Tom Warner Books - Losing Control & Never Going Back

Tom Warner is the author of Losing Control, Canada’s Social Conservatives in the Age of Rights, published May 2010 and Never Going Back, A History of Queer Activism in Canada, published in 2002.

Tom Warner is an author, activist for lesbian and gay rights and a former Ontario Human Rights Commissioner. In his latest book, Losing Control: Canada’s Social Conservatives in the Age of Rights, Warner sheds a bright light on Canada’s social conservative movement over the last 40 years. He exposes social conservatism as an angry insurgency of evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics fanatically committed to waging a long-term crusade to take back Canada . He traces how the religious right seeks to regain control of the moral and policy agendas of the state and to restore Canada as a resolutely Christian nation in which Judeo-Christian moral values are the only true “Canadian values”.

Losing Control chronicles the Christian right’s militant and uncompromising advocacy on a range of moral issues: abortion and reproduction; more stringent state regulation of consenting sexuality, prostitution and pornography; amendment of human rights laws to prohibit sexual orientation discrimination; legal recognition of same-sex spousal relationships and gay marriage; parents’ rights and moral instruction in the public schools. It probes in rich detail the war being waged against secularism and moral relativism, exemplified by so-called activist judges imposing godlessness and secular values through their interpretations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It examines the Christian right’s desperate battle to reverse the evolution of Canadian governance caused by the rapid advancement of separation of church and state and of faith from politics. Warner’s book also contributes to better understanding contemporary Canadian politics by raising disturbing questions about the importance of the social conservative constituency to the Conservative Party of Canada and to the advancement of Stephen Harper’s radical agenda to transform Canada into a truly conservative country.