March for Life in Canada, May 10, 2018

Again this year we had counter protesters.

If they want to protest the March so be it, but I don't believe they should be allowed to block our route

which they have done for the last three years and the police allow them to do so.

In fact there seem to be as many police as those protesting the March for Life so why do the police let this happen?

If you use twitter let Mayor Jim Watson, the Ottawa Police Charles Bordeleau and your councillor know your thoughts on this

@OttpoliceMedia @ChiefBordeleau @JimWatsonOttawa

Tanya Granic Allen vows to keep fighting at March for Life

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/tanya-granic-allen-vows-to-keep-fighting-at-march-for-life

Pro-life MP: Canada must protect the rights of pre-born babies in order to be a just society

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pro-life-mp-canada-must-protect-the-rights-pre-born-babies-in-order-to-be-a

Pro-lifers defiant after Ottawa bans March for Life flag at city hall

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ottawa-bans-march-for-life-flag-at-city-hall

By Jonathon Van Maren

Noting the pro-abortion bias of the media is at this point so cliché that the point is almost not worth making. Nonetheless, I’d like to make a couple of observation about the double standard that was present yesterday at the March for Life, where abortion activists illegally blocked a legal and peaceful protest by pro-life activists.

It was no surprise that the abortion activists were out in force with all sorts of crude signs (these are the same people that complain people might be offended by seeing abortion victim photography, of course), and that once again, a prominent symbol they wielded was the Communist hammer and sickle, the flag that flapped over the gulags and the murder of millions. The banner at the front of their illegal mob read “End the March for Life,” with the hammer and sickle painted on it. These folks are impervious to irony.

I’ve written about these flags at the March for Life before, and I’ve also noted that if our politicians and the media had a shred of honesty, they would be reporting on the affiliations of these thugs—which they would certainly be doing if the protestors had any affiliation that could be portrayed as conservative or right-wing:

The Soviet Union wracked up a death toll of over twenty million, with nearly two million people perishing in the gulags and nearly a million being summarily executed in the first years of Stalin’s rule. Mao’s Red China took it even further, with an estimated 45 million Chinese perishing during the Great Leap Forward—which was actually fewer dead bodies than Mao had been anticipating. He originally thought that 52 million peasants would have to die in order for Communism to be sufficiently implemented. The flag that flapped over these staggering death counts was the Hammer and Sickle, a flag now proudly waved by those purporting to protest totalitarianism.

Just imagine, for a moment, if it was pro-life protestors who decided to illegally interrupt and barricade a pro-abortion march. In a flash, Justin Trudeau would be wheezing his outrage into the dutifully clustered cameras, and probably advocating for a bubble zone of at least fifty metres around every abortion activist in the country. Pro-lifers are lawbreakers, he and his parrots in the media and commentariat would declare, and thus new laws would be immediately necessary. But if it is peaceful pro-life Canadians that are subject to illegal harassment, then whatever.

But of course, it was pro-lifers who were illegally barricaded by crude, hostile protestors, and thus there is no talk of law-breaking, or potential violence, or even criticism of any kind. You can get away with violence against pro-lifers pretty easily—and as I’ve noted before, pro-life activists are subject to harassment, threats, and violence all the time. Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada even justified violence against pro-lifers by saying that pro-life activism simply “provokes” people. Additionally, abortion activists regularly make false accusations against pro-lifers—but when they are exposed, it makes barely a ripple in the same media outlets that had gleefully published every detail of the false allegations.

So there you have it. For months, the Canadian media has falsely declared that bubble zones are necessary because of pro-life harassment, without providing a shred of evidence for their assertion. But when peaceful pro-life protestors are blockaded off by angry lawbreakers wielding a symbol that has presided over more murders than the Nazi swastika in Canada’s capital? Not a whisper.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/how-do-we-find-the-hope-to-keep-going

How do we find the hope to keep going

May 11, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Earlier this week, I spoke to a pro-life banquet in the little Saskatchewan town of Estevan, population 10,000. It was one of those prairie small towns where everybody knows everybody, where many people still live within shouting distance of where they were born, and where the local pro-life dinner was advertised everywhere from the leisure center to the storefront window of the local pharmacy. Both radio and TV reporters were at the dinner—160 people is a big crowd for Estevan, after all—and a local family sang a few beautiful songs accompanied by the violin and piano.

After I finished my speech, I took a few questions from the audience. One question from an elderly woman near the back of the church struck me as I considered it. How, she asked, do we find the hope to keep going when so many things in our culture seem to be going so wrong? With online pornography threatening our churches, marriages, and communities—I’d addressed that threat early on in my speech—and governments across the country that operate with contempt for parental rights and freedom of speech, how can we avoid despair?

The answer to that is a simple one: We don’t have a choice. Many decades ago, perhaps we did. We could raise our kids, go to church, build our own Christian schools, and the government would largely leave us alone. Ensuring that our homes remained porn-free could be as simple as some serious conversations and a decent sweep under the beds and through the closets once in awhile. Nobody demanded that Christian schools change their curriculums to advocate for unchristian ideas or lifestyles, and nobody demanded that people either approve of the latest progressive project or be damned as a bigot.

But that was then, and this is now. While Christian communities minded their own affairs, fundraising money for their schools and organizing church events and raising their children, the progressives were hard at work transforming the society around us. Now, progressive politicians in some provinces are determined to force Christian schools to implement curriculum that lauds unbiblical lifestyles, or face possible shutdown. Christian politicians are accusingly interrogated by progressive journalists as to whether or not they still believe in traditional marriage. Anti-Christian politicians demonize social conservatives in order to tar squishy conservative politicians with the same brush. Insinuations, if not assertions, are made in the press that to hold to the Judeo-Christian values of the last two thousand years makes you a hatemonger.

And then there is online pornography. As I said in my speech in Estevan, if Christian communities fail to get out in front of this threat, nothing else will matter. It is impossible to exaggerate the scale of this plague: in 2016, 4,599,000,000 hours of porn were watched on PornHub alone. That translates into roughly 524,641 years worth of porn—or 12 porn videos for every man, woman, and child on Planet Earth. Porn is poisoning our Christian schools. I know—I speak in these schools, and I talk to the students, and I get their emails. Many of them start looking at porn around the sixth grade. Many of them have seen their view of girls and women transformed. Some of them hate themselves for it.

Porn is infiltrating the churches, too. Over half of evangelical pastors surveyed admitted to looking at porn in the past month. Marriages are collapsing at an unprecedented rate, as young men raised on a diet of porn enter relationships they are not equipped to sustain, poisoned by the selfishness and twisted ideas about sexuality that they have consumed virtually since childhood. Again, I could tell you dozens of heartbreaking stories that I have heard firsthand from young men and women who saw their fairytale collapse under the weight of ugly pornographic fantasy. Porn is ruining the churches, communities, and families that we rely on. Without them, what do we have? What would we have left?

We under attack from both without and within. From without, left-wing governments are presenting us as hateful, misogynist, homophobic wretches who deserve nothing but social contempt and should be driven from the public square. Listen to what our leaders are saying, and listen closely: They are laying out the justification for the abrogation of parental rights. Some, like Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP, are already saying that children need to be shielded from their parents. From within, the toxic waste oozes from the glowing screens of cell phones, tablets, iPads, laptops, and computers, ruining our souls and our capacity to love and sacrifice. These things are happening here, and they are happening now.

And so what choice do we have? I have a beautiful little daughter, and I want her to be able to attend a Christian school just as I did in British Columbia, and my wife did in Alberta. I want her to be part of a thriving church community, and to be able to grow up and find a partner unpoisoned by pornography if she should decide to. But in 2018, I can’t take any of those things for granted anymore. These things used to simply happen—now, they must be fought for tooth and nail. These threats are not going away. They are growing.

So it is not hope that we need, not really. At least, that’s not the most important thing that we need. What we need is resolve, determination, and the awareness that for traditional Christian communities, these battles are existential ones. We fight because we have no choice. As Golda Meir once noted, we do in fact have a secret weapon: No alternative.