Archives for 2010

The latest round of sex-ed curriculum letters and columns in my local paper reflects some puzzlement at the McGuinty government’s whiplash-inducing flip-flop. For the record, regardless of the merits of the ex-new sex-ed curriculum, McGuinty should be voted off the island just for not seeing this coming. I have been receiving emails and invitations to protest the new curriculum since December. I’m sure Dalton has too.

What I should have seen coming was the portrayal of parents who opposed the changed to the Ontario sex-ed curriculum as knuckle-dragging right-wing bigots. Read the comments here , here , and to some extent here .

Count me in I guess; although anyone who has followed my posts about the birds and the bees knows that my children ask a lot of questions and I don’t sugar-coat anything. But believe me, when one of my pre-teens asked me how homosexuals conceived children since they couldn’t have intercourse and what’s the point of marrying someone you can’t have sex with, I wished I had a habit of making things up. Oh, look at the time… Anyway, these letter-writers all miss the point. I have no issue with my children knowing that their genitals won’t fall-off if they touch them or that homosexuals are not psychopaths. I don’t think that sex-ed is corrupting. I am not anti sex-ed, I am anti sex-ed curriculum. My kids’ sex-education is no government’s business. Sex-ed and curriculum are two words that shouldn’t go together. Like Public and Toilets.

But while letter-writers and columnists don’t get my point, I do get theirs and, believe it or not, the government’s. Unfortunately, many children do not get proper sex education at home. It’s like religion in Catholic schools: parents want their kids to have it, they just don’t want to teach it. Some children — yes, they are still children — are sexually active in grade 7 and 8. The hoopla over the HPV vaccine was based in part over the fact that grade 4 girls were vaccinated because after that we couldn’t be sure they were not already sexually active. That shows immense failure on the part of the parents, not the system. How are parents failing their children when it comes to sexual education? Is it MTV? Is it pop radio? Is it La Senza Girl? Is it American abstinence-only sex-ed policies? Honestly, I don’t really know. But I will grant my detractors that the rate of teenage pregnancy and abortion, and STD transmission is outrageous and no flattering reflection on parents or the state’s ability to handle the topic. It’s easy to blame your opponent when stats increase regardless. But while we’re talking, we are still failing our children.

In the Medical Post (not available online) there’s a full page article on abortion and grieving from the doctor’s perspective by one Shane Neilson in Erin, Ontario. Very interesting, in particular because the doctor is not pro-life. He doesn’t like abortion, but he does refer for them. He says he has but once seen a women who had an abortion and didn’t regret it. The remorseless 19-year-old who shows up in his office one week after an abortion is the subject of his column.

He says she appears to live in an “emotional dead zone” and that he “wants to shake her, but [does] the Pap and bimanual exam instead.”

He concludes with this line: “It haunts me that I wrote in the chart that her uterus had returned to a normal size.”

I feel for him. Seems to be strangled by his own desire not to press his opinion on others. I’d like to shake him, actually, I’m betting he doesn’t hesitate to impress his view in other areas–maybe weight loss or smoking. So here’s a doctor who consistently sees women grieving their abortions but won’t cease to refer for them. I think he sounds like a good man, a good doctor. But why won’t he stand up for what he knows to be true? That the fetus matters, even if he’s not sure it’s human? That women suffer after the fact?

In any event, sounds like this doctor doesn’t love abortion. And for that I’m glad. If it continues to haunt him, that “uterus has returned to normal size” comment after it was just violently emptied… chances are sooner or later he’ll stop and think some more about his choices in this situation.

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Brigitte seconds that: I’m glad to see he was at least disturbed. Beats this guy.

I laughed out loud at the headline alone but the quotes are even better:

Young Abortion Foes Trouble NARAL Leader

Yes, yes. I’m sure they do.

Oh, look! An excellent oped in today’s Ottawa Citizen by one A. Mrozek, about the new all-day “learning” program being somewhat less flexible than people were led to believe. Here’s the, ah, money quote:

So how exactly is the Ontario Ministry of Education legislating choice out of existence?

For starters, simply by introducing a monolithic taxpayer funded plan — legitimate and regulated child care providers can’t compete. When the government subsidizes a service, it means others are put out of business.

All-day kindergarten also takes five-year-olds out of existing centres. These children are a day-care’s bread and butter. Care of five-year-olds is substantially cheaper than infant care, which runs into the tens of thousands of dollars annually. Since no child-care centre could possibly charge parents the true infant price, they have balanced their businesses by charging less than the real cost for younger kids and more for older ones. The older ones who will now enter the “free” state centres.

Families with a spouse who stays home are, as usual, totally pooched. Their taxes will rise for a service they don’t ever choose to use. Pascal-plan advocates swear up and down the block we can fund the new system, parents at home and everything in between. The problem is they haven’t told anyone where the money tree is growing.

It bears repeating, again and again, just how expensive these programs are. Costed out, the full Pascal plan comes to $6.1 billion annually. All-day kindergarten rings in at a likely $1.8 billion annually. If money spent on all-day kindergarten went to parents instead, it would come out to more than $9,000 per child, annually.

Indeed. But Andrea, you forgot one thing: Parents wouldn’t know what to do with that money. Better let the government manage it.

Fight fire with fire, they say. Outraged by the ridiculous statement from a senior Iranian cleric that “immodestly dressed” women were the cause of earthquakes (I mentioned it a few days ago), one university student decided to stage a “boobquake”:

An Islamic cleric’s suggestion that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes has drawn thousands to join an American student’s busty bid to shake up the world — by revealing cleavage.

Jen McCreight is the creator of Boobquake, an event scheduled for Monday, which has already garnered the support of more than 40,000 people on Facebook.

[…]

“With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake,” she wrote on her blog. “If not, I’m sure Mr. Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble.”

I am usually more on the side of modesty, but I think I’ll make an exception in this case. But fear not: You don’t have to bare more than you really want in order to participate:

Ms. McCreight, who describes herself as an liberal, atheist feminist, said women don’t have to show off their cleavage or wear a short skirt to participate.

“The name of the event may be about boobs, but feel free to show an ankle on Monday — that will still be immodest to someone, somewhere,” she said.

Premier Dalton McGuinty was caught today actually listening to his constituents. He’s giving up on the new sex ed curriculum.

Cherish these moments.

Margaret Wente on the new Ontario sex-ed thing:

I do have one objection to the way sex ed is taught in schools. It is so scrupulously gender-neutral that it ignores the fundamental differences between teenage boys and girls. Boys want sex, all the time. Girls want relationships. It’s hardwired into their biology. The more that girls absorb this cruel fact of life, the better off they’ll be. Teenage girls need to learn that having sex as freely as guys do is not necessarily empowering. In fact, it’s a lot more empowering if they don’t.

Darn right! But there’s more: Not only are girls looking for something other than just casual sex 24/7, they are the ones most at risk when it comes to long-term consequences from sexually-transmitted diseases (what a surprise it must be to find out, in your early thirties, that the family you are now ready to start can’t happen because you are sterile), and they’re also the ones who end up having to deal with a pregnancy when, you know, things don’t go quite as planned. As a very predictable result, many girls are made to feel that, should they get pregnant, it’s their “problem” and theirs alone even though it usually takes more than one person to create a baby. That, too, is far from empowering. Go read Unprotected if you don’t believe me.

On an another note, I also agree with this bit from Ms. Wente’s column:

If you’re a parent, it’s not sex ed that deserves to drive you nuts. It’s green ed. Today is Earth Day, as you have surely noticed – the holiest day in the school calendar. All across the land, millions of schoolchildren are being reminded that the glaciers are melting and the polar bears are drowning and the entire planet is in peril. The schools are there to teach them that they are stewards of the Earth (it says so, right in the Ontario curriculum), which can only be saved by turning out the lights and recycling the dryer lint. Time to make them watch An Inconvenient Truth again! Poor kids. Now that’s indoctrination.

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Andrea adds: I guess I read recently that even in marriage a husband knows his wife loves him if she has sex with him, and a wife knows her husband loves her if he talks with her. Not that I’m reading any relationship self-help books, no, no. But people keep sending them to me! (And I’m not above the help, either.)

The letters page in the National Post is filled with people against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia, from absolutely every angle. The second reading vote on Francine Lalonde’s “Death with Dignity” bill is today. Let’s hope these letters speak into it NOT passing (which would push it to committee stage). Hopefully this bill will die today.

(here, here, here, here and here–just buy the paper)

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Brigitte adds this update: The bill was defeated, and soundly at that (228 to 59).

Sex week at Yale. Read it and weep. Truly.

While the sadomasochism marketer was attaching pinching devices to her breasts, another presentation was in progress next door. A speaker invited by Yale’s Anscombe Society, a small campus group devoted to the cause of premarital abstinence, was explaining that the sexual revolution made “consent” the only moral test of a sexual relationship, ignoring the idea that “some sexual acts are incompatible with human dignity.” He asked the audience, “Can we move from saying what is permissible to asking what is right and what is good?” Attendance at “Babeland’s Lip Tricks,” in which a New York stripper demonstrated oral sex techniques with rubber props for 90 minutes: 2,000 (more than a third of the undergraduate body). Attendance at the lecture advocating sexual restraint: 14. Yale’s motto: Lux et veritas (light and truth). Privilege of attending Yale in 2010: not quite as priceless as it used to be.