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Buying flowers, cleaning the porch, throwing out junk, etc.

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Hey! Spring is here! (“Here” being Ottawa, where I sit.) This is the first really nice weekend of the year and I am SO ready for it… Thoughts turn to t-shirts (don’t forget to buy yours), running shoes, sunshine and flower pots. Nice change, isn’t it?

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Andrea asks: Buying flowers–but did you buy the chick too? Because if so, I’m on my way over. The last bit of snow from the five foot pile in front of my house is gone now, too. Things are indeed looking up.

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Tanya says: I still have a sad, gray pile of snow on my front yard. I think I shall indeed be one of those weirdos to shovel it onto the street this weekend.
Then I’ll take my daughter outside, barelegged, and snap her annual Easter photos. We always like to involve our pet bunny. But a chick would do nicely, too…

So is the Ottawa Citizen hiring?

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Wanted: opinionated women. I think I know some.

This column discusses why it is that about 75 per cent of opinion columnists in Canada are men.

On the one hand, I have a bit of a hard time understanding why women wouldn’t want to express opinions. That’s always been my goal, and I’d love to have a little sketch of my noggin beside a permanent column in a paper somewhere.

On the other hand, I can see why women would stay away. In writing I can be opinionated, controversial. But in debates and on radio, I default to compassion mode. Consensus-building mode. I become easily concerned that perhaps I am too hard-nosed, didn’t see both sides, spoke to quickly–hurt someone’s feelings. Oh dear. Feelings are always hurt in the opinion business. You need a tough shell.

Now you’ll see in this post how I’ve seen both sides–made sure I was fair to opinionated women and those who aren’t. Very fair. Very middle of the road. Yaaaaawn. (Boring is not the hallmark of a great opinion writer.)

If I wanted to really have an opinion, I’d come right out and say this: there are fewer female opinion writers because women have fewer strong opinions that they want to express publicly and hold to, as a point of debate. Perhaps because we don’t have tough shells. Perhaps because women are less… egotistical. You have to have quite an ego in this business. (Witness the raging success of Rush Limbaugh for an extreme example. Whether you like him or not, he is successful at expressing his opinions.)

Just my opinion, anyway. And when you write to disagree, I will feel very bad and try and see things your way.

Imagine that, women who listen…

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But we did! We heard from enough guys who said they, too, would like a People for the Ethical Treatment of People t-shirt so we made one. Same price ($25, which includes all applicable taxes and shipping anywhere in Canada or the United States), same logo, different colour. And yes, girls are allowed to wear that one, too.

Pre-order yours today. Orders are expected to ship around April 5.

More from the University of Calgary

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The University of Calgary pro-life club set up the Genocide Awareness Project today, again. There must be a bit of freedom in already being criminally charged–what are the authorities going to do–charge them again? Probably. But doesn’t look like that bothers them too much. 

The University of Calgary’s campus security personnel have taken down the names and addresses of seven members of the Campus Pro-Life club at about 2:30 p.m. today, presumably for the purpose of charging students with “trespassing” on their own campus.

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Update: Here. The headline reads that “Free speech wins in pro-life protest” but so far as I know, the charges against the group have not been dropped and they are due back in court in the fall.

Joining the young Campus Pro-Life group is one lone elderly woman, who pulls out of a black portfolio bag a sign that reads “I Regret My Abortion.”While she walks around silently, her sign hoisted in the air, a couple of campus security officers swoop in. But rather than arresting anyone, a move that would have likely prompted much excitement among the gathered media throng and TV cameras, they only plunk down a couple of signs decrying the demonstration, and letting the public know that the miscreants have been charged with trespassing.

Just for the record

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We will never – EVER – do anything as crazy as this. That’s a promise.

The founder of the world’s largest animal rights organization wants to give Canada’s parliamentarians an earful, in a bizarre online will.

Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said that upon her death, she wants one of her ears “removed, mounted” and sent to Ottawa to help the government “in hearing, for the first time perhaps, the screams of the seals, bears, raccoons, foxes and minks bludgeoned, trapped and sometimes skinned alive for their pelts.”

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Andrea adds: You know, there are moments when people give animal rights activists more sympathy than human rights (pro-life) activists, hence People for the Ethical Treatment of People (buy a shirt).

This is not one of them. That’s just disturbed, and I’m quite sure most will view it that way.

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Rebecca says: You know, I completely agree that cruelty to animals is wrong. One of the theories about the laws of kosher food is that the complicated rules mandate humane slaughter and make us aware that, even as we consume meat, we have to remember it came from a living animal. Jewish law emphasizes animal rights in other ways – meat that is hunted is never kosher, because we’re not meant to take pleasure in killing animals. (Note: I’m not anti-hunting. NRA enthusiasts, please keep your fan mail to yourselves.) And one of the things that is permitted on the Sabbath, when almost any form of work is forbidden, is feeding livestock and caring for them.

But the solution to the very real cruelty to animals that does go on is NOT to treat human life as cheaply as animal life. That’s what Newkirk is trying to convey, but the effect of saying “a dog is a rat is a boy” is to demean humans, not uplift animals. This also applies to PETA’s offensive KFC/Holocaust ads.

Get ready for an increase in depressed women

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In a field of research with very very little consensus, it is clear that when a child is wanted–and the mother aborts–depression results.

This article shocks me. And I don’t shock easily. (I think I stopped shocking so easily way back in my Masters with my focus on Holocaust studies. I just needed to learn the material and get my degree. Excellent professors encouraged it, by the way; they didn’t want emotionally-outraged students in the classroom, so we learned to discuss the Holocaust in dispassionate terms.)

I am shocked by news that abortion clinics see women with wanted children who are aborting because they can’t afford it–and no one goes off to raise funds to help them keep the baby.

And this article reports how raising money for the abortion is supposedly deemed compassionate.

What a twisted world.

‘This was a desired pregnancy — she’d been getting prenatal care — but they re-evaluated expenses and decided not to continue,’ said Dr. Pratima Gupta. ‘When I was doing the options counselling, she interrupted me, crying, and said, ‘Dr. Gupta, I just walked here for an hour. I’m sure of my decision.'”

Other doctors are hearing similarly wrenching tales. For many Americans, the recession is affecting their most intimate decisions about sex and family planning. Doctors and clinics are reporting that many women are choosing abortions and men are having vasectomies because they cannot afford a child.

Planned Parenthood of Illinois clinics performed an all-time high number of abortions in January, many of them motivated by the women’s economic worries, said CEO Steve Trombley, who declined to give exact numbers. Abortions at Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis-area clinics were up nearly 7% in the second half of 2008 from a year earlier.

No one ever thought of adoption, either. Many, but not everyone, are feeling the pinch. And I’m quite sure we have the funds to help out here. This is the result of a pro-abortion status quo, that the Vicki Saportas of this world get busy raising abortion funds with my tax dollars (she’s American, but you get my point) instead of raising money for other avenues that don’t involve the death of the child and the subsequent depression of the mother. Well done.

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Tanya adds: I sincerely don’t understand. I know a woman who, a few years ago, ended a wanted pregnancy due to some financial issues. Two months later, when she normally would have been well into her second trimester, the family’s financial problems resolved themselves. Since then, she’s been trying to get pregnant again.

A few months back, I had a dentist’s appointment that I had to cancel because some expensive doohickey went on the car. No biggie. I just rescheduled.

Pregnancy is not a dentist’s appointment.

“Mindful eating, mindless sex”

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A creative thesis in this article here. With subheadings like “Broccoli, Pornography, and Kant” how could you not read it? She’s asking an interesting question:

…What happens when, for the first time in history — at least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want? This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to expect that people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so, for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.

In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they end up doing very different things — things we might signal by shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an exploration of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is driving it.

This does seem to raise one of the great ironies, and it’s one I encounter often enough. Many will watch very closely what they consume when it comes to food (organic, naturopathic, special diets, etc.) but show less concern for who they sleep with. (Then again there are those who just consume a whole lot of both–maintaining consistency, at least.)

This came up on Roadkill Radio last night too, where I talked about People for the Ethical Treatment of People (buy a shirt)–the irony that many will maintain a high level of concern for eating organic, but not think too much about the invasive and destructive surgery called abortion.

A great big grey area

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Here is a long but interesting article about paid surrogates in India, most of whose “clients” are Americans.  There are so many thorny issues here.  Is it possible that these women aren’t exploited, when they’re offered (by their standards) massive amounts of money?  If we accept surrogacy for free, out of charity or love, is it wrong to pay for it?  Are these western parents so desperate for a biological child somehow selfish for going this route instead of adopting one of the many children in the world who need loving parents?  I don’t know the answer to any of these, but the whole operation seems very murky, and that’s without even addressing the “surplus” embryos that are inevitably created with IVF.

I can’t bring myself to condemn people who would do anything to have a child of their own, which for many people means one that shares their DNA.  But this is an area in which some moral clarity, and consensus on what is and is not acceptable, would be very helpful.

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Andrea adds: Condemnation is never particularly helpful, no. But that is besides the point. If something is sketchy, murky or just plain wrong–we ought to call a spade a spade and say so. That might sound a lot like “condemnation” in moments. What is worse–a whiff of condemnation or in the case described above, making people into monetary transactions? I’m a sympathetic sort, I like to think–in particular to feeling like you really want kids. But there comes a point when our feelings really are besides the point–and wanting a child even very badly is, after all, just that. A feeling. (Does anyone ever feel (hardy har har) like our culture is grounded on nothing more than the latest Oprah show?)

Beware religious dogma in Africa

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And when I say religious dogma, I mean the secular kind. Recall the controversy over the Pope’s comments on AIDS and condoms? At least one Harvard academic is saying the immortal gods of science prove the Pope right:

A senior Harvard research scientist confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI, who endured heavy criticism for declaring that condom distribution programs worsen the AIDS epidemic in Africa, was actually correct. Dr. Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, told National Review Online last week that despite AIDS activists and media outlets pounding the pope for downplaying the effectiveness of condoms, the science actually supports the Catholic leader’s claim.

(cross-posted to The Shotgun)

Wow, we must look scary…

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We can’t really be considered dangerous for opposing abortion, right?

If you’re an anti-abortion activist, or if you display political paraphernalia supporting a third-party candidate or a certain Republican member of Congress, if you possess subversive literature, you very well might be a member of a domestic paramilitary group.

That’s according to “The Modern Militia Movement,” a report by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), a government collective that identifies the warning signs of potential domestic terrorists for law enforcement communities.

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Tanya adds: It just goes to show how very elite the pro-choice stance really is.  Pro-life?  Possible terrorist.  But if you’re pro-choice you’re a real patriot.  (When are they putting out those propaganda videos?)

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Rebecca adds: To me this illustrates the accelerating (thank you Mr. Obama) trend toward vilifying those with whom you disagree.  In a healthy democracy, people recognize that men and women of good will may reach different conclusions, and can respect that, even as they disagree.  If we can’t distinguish between “this is a thoughtful person whose values differ from and and with whom I disagree” and “this personal is evil and dangerous,” we’re in a very bad place, as a civilization.  And while there are pro-life people who see the world in Manichean terms, the “if you’re not with us, you’re evil” worldview shows up way more often in pro-choice, feminist, and secular liberal circles more generally, in my experience, than on the right.

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Tanya updates: Reassigned?  Love that terminology.

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