There has been some interesting discussion of late about the religious foundations of the philosophy of John Rawls (1921-2002), which can be traced as far back as his undergraduate days at Princeton.  The recent discovery of his senior undergraduate thesis on sin and community (which he completed in 1942) is starting to generate some intellectual percolations over just how theologically laden his political philosophy was.  Those of us who studied political philosophy and ethics after the 1970s will likely recall the massive popularity that this Harvard theorist of leftist liberalism enjoyed among mostly secular-minded academics.  His A Theory of Justice (1971) still stands out as the most comprehensive work of the postwar period to fully articulate the meaning of liberty and equality within a social democracy.  What I recall is the academic praise heaped on Rawls for liberating leftist liberalism (in a work infamous for its tedious prose) from its historic dependence on utilitarianism while guiding this tradition towards a firmer foundation in Kantian ethics.  Since utilitarians have so often faced the charge of sacrificing minority rights in order to serve the greatest good of the greatest number, Rawls received innumerable accolades for returning liberalism to a tradition respectful of human rights, or what Kant alternately dubbed the “kingdom of ends” (based on respect for human beings as ends, not merely means).  In essence, Rawls defended the modern welfare state as the most just society in history, indeed a society so just in its attempt to break down inequality of ability and achievement that one would have to be irrational to question the egalitarian benefits of this regime for all human beings.  Presumably only cranky reactionaries who still valued the merit principle and standards of excellence, even at the expense of social equality between the talented and untalented alike, would have no place in this levelling regime. 

What I do not recall from my undergraduate days is any discussion of Rawls’ dependence on religious themes to advance his views.  My leftist philosophy professors would have been embarrassed to discover that a great secular liberal from Harvard had any ties to faith.  Certainly Rawls did not acknowledge any indebtedness to revelation in his major work.  What strikes me about the quotations lifted from his recently discovered undergraduate tome, however, is just how easily his youthful reflections on Christian theology gel with the liberalized Protestant churches of our time.  Rawls, who considered training to become an Episcopal priest in his last years as an undergraduate, contends in his thesis that sin is the repudiation of “community”.  Moreover, it is possible, and even necessary, for a just society to “rid” itself of sin.  This utopian (and even blasphemous) idea of equating justice with the elimination of sin has become so commonplace in our culture that even neoconservatives with no historic connection to liberal Protestantism have promised to “end evil” through the judicious use of shock-and-awe tactics against terrorists and rogue states.  All political parties today also identify the building of “community” with the need for bigger doses of governmental action. 

What this has to do with traditional Protestantism is anybody’s guess.  Luther and Calvin would have been stunned to hear any informed reader of the Bible claim that human beings have the power to rid the world of sin.  The Protestants of the founding generation, who fiercely defended their religious liberty from political encroachment, would also have been shocked over the attempts of their modern heirs to place so much faith in the moral rectitude of their old enemy, the state.  Yet this older Protestant realism about the world has long been displaced by new political theologies, optimistic about the power of human agency and statist action arrayed against alleged forms of oppression and bigotry.  (Can anyone imagine Luther or Calvin taking federal money for faith-based initiatives, without worrying about the implications for their freedom of worship?) 

In an age in which prominent theologians conflate social injustice with sin, and call upon Leviathan to act as chief social worker, Rawls’ early musings about the nature of sin and community have all the makings of prophecy. 

In an age when people are naturally preoccupied with the coldly rational reality of a troubled economy, it is reassuring to know that the finer details of political theology are still subject to debate.  According to a recent statement out of the Vatican, President Obama appears to have a passing interest in medieval gnosticism.  Father Raniero Cantalamessa, a preacher to the Pontifical Household, has stated that the president referred to Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202) at least three times in his speeches during his election campaign.  This Cistercian abbot with a heretical reputation was praised by Obama as a “master of contemporary civilization” who sought to create a better world.

What is the significance of this controversial figure from the late Middle Ages?  Joachim applied the symbol of the Trinity to the course of history, based on his reading of the Book of Revelation.  The history of humanity, in his view, had three periods corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity.  The first period was the age of the Father;  the second commenced with the appearance of the Son (Christ); the third was the age of the Spirit.  This final age, whose beginning Joachim dated at 1260 AD (again, based on the Book of Revelation), was the most important.  In this age a new church free of dogmas and hierarchies would appear as the prime instrument for true spiritual fulfillment.  In this end-time, infidels and Christians would join together to forge a new era of peace on earth.  This eschatology, which completely collapsed the Augustinian tension between the City of God and the City of Man, prophesied a new and certain direction for History.  Sadly for his legacy, Joachim’s elaborate system of thought later brought down on him negative reviews from such distinguished figures as St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope Alexander IV.  Apparently, the Cistercian’s theology, which promised a grandiose end for all of humanity in History, was deemed a tad heretical and idolatrous. 

While evidence of references to Joachim in the president’s speeches is scanty at best, it may not be that bizarre to find Obama taking an interest in a relatively obscure medieval historiographer.  There has already been some anxious discussion among prominent neoconservatives and liberals over the impact of Obama’s rise to the presidency on the political theology of our time.  Additionally, the infidel-friendly and dogma-free church which Joachim favored in the Third Age has an eerie resemblance to the sort of pseudo-Christianity which our “tolerant” and “sensitive” age enthusiastically embraces.

Still, Joachim is a rather exotic choice for one’s ideological pedigree.  Anyone familiar with the political philosophy of Eric Voegelin is aware of his positioning of Joachim as a forerunner of the totalitarian political religions of the twentieth century.  Voegelin went so far as to portray Joachim as a “gnostic” who was determined to re-divinize the cosmos, or confuse the authority of God with the idolization of human power.  While I am not convinced that one can draw a straight historical line between Joachim and Stalin, it is undeniable that his metaphysics of History shares some family resemblances with the most vulgar versions of the idea of progress in modern thought. 

Of course, one swallow does not make a summer, and 3 alleged references to Joachim don’t necessarily turn Obama into a gnostic revolutionary.  The president may not even take up the invitation of the officials in Calabria who have invited him to visit the abbey at San Giovanni in Fiore where Joachim is buried.

Nevertheless, who is better suited to usher in the Third Age of spiritual fulfillment today than the Great Transcender? 

While few paleoconservatives would be surprised at the rock-bottom standards of journalism on FOX, leave it to this network to build a new basement just below their all-time lows.  On March 17, the panelists on the “Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld” ridiculed Canada’s military involvement in the Afghanistan conflict.  What provoked this sophomoric bantering was Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie’s announcement on March 9 that Canada’s forces will have to take a “short operational break” in July 2011, perhaps lasting one year. 

This announcement sparked great feelings of hilarity on Gutfeld’s program.  Gutfeld remarked that Canada’s soldiers are taking a breather “to do some yoga, paint landscapes, run on the beach in gorgeous white capri pants.”  Co-panelist Doug Benson added this pearl of wisdom:  “I didn’t even know they were in the war…I thought that’s where you go (Canada) if you don’t want to fight—go chill in Canada.”  Gutfeld even intimated that General Leslie’s name did not sound masculine enough for a soldier. 

Now this story caught the attention of Canadian media on the same week (following March 17) in which 4 Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.  To date, 116 Canadian soldiers have lost their lives, and almost three times that number have been wounded.  All told, the Canadian casualty rate has been 4 times that of the American equivalent in Afghanistan.  Since NATO operations began in 2002, Canada’s soldiers have been shouldering a disproportionate share of the fighting while her NATO allies have been sitting on the sidelines.  Given this record of sacrifice, outrage in my country has been both predictable and justified in the extreme. 

I would boycott FOX over this idiocy if I happened to be a former viewer, desperate enough to watch this sensationalist propaganda machine for news.  (As it turns out, I caught this news story on other, more respectable networks—which pretty much includes the rest of the world’s media.) 

Still, one factoid might hit home even on FOX.  If this story reveals FOX’s idea of humor, perhaps they will find it even more hilarious that their president is sending additional American troops to defend a failed narco-state.  These soldiers will discover, like their Canadian comrades, that they are fighting and dying to build a liberal democracy in a wasteland dominated by drug lords and jihadists.  No empire since Alexander the Great’s Macedon has ever tamed Afghanistan. 

How amusing is a desert version of Vietnam? 

Theresa Tedesco in the New York Times has penned an informative piece that might enlighten Americans and Canadians alike.  If her analysis is correct, Americans may well benefit from emulating the stable and solvent Canadian banking system (which has won the praise of President Obama and Paul Volcker).  Canadians, who are often reluctant to admit the beneficial influence of American ideas on Canada, might benefit from recognizing that the genesis of their banking system was inspired by that great American nationalist Alexander Hamilton.  As Tedesco reports:

Most people don’t know that the vision behind Canada’s banking system, made up of a few large, national banks with branches from coast to coast, actually had its beginnings in the United States. Canada’s system is the product of a banking framework inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the first American secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton envisioned the First Bank of the United States, chartered in 1791, as a central bank modeled on the Bank of England.

Today, Canada’s system remains truer to Hamilton’s ideal. The five major chartered banks, the few regional banks and handful of large insurance companies are all regulated by the federal government. Canadian banks are relatively constrained in the amounts they can lend. Canadian banks are required to have a bigger cushion to absorb losses than American banks. In addition, Canadian government regulations protect the domestic banks by limiting foreign competition. They also keep banks broadly owned by public shareholders.

None of this surprises me.  As much as it may pain Canadian nationalists who enjoy denouncing any American influence, the history of our economic system is Hamiltonian to the core.  Moreover, our very first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was an ardent admirer of Hamilton.  While he was warily eyeing the Civil War and the potential threat of a Yankee invasion of Canada (as punishment for Britain’s support of the Confederacy),  Macdonald carefully studied Hamilton’s views, as expressed in The Federalist, on the virtues of a strong central government.  Unlike Hamilton, however, Macdonald got exactly what he wanted for his nation: a strong federalism, a national infrastructure program of improvements (based on a vast railway linking east and west), and tariffs for our fledgling manufacturing sector.  These economic foundations greatly facilitated Canada’s prosperity well into the 20th century. 

On behalf of Canada, thank you, Alexander Hamilton. 

I was delighted to read Paul Gottfried’s recent piece on the politics of presidential rankings, and how these exercises in ideological gamesmanship reveal more about current political agenda than they do about the brute facts of history.  As Paul astutely observes, the ranking of Lincoln as the greatest president for his prophetic role in advancing progressivist and imperialist causes in the 20th century is particularly egregious, since Honest Abe’s own views on equality and democracy-building bear little resemblance to those of leftist social engineers who came to power over 70 years ago. To add insult to injury, hardly anyone in the general populace questions what I have called here the “straight line” approach to history—the temptation to draw a straight line between the events of the distant past and the present day—without taking into account ruptures and discontinuities along the way.  The avatars of this defective historiography can be found across the political spectrum (including, yes, the paleo-side), who either credit or blame Lincoln for everything from the civil rights movement to global warming.

The best historians on Lincoln’s legacy have long wondered whether his influence even survived the 19th century.  I recommend Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006) as an insightful corrective to straight-line historiography in the Lincoln Bicentennial year.  Noll, who is one of America’s top historians of politics and religion, contends that Lincoln’s speeches on the republic far surpass in sophistication anything offered by preachers of his age, or any age since:  “it is worth noting that Lincoln, a layman with no standing in a church and no formal training as a theologian, nonetheless offered a complex picture of God’s rule over the world and a morally nuanced picture of America’s destiny.  By contrast, most of the country’s recognized religious leaders offered a thin, simple view of God’s providence and a morally juvenile view of the nation and its fate.”  (Has any theologian since Lincoln come close to rivaling the president’s second inaugural address for sheer rhetorical brilliance?)  Moreover, Noll concludes his study with an implicit indictment of what passes for Protestant political theology today:

(T)he Civil War took the steam out of Protestants’ moral energy.  Protestants remained divided North and South…The theology that had risen to preeminence in the early nineteenth century continued to work effectively for vast multitudes in private; but because of its public failure during the war, it had little to offer American society more generally in the decades that followed the war.

If Noll is right, the “Protestant Deformation” kicked in long before the twentieth century.  Noll, who is famous for lamenting the “scandal of the evangelical mind”—the pervasive anti-intellectualism of Protestants which has contributed to their diminishing influence in the culture at large—provides a fascinating and disturbing counterpoint to leftists who darkly warn about the influence of the Protestant Right in American politics; as Noll shows, this influence has been on the wane for some time now.  His observations also help to explain how Lincoln’s heirs in the most liberal Protestant churches today often show little respect for their hero or historical truth when they eagerly lap up the siren songs of leftist politicians who justify a bigger Leviathan in the name of the Great Emancipator. 

Judging from the sheer magnitude of the events planned today to celebrate the 200th birthday of America’s 16th president, one might be tempted to think that American opinion is united in admiration of Abraham Lincoln. So far, the new books that have appeared this year to add to the vast array of Lincoln studies have also been generally favorable towards the Great Emancipator. 

You don’t have to read the estimated 14,000 books written on Honest Abe to realize, however, that there are still plenty of critics of the man and his legacy.  Not everybody belongs to what Thomas DiLorenzo has dubbed the “Lincoln Cult,” that vast army of alleged idolaters who worship the president as a secular messiah who did no wrong in his presidency.  The irony, however, is that the fiercest critics of Lincoln have often shared the same assumptions as those of his most fervent supporters: that the president is indirectly responsible for some of the greatest changes that occurred in the century and a half following his assassination.  It seems that the dead hand of Lincoln stretches out into the present day, in grim vindication of Marx’s famous observation that history is the “nightmare” weighing on the brains of the living.  In less dramatic terms, Lincoln is everybody’s “grandfather,” as the historian David Donald once quipped. 

Since I have already written on this site about the on-going debate over the meaning of the Lincoln legacy, I shall not repeat at length any previous judgments of mine here.  Instead, on this day in which Americans are called upon at least to appreciate their history in principle, I would urge lovers of historical truth not to play the game of claiming Lincoln as one’s “grandfather”; that is to say, avoid the game of drawing a straight line between this president and the parochial agenda of the day.  This game is already all too common across the political spectrum.  On the Left, ex-Senator George McGovern has recently praised Lincoln for bringing strong central government to the republic; the historian Dwight Anderson, who might otherwise share McGovern’s leftism, has criticized Lincoln for posthumously inspiring wars of colonialism in the Philippines and Vietnam.  On the libertarian Right, Thomas DiLorenzo has also faulted Lincoln for fostering “foreign policy imperialism” which has inspired 20th century empire-building.  Within the paleoconservative canon, Mel Bradford blamed Lincoln for helping to advance “gnostic” revolutions in the 20th century; Sam Francis once called him a “global democrat” whose nationalism “degenerated” into the imperialism of McKinley and Roosevelt (although Francis was also careful not to accuse Abe of intending to create a Leviathan-style federal regime).  Neoconservatives like David Gelernter and Robert Kagan claim to walk in Lincoln’s footsteps as they justify the policy of spreading American principles, by force if necessary, to all corners of the globe.  President Obama has got the practice of Lincoln analogies down to a science, in the hope of convincing Americans that his hero desired as much leftist social engineering as he does (although severe economic downturns tend to consume the dollars needed for immanentizing the eschaton). 

This straight-line historiography must stop.  It should be obvious that the natural right philosophy of individual liberty to which Lincoln appealed in his critique of slavery has nothing to do with the growth of big government in the last century.  I take some comfort from the fact that a few voices on the Right have occasionally warned against reading too much responsibility for post-Lincoln policies back into the 16th presidency.  In his The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), Richard Weaver, who was no unequivocal admirer of Lincoln, blamed the president’s party for failing to live up to the appeals to high principle which the president had made; in the Gilded Age, the Republicans first became a party of “Mammon” which squandered the “moral capital” built up from Lincoln’s anti-slavery cause.  It should also be obvious that over half a century had to follow the death of Lincoln before large numbers of Americans seriously embraced social progressivism and global democracy-building (during the Wilson presidency).  While it is undoubtedly true that plenty of Americans have justified wars of imperialism in the name of Lincoln, it is not an iron law of history which proves anything about the president’s legacy.  Indeed, as Paul Gottfried has shown on this site, it is often the case that the most isolationist Americans have admired Honest Abe as much as interventionist Americans have detested him. 

Lincoln often appealed to charity as the highest ethic of the republic.  One can show charity today not only towards Lincoln but the meaning of history as a whole if one avoids refashioning his image to fit the questionable politics of our time.

As we all struggle through this horrendous economic crisis, it is worth noting that not all nations have experienced equal doses of pain.  As Fareed Zakaria has recently observed, Canada’s economy is in relatively good shape.  What are the reasons?  Here are some quick Canadian facts, free of charge:

1) Canada has not faced a single bank failure, calls for bailouts or government intervention in the financial or mortgage sectors.  In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada’s banking system the healthiest in the world. America’s ranked 40th, Britain’s 44th.

4) Canada has been remarkably responsible over the past decade or so. It has had 12 years of budget surpluses, and can now spend money to fuel a recovery from a strong position. The government has restructured the national pension system, placing it on a firm fiscal footing, unlike insolvent Social Security. Its health-care system is cheaper than America’s by far (accounting for 9.7 percent of GDP, versus 15.2 percent in America), and yet does better on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, versus 78 in the United States; “healthy life expectancy” is 72 years, versus 69. American car companies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advantage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michigan has been North America’s largest car-producing region.   
     
To be sure, not all is rosy up in the Great White North.  Our most populous and industrialized province, Ontario, recently became a “have-not” polity.  Due to the ailing automobile industry, which is the bedrock of Ontario’s economy, the province is now eligible for “equalization payments” from the federal government to help it get through this recession.  Additionally, the historic status of Canadians as hewers of wood and drawers of water (and of course pumpers of oil) has left our economy particularly vulnerable to falling commodity prices.  Nevertheless, a certain free-spending liberal Democrat might learn a thing or two from the impressive fiscal record of a country often mocked by “progressivist” politicians for having the Queen of England as its head of state. 

My fellow Canadian David Frum has recently written in The National Post that the real cause of the crisis of conservatism is attributable to nasty people known as “purists.” In a response to an article by Sam Tanenhaus (who writes for The New Republic) on the imminent “death” of conservatism, Frum lays the blame for what ails the movement squarely on ideologues on the Right who are more concerned with riding their angry hobbyhorses than with offering constructive programs for change; the GOP has pandered to these resentful radicals without any benefit in return. As he puts it, “Parties are accountable to movement purists, while purists incur no reciprocal debt.” Apparently these “purists” (especially supporters of Sarah Palin) don’t understand the history of conservatism or the GOP, a tradition of moderation and compromise.  These extremists want nothing to do with the “unending and harassing burdens of governance” which more mature conservatives have always embraced with equanimity.  Frum has nothing but praise for the Republican statesmen of a bygone age, like Henry Stimson and Thomas Dewey, who

appreciated that compromise must sometimes be accepted or even sought. They did not wage “culture wars,” but accepted and defended their society in all its inevitable imperfections. They were men of responsibility, not men of wrath.

Let’s leave aside the obvious fact that Stimson and Dewey did not have to fight “culture wars” because they did not live to see the rise of the New Left as a major counter-cultural force in academe or the media.  Frum’s metanarrative of conservative history plainly ignores the mountain of evidence that the GOP, since the Goldwater defeat of 1964, has gradually and unwisely shifted away from its constituents’ demands for minimal government and social conservatism.  While Republican politicians have reliably spouted conservative rhetoric around election time, they have shown an alarming tendency to forget their credos and appeal to the elusive political “centre” (that is, the Left) after they win office, without electoral gain in the offing.  Even after winning a majority of votes in the conservative South, Richard Nixon imposed affirmative action and wage-price controls on the economy.  The Reagan-Bush presidencies increased both the size of government and the national debt to astronomical heights.  The reign of Dubya, to say the least, has been the biggest disappointment, although perhaps not a completely surprising one.  Bush II squandered the unprecedented advantage of his party’s control of the White House and Congress by encouraging illegal immigration through the promise of amnesty, providing an extravagant prescription drug plan for seniors, keeping affirmative action, and fighting wars to spread the ideals of liberty and equality in lands ruled by tribalists and religious fanatics.  In brief, the GOP has compromised with the Left at the expense of the Right so as to avoid that dreaded “purism.”  Yet they haven’t increased their vote share in the process. 

And where are the “purists” in this forty-five year history of retreat?  Evangelical Christians have faithfully voted for the GOP since the Nixon years, in the still elusive hope of reversing Roe v. Wade.  Libertarians have impotently watched the size of Leviathan grow under successive GOP administrations.  Jacksonian nationalists have grumbled over the GOP’s neoconservative fixation with creating a New World Order of open borders and democracy-building .  Yet these enclaves of “purists” have had little if any effect on the policies of the GOP.  The most recent outcome that “purists” can derive from decades of fealty to “pragmatic” Republican administrations is the election of the most liberal Democratic president in the republic’s history. 

Perhaps Mr. Frum, like Bertolt Brecht, would like to “dissolve the people and elect a new one.”  If the GOP follows Frum’s advice and officially turns its back on its most faithful voting blocs after unofficially doing so for decades, that may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to a conservative cause which is weighed down by this party.  Let’s see how well the GOP does without the men and women “of wrath.” 

If Canada had been the 51st state, then Barack Obama would have won a majority of its votes handily last November.  Most Canadians, like most Europeans, despise and distrust the former Bush administration with as much enthusiasm as they have greeted the ascendancy of Obama to the throne.  Most of my countrymen eagerly await the president’s visit to Canada on February 19, his first official state visit abroad.  Alas, cold, hard reality has set in with breakneck speed.  Obama’s economic stimulus bill (known as the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”) has a “Buy American” clause which is provoking alarm, outrage, and even conversion experiences among supporters of the new president in my home nation.  Since the bill requires that all iron and steel used in infrastructure projects must be purchased from American producers alone, this stipulation is bound to exacerbate the pain felt by Canada’s teetering economy.  After all, Canada sells 40% of its steel, and 55% of its goods, to the United States; $1.7 billion in goods and services cross the border every day.  While this bill arguably violates the provisions of NAFTA, which forbids protectionist measures, this is very cold comfort.  Not only have American governments in the past tended to ignore legal challenges in NAFTA tribunals; when they do hear these challenges, the response is long in coming and the compensation for victimized Canadian firms is pretty paltry. 

While I am not exactly thrilled over the prospect of lost Canadian jobs and business due to this new harbinger of American protectionism, I cannot help but smirk over the disenchantment that many Canadians are feeling towards the hero they once worshipped with childlike glee.  Leftist politicians, who in the past have opposed free trade with America, are demanding that the republic live up to its trade agreements.  These are the same individuals who complained about American “right-wing” imperialism under Caesar Augustus Bush while they hoped for a kinder and gentler liberal idealist taking up residency in the Oval Office.  The Liberal Party of Canada, our version of the Democrats, has always prided itself on close relations with its ideological cousin south of the border.  Our socialist party, the New Democratic Party, is also experiencing a collective epiphany over its leftist fellow-travellers in the republic.  How jarring it must be to discover that this seasoned politician from the inner city Chicago machine has turned out to be a cold pragmatist.  Only Canadian leftists could be this naive.  Still, at least the wake-up call happened early on, which may give these naive politicos enough time to discover an old political virtue known as “realism.” 

It was bound to happen, and now it has happened, in the aftermath of Canada’s “rights revolution” of the past 25 years.  Two men in the province of British Columbia have been arrested for the practice of polygamy.  One of the men stands accused of having at least 20 wives (along with dozens of children), some of whom were allegedly married to him at the tender age of 15 in a community known as Bountiful (no, I am not making up this name!)  A few legal voices are worried that the charges will not stand up against the force of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, however, which increasingly sanctions different versions of marital bliss.  Why is this?  The reason is that not so long ago the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the legal definition of marriage as the exclusive union of a man and a woman while it upheld gay marriage in turn.  If the Supremes can use this power under the Charter of Rights to redefine marriage (and thus allow gay marriage), why should they disallow polygamy (which has much deeper roots in history anyway)?  Unsurprisingly, the accused men are considering just this legal defense (as well as the “religious right” to have multiple spouses).  I would be truly surprised, however, if leftist feminist defenders of the Charter, which has justified all kinds of intrusions into the private sphere of life, are thrilled over this “unprogressive” chapter in the Charter’s history.

Soon after the Charter replaced the Canadian Bill of Rights in 1982, Seymour Martin Lipset predicted that this new legal document (which considerably expands the powers of judges to make as well as interpret the law) would bring Canada much closer to the late 20th century acceptance of judicial supremacy in America,  “with its accompanying encouragement to litigiousness.”  Not even this seasoned political scientist, however, could have anticipated a time when the Charter might advance the cause of endless redefinitions of marriage.  Once again, I advise my American friends to turn their eyes northward so that they are prepared for the next social experiment that may migrate from the north to the south, with bountiful effect.