Belinda and hedonism.

Ottawa -- Newmarket-Aurora, ON MP--and chairwoman of the Liberal women's caucus--Belinda Stronach has had her picture and name plastered on the front pages of Canada's newspapers recently. First there was ex-Toronto Maple Leafs hockey player Tie Domi's estranged wife Leanne named Stronach as being "the other woman" involved in an "intimate, sexual relationship" with Domi.

Then there was the recollection that this is not the first time Stronach has been linked to illicit sexual affairs. Divorced twice, she now feels free to enjoy herself with men of her choice. While still a Conservative MP, she had a live-in relationship with current Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay. (This says nothing for him either, of course.) On October 3 the ex-wife of another former Maple Leaf, Jerome Dupont, affirmed that Stronach had an affair with him (Sun, Oct. 3, 2006). Ms. Stronach is not the least bit worried.

Regarding her attitude toward fornication, she told her biographer, Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin, whose book has just been published, that she loves men, and that sex is "great. Better than golf." She then adds: "What better thing is there? Let's face it. I don't sit at home and knit on Friday nights. I'm single. What do you expect me to be, a hermit?" (Globe and Mail, Sept. 30, 2006).

In July Stronach marched with the homosexual group Egale Canada in the Toronto Gay Pride Day. Egale has been a major recipient of federal funding under the Court Challenges program, now cut off.

A few days prior to the revelation of her relationship with Domi, MP Stronach had risen in the House of Commons as a champion of Canadian women to lambast Stephen Harper's government for cutting the Status of Women budget, and ending the Law Commission and the Court Challenges program, all destructive feminist enterprises opposed to the traditional family. She was furious that the government had listened to REAL Women of Canada, which she detests as "anti-choice, anti-gay, and unsupportive of equality for women and want[ing] to obliterate the Department of the Status of Women" (LSN, Sept. 22, 2006).

The National Post reports that the Stronach debacle has made for "awkward silences in Liberal crowds"--one Liberal MP compared Stronach's presence to "the 800-pound gorilla in the room that no one talks about" (Sept. 30, 2006).

In answer to the question whether politicians' private lives have any relevance to their public life, Michael Coren, on his October 1, CFRB Toronto radio broadcast, pointed out that malfeasances in a politician's private life will inevitably be reflected in his or her public duties. Anyone who lies to and betrays the people he or she loves will inevitably lie to and betray a public he or she does not not really know, he said.

Comment: Coren's remarks are well put. As for the Church, Catholicism tells us that the sin of fornication is, first of all, an offence against God Secondly, "it is always injurious to one's neighbour and the social order" (Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1976, Declaration Concerning Sexual Ethics, 11).

Belinda Stronach's behaviour mocks and insults the nobility of the family and popularizes extra-marital sex.

NEWS ARTICLE BY CATHOLIC INSIGHT STAFF