POLITICIANS STRUGGLE TO EVADE THE TAINT OF MORALITY

Apparently we're not supposed to discuss moral issues during an election
campaign. Which only leaves immoral ones, I suppose. Or perhaps amoral.
Would it be wrong to ask why?

Once, politicians feared the taint of immorality. Now they fear the taint
of morality. It's not completely clear to me whether they're trying to
persuade us that they don't know right from wrong or just that they don't
care. But they do seem determined to convey that in any event it's not
going to matter; when politicians in any party are caught holding moral
views they hasten to assure us they wouldn't dream of acting on them.

It's not completely clear what a moral issue is either. A headline in
Monday's Citizen said " 'Moral' issues blow Liberals, Tories off track,"
and the scare quotation marks suggest the headline writer wasn't sure. At
first I thought it meant sex, since the story started with the topics of
abortion and gay marriage. But then it threw in the death penalty, so we
had the end as well as the beginning of life. And when it added
bilingualism into the mix, I became completely confused.

Then I derived inspiration from marijuana. Indirectly, I hasten to add: I
read a news story about a Fraser Institute study by economist Steve Easton
arguing that if marijuana were legalized governments could rake in a cool
$2 billion a year in taxes. As indeed they might. But I'd rather see the
issue discussed primarily in terms of whether, first, the community is
morally justified in using force to protect people from harming themselves
and, second, if it is, whether marijuana meets the threshold test for
sufficient harm to trigger intervention.

My opinion is no and no, so I would legalize it. You need two yesses for a
principled ban on the stuff. Yet Anne McLellan, who opposes legalization,
recently said the suggestion of counselling women on abortion "as if we are
children, as if we are not able to make our own decisions about our health
and our bodies, is to me, at the beginning of the 21st century, profoundly
disturbing and, dare I say it, very frightening."

Let those women seek to inhale pot smoke into their own personal lungs, or
just agree to work where there's second-hand tobacco smoke, and see how
much Ms. McLellan respects their right to make decisions about their health
and their bodies at the beginning of the 21st century. How do you reason
with such people?

Then it struck me that the Fraser Institute study was speaking precisely
the government's native language by putting aside principle and dangling a
sack of cash in front of it. At which point I saw that what unites the
banned "moral" issues is negative: None allows politicians to attract
support from a broad spectrum of likely voters by promising boodle from the
treasury. They require debate on what's right or wrong rather than what's
lucrative. Not fun.

Even the Conservative Party is campaigning on spending promises even more
lavish than those of the Liberals, claiming they've detected a huge bag of
money in Ottawa that the Liberals are dishonestly hiding because they're
meanies who don't want to spend. Which frankly insults my intelligence as
well as my morals. But this campaign is not about me, it's about directing
the last available tax dollar to the last available suburban swing voter.

Please don't think I'm one of those dolts who considers wealth immoral.
When people talk about mere money or mere things I wonder how long they
think they'd last without mere food, mere water or mere air, a material
mixture of some 78 per cent nitrogen, 21 per cent oxygen, nearly one per
cent argon and traces of other chemical elements made of shabby protons,
neutrons and electrons. Jesus said man did not live by bread alone, not
that he did not live by bread. If you think combining material substance
and moral purpose was a silly way to design the universe, you'll have to
take it up with a far higher authority than me.

My concern is whether the material things will be put to good use or bad.
And so I'm all for people being paid what they have earned. (I wish
everyone who doesn't think it should happen to doctors could be forced to
earn their own living exactly as they would require medical professionals
to earn theirs.) But I'm against people taking money they haven't earned,
whether through armed robbery or through politics. You see, I think it's wrong.

Evidently that's the sort of question we're not allowed to discuss. Which
suggests an uneasy conscience about how the discussion would go if we were.