Nanny-state hypocrisy

Canadian Sen. Anne Cools represents one of those mistaken liberal assumptions. When the pseudo-socialist administration of the late Pierre Trudeau put her in Canada's government-appointed Senate 21 years ago, they assumed she would be a dependable liberal. After all, she is black, she is well educated, she sounded and looked like a reliable radical. So why not?

It was a bad call. Ever since then, the liberals – those of both the capital-L and small-l variety – have been finding this out. Not only are her views small-c conservative, she can express them with telling articulation and knows how to manipulate the media to her own advantage.

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Last week, she proved the latter. The makers of the New Canada, who are zealously molding the country into a liberal showplace, a model for Americans to follow, are conducting a relentless war against the traditional family. They currently have a bill before the Senate, for instance, that would make the corporal punishment of children by their parents a criminal offense.

Since the Canadian Senate is unelected and generally expected to rubber stamp everything the government puts before it, the media rarely cover it and were therefore largely unaware of the bill. The physical restraint of children, said Sen. Anne one day last week, is a human instinct. Why, she had once seen another female senator angrily grab and strike a granddaughter for putting her feet on a couch. In fact, she had often been hit herself by angry male senators who were irritated with her views.

The media thereupon had a field day, joyously jeering Canada's decrepit "Upper House" as the secret enclave of pit-bull geriatric violence, in which misbehaving children were routinely whacked and the senators themselves given to assault, mayhem and fist-fighting, none of it hitherto reported because the incumbents were too frail to inflict serious damage.

But in the meantime, Sen. Anne got her point across, which was this: So-called "advanced" and "forward-thinking" liberal legislation – like efforts to prohibit parental spanking of children – are grounded in a misperception of human nature. Even the senators who are advancing this initiative do not themselves behave as the proposed legislation requires.

And that, surely, has been the universal experience of all the reforms liberals have made for the last half century.

They thought that if they prohibited the strap in the schools and the switch in the home, the children would grow up eschewing all violence. Instead, they have produced schools that are habitats of criminal violence, drugs and occasional mass murder, and homes where parents have given up all effort to control how their children behave. All this happened because kids did not respond as they had expected.

They thought that if they changed prison guards into baby sitters and police into social workers they would produce an idyllic society in which crime was virtually unknown. Instead, they produced a society in which many streets are unsafe at night, jails are packed and crime rates are registered that would have been inconceivable 50 years ago.

They thought that easy divorce would produce marital stability and instead it produced marital disintegration. They wanted to end "back-alley abortions" and they wound up with abortion as a form of birth control, and birthrates falling so rapidly that governments in Europe and soon in America desperately and futilely plead with women to have children.

This was the point Anne Cools has made clear – that people are not, and never have been, what the liberal social planners imagine them to be. We stray, we err, we take advantage. That's why we need coercion; that's why we have laws. Rudyard Kipling put it better:

As it will be in the future,
it was at the birth of man,
There are only four things certain.
since 'social progress' began:
That the dog returns to his vomit,
And the sow returns to her mire,
And the burnt fool's bandaged finger
Goes wobbling back to the fire.

From "The Gods of the Copybook Headings"

P.S. I reported recently that Canada's Conservative Party had backed off the abortion issue and refused to discuss it at their policy convention. This was incorrect. They did discuss it at their policy convention and agreed that they would discuss it nowhere else. That is, they affirmed that abortion-on-demand should remain the law of Canada. My apologies.