EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK: CANADA MOVES ON WHILE WE BICKER

One of last week's more startling headlines was Canada's readiness to
legalize civil unions between gays. During the same week, Portland was host
to dueling conferences on the topic of homosexuality. One group sought to
convert gays to a straight lifestyle through therapy and Christian
conversion. The other urged a response of love.

While Canada says that allowing gays to marry is an obvious outcome,
America is conflicted. At week's end, the U.S. Supreme There is a
distinction between winning elections and governing wisely.

Court handed down a ruling outlawing sodomy statutes that relegated gays to
a separate class under the law.

Canada's initiative on gays is part of a larger trend of sweeping change
which The New York Times described on June 19. For instance, the Canadian
government "is in the process of transforming its drug policies by
decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana and, to combat
disease, permitting `safe-injection' clinics in Vancouver, B.C., for heroin
addicts."

In these developments, Canada resembles western European democracies and
Scandinavian countries more than the United States. Especially striking is
the speed and ease with which this change is occurring. Seeking to explain
that phenomenon, the Times noted that Canada's history contains neither a
revolution nor a civil war and relatively "little social turbulence." It
has also recently and rather quickly become demographically diverse.

Describing his nation's attitude toward change, a leading novelist Neil
Bissoondath, an immigrant from Trinidad, told the newspaper: "There is a
general approach to life here that is both evolutionary and revolutionary."

The sweep of change in Canada is all the more remarkable to an American,
because our nation is going through quite the opposite: a rear-guard action
of sweeping proportions executed by a president who lost the popular
election by 500,000 votes and won the electoral college election only
through the intervention of the Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote.

One of democracy's hallmarks is respect for the precedent of bipartisan
agreement. The environmental movement, which began with Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring, took root with the National Environmental Policy Act in
1969. One of the legislation's authors was Sen. Henry Jackson of
Washington, a centrist Democrat. It was signed by President Richard Nixon,
a Republican, after Jackson and the president talked in the Oval Office.
Over some 30 years, the act was implemented by a succession of presidents,
Republican and Democrat.

President George W. Bush is doing his best to eviscerate the act, just as
he is undoing bipartisan agreements concerning wilderness areas, roadless
Forest Service lands and the Head Start program.

In a democracy there is a distinction between winning elections and
governing wisely. Bush is all about winning. It has has noted that because
of his alcoholism, Bush effectively became an adult at the age of 40, the
point at which he reckoned with his illness. That is one way of explaining
the president's myopia with respect to large global issues. He lacks a
reference point. Thus without a qualm, he trashed America's longstanding
alliances with a host of nations running from France and Germany to Mexico
and Canada, as if we'd never need them again.

In sum, we seem to have a president who is without the kind of collective
memory that is essential in a chief executive. That leaves him free to play
election politics, rewarding his bedrock constituencies -- the religious
right and the very wealthy -- with payoffs ranging from tax breaks to a war
on women's reproductive rights.

In any nation or culture there is tension between those who are eager to
move forward and those who are threatened by the future and seek refuge in
the past. Bush's core constituency is the latter group, known generically
as the religious right.

In another era that was spiritually empty and materialistic, Ralph Waldo
Emerson appeared. One of the most interesting recent book is David
Robinson's Spiritual Emerson. It is a distillation of the vast literary
output of the Sage of Concord. An Oregon State University professor,
Robinson provides an interpretation of well known essays such as "On
Nature" and "Self Reliance" as well as the lesser known "Circles."

As a minister, Emerson startled the New England clergy with his address to
the Harvard Divinity School. In essence, Emerson said that much of
organized religion had become a set of empty gestures with no connection to
moral living. He was not invited to speak at Harvard for another 30 years.
Emerson became the fulcrum of the Transcendentalist movement which speaks
to many in America's spiritually arid landscape.

Alan Jones, dean of San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, recently made a point
similar to Emerson's when he said: "When religious observance becomes more
important than love, religion dies from within, and it deserves to."

-- S.A.F.