Interesting post about why we say someone is a vegetable, post-debilitating injury or illness.

So by now we’ve all heard about the Nova Scotia teenager who was suspended for wearing a t-shirt that says, “Life is wasted without Jesus.”

If I were him, I’d comply and take the t-shirt off.

The next day I’d wear my pro-guns t-shirt. Followed up by an anti-Occupier t-shirt, followed up by a “Stop Global Whining” t-shirt. Then, of course, I’d be sure to find an anti-abortion t-shirt that was particularly strident, and put that on for good measure. Rinse, repeat.

There’s no limit to the offensive Ts that can be found on this here thing called the Internet.

Dear school administrator: Abortion stops a beating heart. Have a nice day.

What is it about these staff that demand perfect and total conformity? Oh wait, that’s their business: to make kids conform. To squash the really creative ones. To diagnose the really active ones with ADD. But let’s make sure we expand our school system to include toddlers.

Here ends the rant. (Sorry about that.)

Good commentary on these concepts in the Post today.

Our culture, which treasures freedom above any other value, is conflicted about what freedom means. Is it the raw assertion of my own will, in which any limitation of that will, whether imposed from without or embraced from within, makes me something less than what I should be? Or is freedom my capacity to choose to what great mission I will devote my energies, my talents, even my life? Does maximizing my freedom mean preserving only the capacity to choose, to keep my options open? Or is freedom noble precisely because it enables us to commit to a particular choice, one mission among a hundred options?

 

In this concept of autonomy, freedom and choice, what is being chosen matters as much as the fact that we have a choice. You might as well sit in a real prison if you are going to spiritually land yourself there anyway through bad choices.

While I’m at it, there was some good commentary on the same concepts published by my workplace, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, last week.

A book review of Girls Uncovered, by my friend Glenn Stanton, here.

While only 20 percent of young women answered that oral sex is sex (such a question reminds me of the Saturday Night Live “Celebrity Jeopardy” skit where Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery is stumped by the category “Colors That End in Urple”), more than 40 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds have had oral sex, while 70 percent of 18-year-olds have done so. And it doesn’t get better the older they get. For 20- and 21-year-old women, more than 80 percent report having had both vaginal and oral sex. More than 25 percent report having had anal sex. More disturbing, more than 40 percent of early post-teen women report having engaged in oral sex in the last thirty days. Now anyone who believes these girls are empowered, doing exactly what they want to do, when they want to do it, don’t know the hearts and minds of most girls. They want meaningful relationships where their boyfriends commit, taking them seriously and treating them respectfully. It was not young girls who invented the hook-up culture. But they do acquiesce to it.

A while back now I reviewed Donna Freitas’s Sex and the Soul. It said something similar. And then Dr. Miriam Grossman (Anonymous, MD) and Jennifer Roback Morse also wrote books saying something similar. “Sex is sexist” is a line from this most recent book review. But  it’s true, in so far as men and women experience sex differently and want different things from it.

I’d be interested in the book that examines what the hook-up culture does to boys. A friend of mine was recently asked out on a date where she had to pick the guy up, from his parent’s house, he was late, he emerged wearing a robot t-shirt, he made her pay half for a pitcher that she wasn’t really drinking since she was driving and then, wait for it, wanted her to stay over.Wow.

Where did he get the idea that this was a workable proposition? Come on, science, study the negative effects of the hook up culture on boys, too.

______________________

Correction: Said fellow did not ask my friend out, but rather texted her for long enough that she suggested perhaps they could meet. A natural thing to suggest, I’d say. However, it’s worth noting that he didn’t even have the gumption to ask her out.

I don’t actually like Dan Gardner’s columns. It’s not what he says so much as how he says it–with that air of official superiority that tells us all he has achieved the nirvana of perfect wisdom. I have a soft spot for humility. But damn! He makes some great points in this column. Read it.

Thus, what looks like a highly principled statement about the relationship between morality and liberty in a pluralistic society is actually something less grand: It is a lazy and weak defence of the status quo.

It’s time for me to read the Margaret Atwood novel, if only because it has been referenced so many times this past little while. But I have seen Gattaca. In this article, Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection, a book I have read and highly recommend (see? I do know how to read) questions whether Gattaca will come true. It’s about genetic pre-screening and tests on embryos.

And here’s a little clip from the movie, while I’m at it:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c25ZzUFePY]

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…when they read pro-abortion talking points. (Otherwise, please shut up.) Thanks to Heather Mallick for clarifying this, once again:

I now find Tory MP Gordon O’Connor strangely attractive. And you can quote me.

Way too reasonable. That’s all I have to say about Andrew Coyne’s column today. Too fair minded. Too thoughtful. Seriously, it’s helpful when someone who isn’t pro-life (which I assume he’s not) weighs in on these things without lighting any hair on fire.

Watch here. Brian does an admirable job. So does Joyce, though I disagree with her vehemently and she has her facts wrong in places.