Robert Latimer, who murdered his daughter Traci because she had cerebral palsy, is out on parole (alas) and vowing to clear his name. Polls in Canada show much sympathy for him. But Tom Oleson, has Latimer’s number in this column published in the Winnipeg Free Press:
Robert Latimer has a problem with the truth. He has a problem telling it, a problem grasping it and a problem understanding it. When he murdered his 12-year-old daughter Tracy in 1993, Latimer initially lied to the police about it, saying that she died in her sleep, in her bed. In truth he carried the girl out of the house, placed her in his pickup truck, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe and filled the cab with poisonous gas until she was asphyxiated.
Then he carried her back in the house and put her in her bed. It was only when an autopsy revealed that she had been murdered in this cold and calculated fashion that he confessed.
So? He was motivated by compassion, and in our unprincipled time, compassion justifies all evils.
Latimer sure thinks so. He wants a new trial with a jury to decide not whether he murdered his daughter but whether he was right to do so. Oleson isn’t buying:
I don’t think I’m hysterical, but I do know what I and many other Canadians — particularly disabled Canadians — are afraid of. We’re afraid of Robert Latimer and people like him who think that they have the right and should have the authority to judge the quality of our lives and to decide whether those lives should continue, as Latimer did with his daughter.
The Latimer case is a warning: Millions of Canadians support a man who murdered his child because she was disabled. I can’t say the same attitudes would not be expressed widely here in the USA. We are well on the way of recreating the “useless eater” category of human life. Oleson understands:
…[T]he day that Canadians come to consider it as the “right” thing to do, as Latimer asks us to, will not only be a dark day for Canadians who are disabled, but an even darker one for those who are not.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
