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Newsflash: Hollywood is not a good teacher

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For the love of the saints-do I need to write this? Hollywood movies are not a good tool of instruction for your kids.  Today Ellen Goodman of the Washington Post Writers Group notices this, and bemoans a spate of movies she says are unrealistic, and uncomplicated. What? Hollywood, unrealistic?  Shocking.

We are in the midst of an entire wave of movies about unexpectedly pregnant women-from Knocked Up to Waitress to Bella-all deciding to have their babies and all wrapped up in nice neat bows,” she writes.

Now, ignore the fact that these movies are truly the exception to the norm-the usual Hollywood storyline is more American Beauty than Bella-and ignore the fact that she clearly has not seen Waitress-the lead actress there allows her baby to lead her away from “Husband Wrong” to singleness, not Mr. Right, as she claims-ignore all that, and I’d still say I can’t believe Goodman is actually complaining that parents are being called to, well, parent.

Once again, adults are being called to teach against the cultural tide,” she writes, angrily bemoaning the fact that “when Spears told the world she was pregnant, it was described as a ‘teachable moment…’  

If I ever have daughters, I’m just going to sit them down in front of Enchanted and The Sound of Music on repeat. That way, when a wicked witch kicks them out of Fairy Tale Land, they’ll have the real life survival skills to cope with New York City in their poofy prom dresses at night. Alternatively, when Mother Superior kicks them out of the Abbey, they’ll fall right into the arms of a dashing sea captain, who will leave his fiancée (she goes back to Vienna, where she belongs) and change from a taciturn, angry man into a warm and loving husband.

That’s my plan, anyway. 

And on a different, more serious note, these movies reflect the reality that most of us are uncomfortable with abortion–and plans to socially engineer that discomfort away make us more uncomfortable, not less. Hence Hollywood-movieland may from time to time address the topic in a way that is profoundly unrealistic.

But turn that frown upside down, Ellen! The vast majority of girls and women who find themselves in a crisis pregnancy really are living sad and complicated lives. And they go to the abortion clinic so that we as a society don’t need to grapple with their problems and can go on living our enchanted lives.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGdi_4v020]

Is “Choose Life” religious speech?

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 A New York court has decided that the phrase “Choose Life” is not religious speech.

…a New York federal district court refused to permit the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles to amend her answer to raise an Establishment Clause defense, finding that religious speech was not involved…

Are they sure? “Choosing” and “life” could be part of a religion somewhere. But I’ll leave that decision to the judges in New York.

For my part, I’ve long been worried about Ontario’s license plates, “Yours to discover.” Discover what? Ontario? Or perhaps you should discover yourself, implying some sort of spiritual journey. My point is, it’s all very nebulous, and this government slogan could be deemed religious, or irreligious and therefore offensive, to someone, somewhere, at any point soon.

I’m concerned.  

A revolution in Britain?

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A story in the Daily Telegraph explains how an overwhelming majority of British GPs do not wish to perform abortions.

Family doctors are threatening a revolt against Government plans to allow them to perform abortions in their surgeries, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Four out of five GPs do not want to carry out terminations even though the idea is being tested in NHS pilot schemes, a survey has revealed.

The findings will throw doubt on Government trials to provide medical abortions – using drugs in the early stage of pregnancy – outside hospitals.

In a survey for The Daily Telegraph that was carried out by Doctors.Net, an online organisation representing GPs in England and Wales, only 14 per cent of the 2,175 GPs who responded were willing to undertake the procedure.

More than three quarters said they were not willing to carry out abortions and 54 per cent of these strongly objected to the idea.

The comments at the bottom of the news story are quite interesting. Most seem strongly against the idea of forcing doctors to abort babies.

Radical fallacies

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What do I think about supposed pro-lifers who kill abortionists? I think they’re not pro-life. They may call themselves pro-life, but they are not.

  

I bring this up because on December 27, the front page story in the National Post intends to examine the beliefs of fringe pro-lifers and discusses their murderous actions as acts of faith.

 

These lunatics make for easy targets, and deserve the scorn, derision and life sentences in prison they receive. 

 

I call them lunatics: But this is not to say I believe that those who commit lunatic acts—like killing abortionists—are crazy. Quite the contrary—they often follow a set of beliefs they believe to be rational and logical. I’ll turn to another National Post columnist today to explain what I mean: “There is bad philosophy, and bad ethics and bad theology—just as there is bad science. They produce ideas which are false—and all false ideas of consequence are eventually dangerous.” That’s Father Raymond de Souza for you—far more eloquent than I’ll ever be.

 

In this vein, killing abortionists is the dangerous consequence of bad philosophy and bad ethics.   And while we’re on the topic of bad beliefs, there’s plenty of ‘em out there, firmly embedded in our current zeitgeist. It’s the purpose of this group to combat just one of them: The radical idea grounded in extreme utilitarianism that abortion helps women. I raise my glass (but far away from my laptop so as not to spill on the keyboard): A toast to fighting bad ideas, no matter how they manifest themselves, no matter how popular they become. 

From church dogma to choice dogma

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Were women asexual prior to the 1960s? Michael Valpy seems to think so. Today, Valpy chose to kiss the ring of 1960s “choice” dogma, ironically, in an article about how women rejected church dogma in the 1960s. Valpy comments on the advent of a woman’s choice to be sexual, which, apparently, arrived finally, after millennia on the planet, with the birth control pill. Talk about repression! Prior to that, all sexuality was denied her—she was a mere slave to her reproductive system. “Birth control gave them the deliberate choice to be sexual, to move out of enslavement to fertility,” he writes.  

There’s a fairly simple formula, here, that appears to have passed many by. Having sex may sometimes result in pregnancy, and this amounts not to being a slave but to being a parent—for both men and women (for all you parents out there, I’ll grant that sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference). Men didn’t come out scotch free, in this equation, sorry.

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