Archives for 2009

Paris Hilton wants young women to know: Don’t make a sex tape!

Paris Hilton wants to warn young girls from making “humiliating” sex tapes.

The blonde socialite was devastated when X-rated footage of her and ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon surfaced in 2003 and has vowed to stop other girls from agreeing to film themselves engaging in sex acts to please their lovers.

She said: “I want young girls to never put themselves in that situation I was in. Don’t ever let someone talk you into doing something you don’t want to do.”

Well, there you have it. Me and Paris Hilton, we agree on something.

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Andrea adds: Wow, that practically makes her a values voter. For her, anyway.

Lubna Hussein faces up to 40 lashes for wearing pants in public.

On Wednesday, the court gave Hussein the option of accepting immunity as a U.N. worker or waiving it and standing trial. Hussein works for the media department of the U.N. and is also a journalist for the left-leaning Al Sahafa newspaper. The soapbox at her disposal has not been lost on her: In response to the court’s offer, Hussein waived her immunity, saying, “I wish to resign from the U.N. I wish this court case to continue.”

Later she added, “I wish to change this law.”

We can help her by watching closely and talking about her case in public. The more attention her case gets, the better. Please share her story.

Barbara Kay is on fire!

For greater clarity around domestic violence in Canada, we should use the term Inter Partner Violence (IPV), now favoured by many academics in this field. Normative IPV is violence that springs from psychologically troubled people — both men and women — who have problems dealing with intimate relationships, but have no healthy model for resolving them. Many of them have come from abusive backgrounds. Much of IPV involves alcohol, drugs or both, not the case with honour killing. IPV is usually situational and therefore spontaneous, rarely planned in advance like honour killing. Unlike honour killing, too, which invariably involves males killing females, about 50% of IPV is “assortative” — cases where damaged like seeks like — and the partners bilaterally provoke each other.

Canada’s male-on-female IPV murder numbers — about 45 women partners (not daughters) a year, low for a population of 35 million — are directly linked to an important cultural fact: Murdering women, especially their own loved ones, is anathema to healthy Western men. Unlike honour killings, such crimes are universally condemned: They are never validated, let alone encouraged in our institutions or houses of worship; indeed, all abuse of women is abominated rather than tolerated in the general culture.

We must understand above all that IPV and honour killings represent different stakes for society. IPV is not sociologically catchy: Healthy people do not take their intimate relationship cues from the pathological amongst them. Honour killing, on the other hand, is a form of ideological terrorism linked to a particular religious and cultural outlook, an implied threat to other women of what can happen if they don’t toe the party line and an emboldening “inspiration” to their male cultural peers. Like suicide bombing, another culturally induced form of hysteria, honour killing is a sick practice that can go viral if not nipped in the bud.

Cravenly ascribing the problem of honour killings to all men’s nature, which is what we do when we subsume it under the heading of domestic violence, itself misunderstood, rather than acknowledging the specific cultural matrix from which the phenomenon emerges, will only end in more dead innocent girls and women. That seems a rather high price to pay for our liberal elites’ pleasure in dancing to the vivacious gallopade of the multicultural-correctness polka.

What’s missing from this column are numbers for “honour killings” in Canada, which I’m guessing are pretty low. According to the UN (not exactly hysterically anti-Muslim people), something like 5,000 women are victims of such crimes a year around the world – mostly in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. I wonder how many women are killed by their male partners in “non-honour-killing” murders (what I gather we should call “male-of-female IPV murders”) worldwide every year.

We all know by now it was Sarah Palin’s last day in office last week. Here’s the Globe and Mail‘s oh-so-funny take on it. But I won’t begrudge them their satire, no.

Instead, a short post we will call “A diligent Globe and Mail reporter and editor work on a story about Sarah Palin.”

Sarah Palin’s last day as Governor was Sunday, July 26. Woo-hoo! [Remove “woo-hoo.” We do not cheer her resignation; Look, in Alaska she was at least contained. Now she could turn up anywhere.–ed.]  Location: Far away! Even further than the 905. [Add “Can’t see the CN Tower there,” for Canadian content and context. Remember, show, don’t tell–ed.] Background: Crazy gun-toting fundamentalist religious nutbar [Enough already!  You’ll look unfair; try “crazy gun-toting moose-field-dressing religious Barbie-doll grandma” and drop fundamentalist nutbar–ed.] appears on scene, poised to steal American election from rightful heir, Barack Obama (May His Holy Name Be Praised) [Do you think that might offend Muslims? Please do solid fact check.–ed]. Couldn’t have that again. Not after George W in 2000. Bygones–we have Barack now. No more is America a land of fat, overbearing rubes.  Just redneck governors with five kids, one of whom just resigned. [Good place to insert joke about the out-of-wedlock birth of her teenage daughter? Just a thought. Good start, but I think there’s more we can do with this one–ed.]

…Look, I was never getting published in the Globe anyway. Might as well have a little innocent fun, right?

It’s hardly the worst thing about them, but still, these kinds of results should obviously be mentioned in there somewhere if we are going to continue to believe (I use the term loosely) that women give their fully informed consent before undergoing abortions.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A new study done on women in Turkey who had abortions finds a 66 percent increased risk of contracting breast cancer as a result. The study is the latest to confirm that abortions cause significant adverse medical risks for women who have them, in addition to killing unborn children.

Yes, I know. Continuing an unwanted pregnancy also has consequences. But most people are usually aware of those (like, say, that there will most likely be a baby at the end). It’s not a question of which course of action is less risky so much as which one is right. And I for one believe that in virtually all cases, abortion isn’t the right course of action.

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Update: Seems like tanning beds are also dangerous that way. Me, I can’t understand why anyone would want to squeeze into one of those tubes (OK, so I am claustrophobic), regardless of cancer risks.

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Andrea adds: Both of these cancer links are no-brainers if you ask me. But one of them will be highly-contested. Intuitively, it makes sense that abortion would increase your risk of breast cancer. In totally non-scientific terms, it is my understanding that a woman’s body changes when she gets pregnant and part of that change involves increased hormone levels and a multiplication of breast cells. And when you abort, you are left with the multiplying cells (again, I’m not a doctor but isn’t that what cancer is?) and higher levels of hormones of the cancer-causing variety.

As for tanning beds, I have been known to use one once or twice in mid-February when you feel like winter will never end. But I gave it up when I realized if I am to get skin cancer, it should be because I spent time on the beach in Hawaii and not because I shut myself into a small, brightly lit, coffin-like tanning bed. Priorities, people.

Scientists think they’ve discovered a male contraceptive – one that involves inhibiting the sperm’s PLC zeta protein. I’m sure (certain! positive!) the guys will go for that. Sounds so virile.

Our family is in the middle of a move. We are moving ten minutes down the road from where we currently live, out of the cookie-cutter suburbs and into the custom-made estate lot suburbs where our children will be able to kick a soccer ball without disturbing the neighbours’ lawns, pools or tranquility. But more importantly, where we won’t have to look at our neighbours sunbathing 24/7. Yes folks, even with the crappy summer we’ve had so far, my neighbours have found a way to work on their tan. Maybe I’m just jealous of their idleness. Still, I won’t miss them: bikinis and Speedos after 40 are a privilege ladies and gentlemen, not a right.

Packing boxes with a three-year-old underfoot should be an Olympic discipline, just ask Andrea who came to help on Saturday. So I guess we should have known things were going a little too well when an unknown neighbour rang our doorbell to bring back our son. He had wandered two streets away “on a walk” as he explained later. “Is he one of yours?” he asked, “I thought you might want to have him back.” In a spectacular display of lying through his teeth, my husband said “Yes, thank you,” resisting the urge to say something like “No, we were doing just great” or, even more accurately “Uh, we didn’t even know he was missing…” Our son, in the meantime, was shooting looks at his benefactor thinking “One perfectly good walk, ruined!”

With six kids under my belt, I have learned to laugh at my parenting failures. Still, each one of them has hunted me with “what if’s?” and this latest escapade from my son is no exception. It can be difficult to keep everyone safe in a large family and my luck sometimes leaves me uncomfortable. What if…

So this is the first ProWomanProLife Parent of the Year forum. What is the worst parenting failure you can now laugh at? You can stay anonymous. Come on, make me feel normal please!

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Andrea adds: Saturday was fun. Kept me on my toes. Between the “match the tupperware with the right lid” game I devised for your three-year-old to keep him from blowing that whistle while you were putting the baby down, and the tap shoes used interchangeably between the three-year-old and your older daughters, I felt right at home. (Who doesn’t want tap shoes? I always have. Plus a show on Broadway, but I digress.) Through it all, your neighbours, serenely lying out in the muggy overcast cloud, drinking adult beverages. You are correct: bikinis past 40 are not a right. In fact, for some, they are downright criminal.

Logic is a cold instrument that is frequently not compatible with life (or maybe I should say: Life isn’t always logical). Anyone who’s ever fallen in love will know as much – sometimes, we do things that don’t make sense even though we know they don’t make sense.

I like being logical, most of the time. But like anything else, logic can be taken to extremes. Like deciding, when young and reasonably healthy, that we wouldn’t want to live with illness or pain, therefore we should legalize euthanasia. Especially given how overstretched our medical system already is…

If, like me, you don’t like this sort of “logical” thinking, then you’ll appreciate this column.

We have up until recently assumed that we cannot control life’s end. When that was the case — just as when we used to think we could not control life’s beginning — caretaking for those at the heart of the drama was accepted as everyone’s responsibility. But now we would view late-life sufferers, as we used to consider unwed mothers, as having gotten themselves “in trouble” and in need of a termination to that trouble. Of course, as with abortion, the pregnant woman, or the sufferer pregnant, so to speak, with pain, can choose not to terminate. But then, if that’s your choice, the result of the choice (the baby, the suffering) is also your problem, isn’t it? Because in the case of the sufferer, if you haven’t made a deliberate decision to die, then continuing to live is not a given, something you needn’t concern yourself with; rather, continuing to live then also becomes a deliberate decision, one for which you, not your family and society, are responsible.

For a glimpse into a future in which euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal, read a short essay by Richard Stith, Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men in the August/September issue of First Things magazine. Stith, who teaches at Valparaiso School of Law in Indiana, makes the persuasive case that when having children became an elective rather than a natural consequence of sex, responsibility for children shifted wholly to women. Men instinctively understood that if conception could be undone, then so could their responsibility for being involved with the children women chose not to terminate.

Instead of empowering women, abortion has placed many women in a cleft stick. As Stith notes: “One investigator, Vincent M. Rue, reported in the Medical Science Monitor, that 64% of American women who abort feel pressed to do so by others. Another, Frederica Mathewes-Green in her book Real Choices, discovered that American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children.” If you substitute the words “euthanize” for “abort” and “elderly” or “chronically ill” for “children,” the analogy with end-of-life termination could not be more clear.

It’s hard to react to stories like this with anything other than a string of swear words. Nothing – absolutely nothing – justifies this kind of criminal behaviour.

The infant girl is reportedly not expected to survive.

No, I don’t have anything useful to say, other than “throw the books at them”. I just wanted to help making sure her suffering didn’t go unnoticed.