Conservatives and the Concept of Freedom and Government Intervention

The Conservatives scrapped census and the gun registry under one principle: freedom and privacy. The Conservatives deemed their decisions were beneficial as the government got out of the affairs of Canadians. However, some Conservative supporters and MPs are making the push to re-open the debate on abortion laws in Canada and tell Canadian women what they can and cannot do with their body in the name of justice. Does that make sense?

The Conservatives will tell you that they believe in your freedom but when you ask them if they are allowed to surf the web freely, they respond with bill C-52 which allows police to act on you without a warrant whenever they think something isn’t right. They will tell you that gun owners aren’t criminals and then say that the government shouldn’t monitor them – the exact opposite of the standard internet user – and abolish the gun registry and effectively get the government out of their faces. They will tell you that you would not have to give your personal information to a census bureau and so you shouldn’t be required to fill out the form and that government should stay out of your face.

But while they say this, they are ready to tell you that they don’t want to interfere with your way of life, but they have full control to make you a criminal based on whatever you do with your body. Whether it be do fill yourself with toxins that will eventually lead to your death, or whether it be abortion, the Conservatives are ready to impose their views upon you and jail you if you disagree.

Now, let’s not make any mistake as to where I am going with this article. Abortion is a hot topic and the arguments all try to pin black or white on a very grey area. However, if you believe that a child is not a child until birth, or part way through the process or if you believe that any fetus is life regardless of the stage, you believe two different things which are relatively right or wrong. It is like a religious man telling a scientist that everything he has studied was created and brought to him by a god and thus he should learn to have faith; or a scientist preaching that all faith should be dissolved because there is no concrete evidence that any god exists. How can you tell either of them that they are wrong? Who on this planet really, absolutely knows for a fact how the universe came to be? Why would you jail someone for thinking and believing what they will?

What these Conservatives are proposing is that anyone who doesn’t believe that a fetus is always alive goes to jail and gets punished because the people who believe that they are say they are. Many on the pro-life side will argue that abortion is murder of a potential child and from a moral sense, they are correct, albeit pro-life activists have a good track record of blackmailing, killing and attacking abortion clinics, its staff, and its clients.

What these Conservatives are essentially saying is that people are only “free” on their terms and that goes against the whole principle of freedom. It also goes against the whole principle of getting government out of the way because now government is controlling the bodies of every pregnant woman or these women get slapped with murder charges.

Opening this debate opens the doors to many others which over time have been a common mantra of Conservative movements. We saw remnants of one them in the Ontario Provincial election where Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak promised to bring daily prayers to the public education system, a move that would impose religion on students. So, now, Christians, how would you feel is Muslims told you that you had to follow their faith? Does it make sense to you? Probably doesn’t, so where does it make sense for Christians to preach upon students who are atheist, and a mix of other religions and tell them what they should and should not believe?

This is not the only common Conservative argument type, look at gay rights, the conservatives believe that being gay is a choice and in the United States, many Republican leader nominees do plan to take those tights away and when they were passed here in Canada, Stephen Harper led the protest against them.

It seems that as much as the Conservatives try to play centrists, they cannot hide their true identity of being radical right-wing leaders who want nothing more than to impose their beliefs on your lives. From abortion to religion to gay rights, why should the government be allowed to dictate what you believe? Aren’t you a free and independent person?

The Conservatives, contradicting themselves again, refusing to acknowledge people’s freedom of speech, thought, and control over their own bodies. When you think about it, it makes those Liberal ads back in 2006 and Chretien’s staunch warnings seem so much less inflated and so much more realistic.