Given that Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Barack Obama have already picked up Nobel Peace Prizes, one hardly begrudges left-out Bill Clinton the awards that he does get. For example, this year he was honoured as the 2013 Father of the Year. Apparently the “National Father’s Day Committee” picks various “lifestyle leaders… whose lives are dedicated to family, citizenship, charity, civility, responsibility and reverence.”1 They are not fussy. Back in 2007, Senator John Edwards and Hulk Hogan got the award. Father Theodore Hesburgh, long-time president of the University of Notre Dame, used to tell young couples he married that the best thing a father could do for his children was to love their mother. Not quite the message sent by the adulterous ranks of the Father of the Year recipients. Not that it’s really news, but “dedication to family, responsibility and reverence” takes a back seat to celebrity status.
Speaking of Al Gore, earlier this year he sold his cable news channel, Cur-rent TV, to Al Jazeera for a cool half billion dollars, of which he pocketed $100 million. No one watched Current TV, but Gore still had enough influence to persuade the big cable and satellite companies to include his channel in their packages. Even though it got abysmal ratings, Current TV raked in $100 mil-lion in revenues each year, with some 40 million households paying for it each month whether they wanted it or not.2 Now they will get Al Jazeera, just in time to watch the Arab Spring turn into the long, sweltering Arab summer, before it becomes the long, dark Arab winter. More interesting is that Gore got his $500 million for Current TV from the Qatari royal family, which owns Al Jazeera. There’s a head-line: crony capitalist sells out to a petro-monarchy for a half billion! Not exactly what one would expect from the climate change crusader who rather vigorously agitates for grassroots activism against fossil fuels. Don’t expect any awkward questions from the emir’s American news channel—about climate change, the Arab Spring or Al Gore.
Sinful humanity abounds, but sin does not make us more human. The mistake is made not only by the Toronto Star but also by people who should know better. I heard a priest preach recently about Peter and Paul, noting that while no one would doubt their immense importance in Christian history, they also had flaws that made them “more human.” That’s unintentionally bumping up against heresy insofar as it implies that Jesus was not fully human, lacking those human sins and imperfections. C.S. Lewis wrote that it was sin that was boring and monotonous and virtue that was adventurous and made us more distinctive. We might identify with the sinner because of our own sins, but we ought not think that our sins make us more human. Our sins are not our identity, not the image God willed for us. “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” is the advice of the Sermon on the Mount. Perfection does require divine Grace, but it is not inhuman.
The Toronto Star might also be inter-ested in some unexpected adults-only activity taking place in Vaughan, Ont., where their massive printing plant is located. As I tell my students, anything advertised for adults only is not suitable for mature ladies and gentlemen. There is a new Legoland Discovery Centre in Vaughan. John St-Onge of Windsor is 63 and his children are all grown now, but the Lego his children once played with became something of a hobby for him. So he drove up to Vaughan to check out Legoland but was told that he could not enter if not accompanying children.4 Mr. St-Onge took offence at being not so subtly suspected of creepy tendencies, or worse, and complained. (Legoland subsquently apologized and offerred him free passes to the next adults-only event.) But it turns out it is standard policy at all Legoland Discovery Centres (the one in Vaughan is the first in Canada; there are five in the United States). While lone adults are banned from Le-goland, the centre does offer adults-only nights monthly, which may well be rather creepy affairs in their own way. Mr. St-Onge drove back to Windsor, willing to be known as an older man who likes to build Lego but unwilling to be treated as a likely child molester. So in Vaughan, “adults only” does not always mean what it usually means, but rather may be an attempt to preserve the innocence of children by banning those adults who enjoy the pure, child-like fun that Lego can bring. One under-stands why Legoland does what it does, but in Mr. St-Onge, it seems, turning away an adult from Legoland was as cruel as telling a young boy he couldn’t play inside. Who would have thought that in Vaughan, a senior would have a harder time getting into Legoland than a teenager would getting into a bar?
After the floods in Calgary in late June, I wrote in the National Post that the sto-rylines after disasters were becoming a little too forced and that journalists should just cover the flood, not What It Really Means. A reader from the financial industry wrote about his experience of the reporting, with a particular window on the financial dimensions: “Some of this reaction is a function of the need for content. As early as Friday, we had reporters on the phone to our economists, asking, practically begging, for loss projections. It was not relevant to said reporters that the flood was only hours old and that there were no data available for our economists to measure. They needed something. Anything. By the end of the weekend, a few projections had been thrown around by some people (without data). Someone here decided to take an Alberta-based economist’s back-of-the-napkin projections, make some conservative calculations of his own based on those projections, and write a small internal report that suggested a conservative loss estimate in the $2.75-$3 billion range with an upward risk to $5 billion. He included as many caveats as he could—no data yet, just a preliminary analysis etc. etc. But it didn’t take long for media reports to emerge: Projected $5 Billion Loss. [There is a] panicked search for stories—the heroic neighbour, the dev-astating loss, the finger pointing (climate change, the ignored flood report), even Stephen Harper’s coat. (As an aside, I have taken to noticing that no politician in a natural disaster is complete without a jaunty windbreaker).” My correspondent is right, even down to the windbreaker, that there is a blind journalistic conformity on disaster stories. Journal-ists ought to be able to cover a great human drama as just that—a human drama—without forcing the whole matter into a ready-to-wear template as determinedly as the prime minister reaches for his windbreaker.
A troubling study out of England reports that marriage between first cousins doubles the chance of birth defects.5 It has long been suspected—hence the ancient rules against mar-riage between first cousins in many countries and some religions—but it has been difficult to conduct studies for lack of sufficient data. However, the Pakistani community in Bradford, England, is both large and has many blood-relative marriages, and so a sizable study of some 13,500 births was pos-sible. The rate of birth defects was three per cent in the Bradford Pakistani community in general, but doubled to six per cent in cases where the parents were blood relatives. The study struck a chord with me, as almost every year I try to visit a school for deaf children in Bethlehem run by Catholic religious sisters. All the children are Arab, as you would expect in an Arab city, but they are also all Muslim. The deafness is caused by marriage between close relatives. There are even families with multiple children in the school. It’s a hopeful place and a beautiful response to an otherwise very sad situation. The sisters admirably provide educa-tion and formation for the children in their care, rather more ably, one would expect, than the social services in Bradford are able to. It’s a widespread problem that is rarely discussed. I first discovered it in Bethlehem. Now it is in the open in Britain. The issue needs a better hearing in the Muslim world itself.
Dominion Day and the Fourth of July came this year with news that, according to the Heritage Foundation, Canada is more economically free than the United States.6 The conservative American think tank has been tracking such things—size of government, tax rates, deficits, regulatory burden etc.—for some years, and this year Canada came sixth (behind, in order, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland). The Yanks came in tenth. For those who have been paying at-tention, it is not a surprise. The Americans, among other things, have a higher top federal marginal tax rate on personal income (39 per cent versus Cana-da’s 29 per cent), the highest corporate tax rate in the world (35 per cent versus Canada’s 15 per cent), a higher percentage of government spending on a per capita GDP basis, and deficits and debt to the horizon and beyond. Americans always greet such news with disbelief, as if their socialist neighbour to the north simply must be less free because, well, it is not the United States. The land of the free? Well, tenth is not so bad. No shame in that. But not as good as the true north, strong and free.
The price of freedom is vigilance, especially against the invigilators. The National Post reports that “the Prince Edward Island government is consid-ering a specialized licence plate for convicted drunk drivers, raising concerns from civil libertarians. P.E.I. Transportation Minister Robert Vessey acknowledged he is in discussions about a designated plate as he unveiled other changes to the province’s licence plates this month.”7 The folks at Mothers Against Drunk Driving are cautiously opti-mistic. The idea is that repeat offenders, in addition to having to wear the scarlet DD on their vehicles, will be slapped sober by relatives too embarrassed to drive the family car. We are assured that the police would not pull over such cars without prob-able cause. Of course they wouldn’t. Public shaming has gone rather out of fashion in recent decades, as one might note from the parade of the promiscuous at the Father of the Year awards. But on really important moral issues—smoking also comes to mind—a little State-administered public disgrace might just be in order. Interestingly enough, the thinking is that public shaming might work better in the small communities of Prince Edward Island, where it is more likely that your neighbours know who you are and what car you drive. All of which makes it doubly disappointing: in small communities where actual personal ties ought to promote good behaviour, the long arm of the criminal justice state has to intrude to make sure the shaming is properly done. A culture in which the State has to promote proper embarrassment should be—what’s the mot juste?—ashamed.
