Losing Control: Canada’s Social Conservatives in the Age of Rights (review)

Reproductive rights (especially access to abortion services), lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans rights, sex work, sex and safer sex education in the schools all continue to be major flashpoints in battles between the socially and morally conservative right-wing and progressive social movements. Even when we thought these battles were won and settled long ago there continues to be a resilient conservative opposition to gender and sexual liberation movements. As someone actively involved in these progressive sex and political struggles it has sometimes seemed like the moral conservative movements will just never go away. In Losing Control Tom Warner provides us with an important history and analysis of the moral conservative right wing our progressive social change movements are up against and why they can be such formidable and persistent opponents.

An activist himself in gay rights and related struggles, especially through his long and important involvement in the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario, Warner provides us with an invaluable mapping and tracing out of relationships among the different currents within this moral conservative right-wing, ranging from Protestant and Roman Catholic evangelical activists, to powerful actors in the Conservative government including Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney. He introduces us to many of the cast of characters animating this right-wing. Warner also begins to detail connections between social conservatives and broader right-wing politics.

Warner’s important argument is that the social movements and social trans-formations of the 1960s and 1970s (to which I would add the continuing transformations within neoliberal capitalism) that influence gender, sexual and familial relations have provoked significant counter-movements of right-wing evangelical Christians organizing at more community levels and also within established political parties and state institutions. These groups have attempted to re-assert patriarchal and heterosexist relations in the face of feminist and queer revolts and broader social transformations. Our social movements with the support of allies, including by the 1980s major sections of the union movement, were able to make significant progress in achieving formal legal rights and equality on a number of fronts, especially with the shift in Canadian state legal formation signalled by the Charter and its equality rights provisions. The Charter created a much more favourable terrain of struggle for formal legal rights, making it possible to challenge laws on constitutional grounds if they conflicted with equality rights. Warner characterizes this new terrain of struggle and advancement as the “Age Of Rights,” which I come back to more critically later on.

In the context of our social movements, the coalitions we built, and the Charter, the moral conservatives began to lose control of the agenda regarding important aspects of the regulation of sexuality and gender relations, and suffered a series of important defeats, most notably regarding women’s legal access to abortion and lesbian and gay rights. In response they built a persistent long-term movement to try to seize back the agenda but fortunately with only limited success so far. While the major moral conservative groups have not had much success in bringing about their stated objectives of an end to women’s access to abortion services and prohibiting lesbian and gay rights, they are also present in and have friends, allies and supporters in very powerful places within established political parties and state relations which has allowed them to both begin to push back progressive social change movements and also to make the terrain of struggle more difficult for our movements. While the moral conservatives are frustrated with the slow pace of the more official conservative incremental strategy of slowly trying to re-establish a moral conservative agenda they have provided much of the political and social momentum for the success of this strategy.

Moral conservatives have played a part in the cutting of the Court Challenges Program which had been used by social justice groups to push forward some of our struggles on the legal front; in the pushing for cuts to funding for...