I submitted my book Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values   to a prestigious local magazine “In The Hills” for inclusion in their “local authors books” in their Winter issue. I am not only a local author but the book began because of an event that took place in the area. For those of you unfamiliar with my book, I talk about the need to reconnect to the Judeo/Christian ethic that comes to us from the Bible, and underpins our Constitution, our way of life. When I realized that my book was excluded I contacted her.

Here is the response from Signe Ball the publisher: “We found the opinions it expressed unhelpful at best and destructive at worst to a healthy social conversation."  

Does that mean she is against the teachings of the Bible?  

The Judeo/Christian ethic, that originated in the Hebrew Bible and underpins our constitution, led to our Canadian values of tolerance, inclusion, and accommodation with one proviso: that you accept our values, our ideology, as yours.

“Whereas Section 15.(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees that “every individual”, not belief system or ideology, “is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

This ethic was miraculous when it was brought into the world by the Jewish people more than 3500 years ago. Irish author Thomas Cahill wrote an entire book called The Gifts of the Jews. Perhaps she is opposed to the very idea that there are immutable values in this country-that include caring for the weak, the sick, the orphan the widow and the other.

Yet, this is the only ethic that makes pluralism possible because it is open to all-no matter race, colour, creed, religion or sexual orientation. It is the ethic that gives us freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and most importantly free-will-not submission-which went against the world view at that time. This is the ethic of Freedom.

Yet she felt this book was inappropriate to share with the community- a community filled with small towns and villages where you can’t turn around without bumping into a church. Is Signe Ball suggesting that the people in this area would be insulted by a book that teaches us how to be compassionate people in a compassionate society? Is she disagreeing with Winston Churchill whom I quoted in the book:

The ethical system we received from the Jews is incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.”

 

Is it that somewhere along the way to political correctness nirvana, God and religion became four-letter words to Ms. Ball?

Or is it that she assumed that I had written a book that goes against her Progressive liberal left wing ideology that promotes moral and cultural relativism? That I wrote a hateful book?  I won’t know for sure as she never responded to my many emails requesting clarification. She wrote in her magazine that “public discourse in America foundered in the gutter.” Are my words being put in the same category?

Did she assume that my book contributed to the atmosphere she described as “…a post-election morning when one of the most urgent questions was how do we explain this to our children? How do we explain to our children that our cherished democracy rewarded the highest prize and power to a man who so loudly demonstrated the very antithesis of the compassion, tolerance, grace and civility we seek to instil in them?

Considering that the book was written over four years from 2010 to 2014 and was in process until it was published December 2015 how is it possible that I could contribute to that?

Or is it that she has decided that I am part of “…the forces of bigotry and xenophobia [that] have been unleashed in civil America and threaten to rouse from their light slumber in our own country”?

Ball also wrote in her editor’s role “How do we take them (our children) within the week to services of remembrance and ask them to look into aging faces and see the moral conviction of young men who fought at such cost against the fascists and demagogues who rallied human against human and threatened to undo us?”

Interesting that she mentioned the demagogues and fascists. For isn’t she like so many of the self-appointed media elites, the Progressives, a  demagogue and fascist? She refuses to publish my book either because I wrote about the Bible-heaven forbid-the revolutionary and evolutionary ethic within that Book, or she assumed from the title that I was like Mr. Trump and Canadian Kellie Leitch who had the audacity to talk about the Judeo/Christian ethic and use the word “values” which in her world of “Progressives” is code for xenophobic, racist, fearmongering Islamophobe, making my opinions “unhelpful at best and destructive at worst to a healthy social conversation.”

In the meantime I am watching as the Canadian government is passing a motion that will undermine our value system. This government is choosing to label attacks on Islam as more egregious than attacks on anyone else. This government is attacking the ethic that is embedded in all of our foundation documents.

This is the new reality-even out here in rural Ontario. I had no idea that the PC police lived out here.  I suggest that Signe Ball like so many other smug media elites has refused to see that our Western culture is crumbling from the internal pressures of worshiping the false gods of absolute tolerance, inclusion, and accommodation to the point that we welcome beliefs, customs, and rituals that undermine our democracy—in the name of democracy!  

Perhaps it is time to go “Back to the Ethic.”