A father in Canada has been jailed after refusing to refer to his biological daughter as a boy.
Robert Hoogland turned himself in to authorities on Tuesday after the Attorney General of British Columbia issued a warrant for his arrest earlier this month.
According to a detailed report from The Post Millennial, a gag order prohibited Hoogland from “publishing, speaking or giving interviews” about the case, after the Canadian medical system, the legal system, and the child’s mother proceeded with the social and medical transition of the child without the father’s consent.
The order barred Hoogland from attempting to persuade his daughter to abandon efforts to transition. He was also banned from addressing his daughter by her birth name or referring to her as a girl or with female pronouns.
Hoogland was arrested and jailed after the Attorney General issued a warrant for his arrest on March 4 for contempt. He was convicted of “family violence” on the basis that he had declined to use his child’s preferred masculine pronouns.
It’s a shocking incident, but hardly surprising. Plenty of people have warned that this would be the inevitable end of the progressive, or rather regressive, course we’re currently set on as a society.
Naturally, these warnings have often been dismissed as “slippery slope” arguments, as though it were inherently fallacious to appeal to the consequences of proposed legislation or an ideological shift within the culture.
But like it or not, ideas really do have consequences, especially those ideas that reshape or replace the most fundamental aspects of our society, like how we discover truth, arbitrate justice, and define what’s morally good.
In short, that which George Washington described as “indispensable supports” to a nation’s wellbeing and future: the Christian religion and morality.
For Washington, when you topple religion, you topple national morality. And once you’ve toppled both, you’ve undermined the basis of justice and handed unrestrained power to those striving for total dominance over our lives.
For decades now, society has been convinced that the Christian religion has no place restricting the power and reach of the government over the people. Of course, the systematic rejection of Christianity was sold to the public as moral freedom and sexual liberation, but once again, there are inevitable, often unspoken consequences.
In sum, it’s this simple: We can’t reject Jesus as the highest authority over our nation without the government assuming that supreme position.
In other words, if your government doesn’t kneel before King Jesus, you will inevitably kneel before your government.
Caesar was declared “Lord” until he was dethroned by Christ through the proclamation that Jesus, not Caesar, is the Lord. This is the reality our countries were founded upon, and it is a reality our nations are presently rejecting in order to once again give Caesar complete dominance over our lives.
If Jesus doesn’t define the state-imposed limitations on our personal behaviour, then he doesn’t restrain the behaviour of our governing authorities either. If he doesn’t shape our laws, then he doesn’t restrict our government.
Do away with Christianity and the notion that our governing authorities ought to act within the boundaries and limitations prescribed in the Bible and what are we left with? A society governed by the arbitrary whim of those in power, legislating any ideology they desire without external moral restraint.
In the end, might makes right, and that’s a system always favoured by those who don’t want to serve the highest authority but be the highest authority.
When the state, once again, assumes the highest throne, they can not only define their subjects’ rights and freedoms but decide what constitutes as immoral and intolerable behaviour, such as whether a father ought to be jailed for referring to his biological daughter as a girl.
Before we know it, in our vain pursuit of moral “liberty” and plurality, we’ll have shaped for ourselves a society ripe for tyranny. And suddenly, we’ll have no higher court to appeal to, no higher standard to hold Caesar accountable, no meaningful measure to cry “injustice!”
For Robert Hoogland, we’re already there.
