I’ve been trying to figure out what happened with Apple ceasing to make the Manhattan Declaration app available. I’ll be the first to say it isn’t a great app (I have it) but then again, neither was the Smurfs’ house building game, which I downloaded late one night thanks to a bout of insomnia. Neither app was offensive to me.
Seems to be that some activists lobbied Apple to have the Manhattan Declaration app removed because they found it offensive. For those who didn’t sign it, the Manhattan Declaration is an ecumenical statement of faith, “a call of Christian conscience” on three major points: life, marriage and, ironically, religious liberty.
Whether or not you could have signed the Manhattan Declaration itself, I’d recommend signing the petition to have the app reinstated. I just hope it doesn’t come to some sort of boycott. I really love my iPhone.
A nice letter to the editor from one Stephen Woodworth, the Member of Parliament for Kitchener Centre. It’s a reasonable letter asking for discussion about abortion, but let me assure you, those who favour our abortion anytime status quo are chiselling him into the “anti-choice” side of the ledger as I type:
I support efforts to encourage a calm and respectful discussion about abortion law reform in Canada, as Canadians have passionately differing views over whether our existing abortion law, which declares that a child is not a human being until fully born, should be reformed. Many Canadians have decided that this question is too unpleasant to think about, much less talk about. This is because people on both sides have made it unpleasant with heated rhetoric. Until we convince Canadians that it’s not a burden to deal with this issue, people will continue to recoil from what is really a healthy discussion. There is plenty of medical and scientific evidence that can help us to answer the question whether or not our law is correct to say that a child is not a human being before birth, and therefore not deserving of human rights. There are modern principles of human rights which can be brought to bear. Difficult truths can always be tempered with sensitivity.
The alternative is to perpetuate a chill on national dialogue that will serve to perpetuate the status quo. Who’s goal is that?
To put it bluntly, that’s the goal of every active pro-choice/pro-abortion group. (Isn’t it their favourite line to say this issue was long ago decided?)
I almost missed this one. George Jonas on what you can and can’t say on campus. Naturally pro-life speech falls into the category of what you can’t say. My favourite part on why freedom of speech is curtailed:
Second, because the centre-left, in charge of both universities and the justice system, has a soft spot for the far-left from which free-speech deniers are launching their forays. Centrists and extremists of the left are kin under the skin. Left-centrists embrace illiberal institutions from “human rights” tribunals to affirmative discrimination, just like the far-left. While the centre-right is embarrassed by its far-right cousins and disowns them, the centre-left tries to find excuses for the black sheep of its own ideological family.
No matter how we got there, the end result is that we have police taking away pro-lifers in handcuffs.
There’s a new website sponsored by Students for Life of America (US), National Campus Life Network (Canada), Law Students for Life (US), Students for Life of Illinois (US), Rock for Life (US), and LifeNews.com (US). It’s called Stand With Carleton. Find out more about it, here.
The student association at Carleton University has decided that any club that is opposed to abortion has no place on campus and would have its funding as a student club cut off.
On Monday, Carleton Lifeline, an anti-abortion group, was told by CUSA, the Carleton University Student Association, that it was in violation of CUSA’s anti-discrimination policy.
The letter noted that Carleton Lifeline believes in the “equal rights of the unborn and firmly believes that abortion is a moral and legal wrong,” wrote Khaldoon Buhnaq of CUSA.
Therefore, because of CUSA’s commitment to choice, Carleton Lifeline can no longer promote activities on campus or even lobby in any way that would go against a pro-choice position.
“It is ironic that they support choice and do not see that they not having an abortion is a choice,” said Ruth Lobo, president of Carleton Lifeline.
I’ll say!
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Véronique adds: Can you hear me whack my head against my desk? What are kids learning these days? Because as someone who recently had to hire some junior staff, I can tell you that they don’t learn how to write or how to work. Apparently they don’t learn how to think either.
I wish I could have gone to this conference at Princeton. Sounds interesting. And I enjoy going into environments where there are the most extreme kind of pro-abortion people. The quotes you get are worth the entry fee in gold. Take this, as an example:
Kissling shocked the audience in the last session by saying, “I don’t care how you accomplish it [the right to abortion], whether through a constitution, the UN, state laws or federals laws, or by the Taliban.” The University of Pennsylvania, where Kissling is a visiting bioethics scholar, has drawn criticism for appointing the long-time abortion activist who lacks significant academic credentials.
Now that’s dedication.
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Jennifer adds: Here’s a good article about Singer and the fact that he paid for care for his aging mother with Alzheimer’s, going against his utilitarian ethics. “Singer forgot to look on page 2 of his book Practical Ethics, where he asserts, “…ethics is not an ideal system that is noble in theory but no good in practice. The reverse is closer to the truth: an ethical judgment that is no good in practice must suffer from a theoretical defect…” It seems that not only his critics think his action towards his mother negates his ethical theory, he does too! Will he take his own advice and admit that his ethical theory must suffer from theoretical defects, since it is no good in his very own practice?” (Source)
…has a new web site. The videos (under Strategy and Training) are particularly helpful, I find. Check it out.
(Yes, this is the group that does controversial things, like the Genocide Awareness Project and showing photos of aborted fetuses. It won’t suit all of us, but that’s the point, it will suit some of us and help jar our complacent culture, which is why I support them. And actually, the videos, featuring Jojo Ruba and Stephanie Gray are just very…what’s the word I’m looking for…logical. Can’t argue with that. Well, you can, but I don’t and most pro-abortion types don’t either. I don’t argue because I agree. They don’t argue because they’re missing the intellectual capital. It might be added at this point that the whole abortion debate won’t be won on arguing anything–the debate resides almost entirely in the realm of the emotional. If it were up to facts, figures, and statistics, we’d have a pro-life culture by now. That’s why videos showing faces and people, sympathetic people, will be so important.)
You don’t need to be pro-life to donate to the Faith and Freedom Alliance, through which John Carpay, a Calgary-based lawyer, can continue to defend the rights of pro-lifers to voice their views on campus as he has done so effectively in the past.
