The Ted Morton factor

Ted Morton is a Judas goat. Not familiar with the term? According to Wikipedia, a Judas goat is a trained goat used at a slaughterhouse. The Judas goat associates itself with sheep or cattle and then leads them to slaughter, while its own life is spared.

How is Morton a Judas goat? His presence in the Progressive Conservative party allows premier Alison Redford to claim that true conservatives still have a voice with her. Nothing could be further from the truth. She is the one who is “frightened” by anyone actually defending freedom of speech. She is the one talking about a National Energy Program to be developed with the help of eastern, anti-oil sands Liberal governments. She is the one who has promised to reintroduce an education bill that will eliminate parents’ rights to teach their children Biblical principles of right and wrong. But because Morton remains with the PCs, she can claim conservatives still count. They don’t, and Morton is too intelligent not to know it. Why he stays with Redford is a question of conscience, and thus none of our business.

Morton is not the first Judas goat to lead conservative voters to the slaughterhouse. For years the federal Liberals touted their pro-family caucus as though it meant something. All it meant was a padded majority for Prime Minister Jean Chretien to wield while imposing his anti-family, pro-gay marriage, pro-global warming, anti-US, anti-western Canada biases upon the nation. Liberal MPs could make all the pro-family speeches they wanted, but Chretien knew that when it came to actual votes, he held the whip hand. Closer to home, in his last several years as an Alberta MLA Stockwell Day fulfilled the same function for premier Ralph Klein.

I’ve never quite understood why so many conservatives are willing to give up principle and trade integrity in the pursuit of a pretense of power. But that, in my opinion, is exactly what Ted Morton, and men who think like him, are doing. They apparently believe that if they hide their true selves long enough they can eventually rise to the top. Then, they tell themselves, they can recover their integrity from the hermetically sealed box in which it has been stored and govern according to the Good Book. It never works. Unscrupulous politicians invariably use these fundamentally good men for moral cover, then throw them away when they are no longer needed.

In this year’s election only the Wildrose Party is defending individual rights. Thus, by extension, only the Wildrose is defending the rights of Christians in the public square. In my opinion the Wildrose is the only choice for people who care about fundamental freedoms. To vote otherwise is to vote for secular tyranny.