a protocol problem this year with the king's death. With supine Christians from Aberdeen to the antipodes lowering their crosses in honour of a kingdom where Christianity is illegal, it would have seemed churlish to keep the shahada-and-sword aloft. So, for King Abdullah's death, an exception was made and the Saudi flag flew at half-mast — a full measure of acknowledgment that Christians were eager to abase themselves.
Happier news came to the House of Windsor, as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge welcomed a little girl, their second child. She will be christened with a beautiful name, Charlotte Elizabeth Diana. The first name is in honour of her grandfather, the Prince of Wales; the last, in honour of her grandmother, the late Diana, Princess of Wales; and the middle name, in honour of her great-grandmother, the Queen. For European monarchs, Charlotte also calls to mind Charlemagne, the idealized model of Christian kingship. The name of the little princess combines saintly Christian tradition (Charles) with biblical roots (Elizabeth) and family history (Diana) — a good model for all parents choosing names for their newborns.
In other royal family news, Hillary Clinton declared that she is officially giving her consent to the people of the United States to elect her president. This marks the 40th anniversary of her unofficial campaign for president, which began on October 11, 1975, when she married Bill Clinton. Jeb Bush, son of George Bush Sr. and brother to George Bush Jr., is also preparing to give his consent to inherit the family throne. Americans like to brag that "only in America" can this or that happen, including that anyone can grow up to be president. Well, almost anyone. It's true that only in America would the election of 2016 be a rerun of the same families of 24 years earlier. In the gentler times of the first Bush-Clinton presidential election, a joke circulated about Bush's broken no-new-taxes pledge and Slick Willy's broken marriage vows. "If he lied to his wife, can he be trusted by the country?" was the joke about Clinton. "And if he lied to the country, can he be trusted by his wife?" was the one about Bush. More than two decades on, the jokes, and American presidential politics, are growing stale.
The interminable American presidential campaign makes one long for the briefer Westminster style, though fixed election dates are beginning to extend our campaigns. The United Kingdom had its first fixed election on May 7, and the resulting Conservative majority was not predicted by any of the pollsters. But some of the pollsters did, in fact, get it right. Damian Lyons Lowe of the British pollster Survation reported that their last poll, taken the day before voting, had Conservatives at 37 per cent, Labour at 31 per cent, Liberal Democrats at 10 per cent, UKIP at 11 per cent, Greens at 5 per cent, and others, including the Scottish Nationalists, at 6 per cent. Lowe noted that it was "very close to the final result… but the results seemed so 'out of line' with all the polling conducted by ourselves and our peers… that I 'chickened out' of publishing the figures — something I'm sure I'll always regret." There are plenty of problems with modern polling, but technical refinement will not overcome more fundamental problems of character, namely the lack of courage to contradict one's peers. The pollster's profession is to measure aggregates, not to make aggregate opinion the measure of his own professional judgment.
Our Supreme Court has been busy refashioning society these past months. I was struck by the court's statement in the unanimous Saguenay decision that the reference to the "supremacy of God" in the preamble to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms merely "articulates the 'political theory' on which the Charter's protections are based." The references to God, the Court held, are not really references to God but politics. "The reference to the supremacy of God... does not have the effect of granting a privileged status to theistic religious practices," concluded the Court. So it doesn't mean anything, which is rather an odd conclusion for a court to make about a constitution passed way back in 1982. But if politics is the only category you choose to employ, it is hard to recognize law let alone public theology.
Courts, having the authority to decide what Parliament should do or how municipal councils should organize their meetings, will be busy. Consider the latest from the American Supreme Court, which heard a case this spring about whether a Muslim headscarf should be accommodated by clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch: "Abercrombie chose not to hire Samantha Elauf, a Muslim teenager who applied for a retail job with the chain retailer, claiming that her use of a headscarf violated the company's policy of no headdress for employees. 'I learned that I was not hired by Abercrombie because I wear a headscarf, which is a symbol of modesty in my Muslim faith. This was shocking to me,' Elauf stated after the hearings. I am not only standing up for myself, but for all people who wish to adhere to their faith while at work. Observance of my faith should not prevent me from getting a job." A difficult question the American Supremes must answer is whether it is relevant that Abercrombie has long marketed itself in what would once be considered near-pornographic fashion. Its shopping bags, its billboards, its catalogues and even its salesclerks — or "models" as it prefers to call them — are stripped down in a fashion impossible to reconcile with Christian virtue let alone traditional Islamic modesty. What is a Muslim teenager concerned about religious modesty doing applying for a job with a company that rarely uses a headscarf's worth of material to clothe an entire model? I would never shop at Abercrombie, in the same way that I would never eat at Hooters. For religious reasons. I can't imagine insisting that religious liberty entitled me to work in a place antithetical to my faith.
The court has not yet rendered its verdict in Religious Liberty v. Scantily Clad, but the case may soon be moot. Two months after the case was heard, Abercrombie announced it was abandoning its "Look Policy." "In addition to no longer hiring people based solely on looks, the company will stop requiring employees to wear Abercrombie duds exclusively. The dance-club store atmosphere, which includes blaring music, flashing lights and a strong scent of cologne, is going to be toned down…. Employees will now be called 'brand representatives.' And those shirtless, hunky guys at store openings, and other sexualized marketing, will be a thing of the past." One doubts very much that any American clothier, let alone Abercrombie, is going to abandon sexualized marketing. Yet it surely will be awkward in the extreme for those first employees hired to demonstrate that the "Look Policy" is no longer in effect.
Nancy Lane, a woman from just up the road in Brockville, has been charged with murder. At her trial opening in February, the Crown prosecutor argued that "in financial desperation and longing to live with her gigolo in the Dominican Republic, the Brockville nurse and former Prescott town councillor killed her husband in 2009 by administering a lethal cocktail to cash in on a $200,000 life insurance policy." It's quite a case, as the son of both the victim and alleged murderer went undercover to help collect evidence against his mother. As shocking as the crime is, the defence is astonishing. Mrs. Lane killed Mr. Lane all right, but she has presented his death as "a mercy killing. He'd had three heart attacks, was a stubborn patient who didn't take care of himself, and was terrible at taking medication. Her defence… is that he was depressed and suicidal and that his wife assisted his suicide with a bunch of pills. She, according to the Crown, said that it was his 'cherished wish' that his suicide be kept secret from the proud man's friends and family." A crime as old as the Bible — the killing of a husband to be with a lover. A defence as fresh as this spring's Supreme Court verdict: she was helping him live out, pardon the expression, his constitutional rights.
Most commencement addresses are forgettable. Not so for the graduates of Mount Allison in New Brunswick this year, who were addressed by Kevin Vickers, the sergeant-at-arms of the House of Commons during the terrorist attack last October and now our ambassador to Ireland. He told them about driving home to Miramichi, N.B., a few days after the attack of October 22 to see his mother and grown children. "And that night I said to myself as I was driving, I should pray for them." After arriving at his home at 4:30 in the morning, Vickers called the family priest and asked him to lead a Mass at his home that morning. When the priest agreed, Vickers phoned his family and asked them to join him. After the Mass, Vickers' mother, Monica, prayed, "first for Kathy Cirillo, the soldier's mother, and then for Suzanne Zehaf, the gunman's mother. And it kind of occurred to me that God, after he was crucified, the first person he let into the Kingdom of Heaven was the man crucified next to him, a convicted criminal. So with my grandchildren in my arms, I said a prayer for [the gunman] Michael." As we approach Canada's 148th birthday this Dominion Day, pray that our country is served by more men like Kevin Vickers.
