Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail

« Many people I know (I live in an affluent downtown Toronto postal code) believe that Mr. Khadr has been treated atrociously, and that the government should be condemned for not repatriating him from the hellhole of the U.S. justice system. These people are also likely to fault the government for being hypocritical about death-row cases. As Amnesty International says, Ottawa has an obligation to vigorously defend any citizen who faces execution abroad. As for the beauty contestant, they may well agree with Peter Singer that society’s overemphasis on gender identity is a bad thing.

There’s a label for these people. They are WEIRD. That is, they belong to a tiny subculture of the human population that is Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. In Canada, they are the secular liberal baby boomers who dominate the opinion elite.

(…) they need to understand why the reaction of many ordinary people to the issues in the news is so different from their own.

The simple answer is that these people are less concerned with individual rights and universal justice than they are with things such as loyalty, authority and people getting what they deserve. They think, for example, that Omar Khadr is a troublemaker in a family of troublemakers who are disloyal to their adopted country and that he should be grateful he’s not dead. They’re glad our government is standing up to save the life of an innocent man, but they couldn’t care less if a brutal killer gets his just deserts. As for transgender beauty queens – well, whatever. But the whole idea that gender can be made irrelevant in human affairs – or that kids can, or should, be raised sexless – is ridiculous. »