The Huffington Post is featuring a debate about whether or not a parliamentary committee should study when a fetus becomes human and has rights.

What’s interesting is the format. They ask you your beliefs up front, then you read and then you vote again at the end. They tally who has changed more people’s minds, as well as showing you the percentages of agreement and disagreement.

I thought it was a neat way to do things. You can check it out, here.

I do like to see Ezra vociferously defending Mary Wagner in this clip. (Mary Wagner is another pro-life activist who protests at clinics.) I think her punishment is way excessive and it’s based on a systemic anti-pro-life, anti-Christian bias. (“Your God’s wrong”? Who says that? Reminds me of that scene in Bruce Almighty when God (Morgan Freeman) reads back some of what Bruce (Jim Carrey) has said about God recently. A good scene. Hey! Here it is. YouTube has everything.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjAM2J_D4UY&feature=relmfu]

When you blog about life and work at a marriage institute and you’re childless and unmarried, uncharitable, callous and plain ole’ mean folks come out of the woodwork. I’ll reference here this blog post, pertaining to moi.

And then I’ll link to this story in Alberta, whereby a Redford staffer tweeted this about Danielle Smith:

If @ElectDanielle likes young and growing families so much, why doesn’t she have children of her own?  #wrp family pack = insincere

Look, I am practicing what I preach. I preach young women following their dreams/the calling on their lives, such that they might contribute to the world even as they are fulfilled. I simultaneously preach that not everyone needs to have a “cookie cutter” life, ie. married at the national average, two kids, a dog. Finally, I preach that some things are not a choice, aka, the great women’s “choice” to abort is one of the strangest, most extreme ideas ever foisted on women and society, compelling them to live cookie cutter lives that may actually run contrary to their callings.

Back to Danielle Smith: I think she need not have gone as far as she did in her response to this uncharitable tweet. She is doing a great and arduous task, contributing much. I happen to have met her when I lived in Alberta and she’s lovely. We don’t need to know why she does or does not have children. Full stop.

Natalie recently informed us she’d like to be like Charmaine Yoest when she grows up.

I would like to be like Mary Eberstadt, who I really don’t know, other than finding her writing to be smart. A great article in the Wall Street Journal about the Pill, religion, the sexual revolution and why this matters, here. 

This just in, first hand, from someone working in a hospital:

One teenage girl came in last week for an abortion.  She was all alone, and clearly she was struggling with her decision.  After the abortion, I saw her in the waiting room, and the look on her face said it all…the suffering and pain she was feeling was quite apparent.  The poor girl had no one with her.  There was no pre-abortion counseling, nor was there any post-abortion counseling.  This, sadly, is still the state of affairs here in Canada.”

As you can imagine, abortion was not mentioned in the Budget 2012 documents.

So what connection could I possibly be making?

Read Andrew Coyne today. It’s about how fiscal conservatives have been had by this lacking-in-fiscal-conservatism Conservative government. I happen to agree, in large part, speaking as a small-c conservative myself.Which, by the way, you do not have to be to be pro-life, but now I’m digressing.

Anyway, many a pro-choicer has enjoyed making fun of pro-lifers when it comes to this Conservative government. They poke fun: “Stephen Harper has run you over–again!” Thereby implying that pro-lifers are naive and simplistic folk who thoroughly believed Stephen Harper was the man for them.

I have never believed this about Prime Minister Harper. Very, very early on, I took his robotic repeated phrase “I will not re-open the abortion debate” at face value.

He’s not going to re-open the abortion debate, folks.

But on fiscal accountability, now there’s a place where expectations may, rightly, have been high. Fiscal conservatism is, in actual fact, popular. Most parties, however they attempt to enact it, pay lip service to it. To have a Conservative government that does not follow through is a bit of a blow.

I just thought I’d highlight this, well, because I have a blog and can. I do so both for those pro-choicers who like to highlight what they perceive to be a pro-life weakness, AND, I might add, for those pro-lifers who believe Stephen Harper has thrown us under the bus, so to speak.

No one has been thrown under the bus like the average fiscal conservative under Stephen Harper.

Since it only dawned on me but very, very slowly and late in life that the the sexual revolution was a real revolution in the way we live as women, men and families, I remain interested in smart assessments of the topic. Here’s one, from Carolyn Moynihan over at MercatorNet. The article references another smart woman: Mary Eberstadt, writing about the same topic in the Wall Street Journal and that’s an article I’ll certainly be returning to read when I get a spare minute.

I have mixed feelings around movies like October Baby. One side of me totally agrees with the filmmaker in this article about the movie. He has an audience and he is catering to it. Religious folks, be they conservative evangelicals or conservatives Catholics, deserve more respect than they currently get. All too often they are pigeon-holed as being radical, crazy, out of touch or all three.

However, I wonder what the point is of creating a movie that only the converted will go see.

The problem here is that while I’d like Hollywood to make better movies, those movies, in order to support life, need not touch on it quite so directly. I suppose what I’m interested in are high quality films that testify to the human spirit, which will, in turn, testify to the idea that life is worth living, through good times and bad.

I’m not saying movies like October Baby should not be made. I’m glad Jianna Gesson’s story of surviving an abortion is being told. But I suppose what I’m saying is that I hope the filmmaker will go on to tackle a range of topics, doing so from his faith perspective, speaking to life and faith in a manner that might be more subtle, as well.

Given how brothels are newly legal in Ontario, this conference about human trafficking seems all the more prescient. You can get more information and register here.

Are you in law enforcement, social services, community services or a frontline service provider?

We are excited to inform you of an upcoming conference that will offer dynamic workshops and seminars on human trafficking. The Justice Summit will take place here in Ottawa on Saturday, May 5, 2012 at the Metropolitan Bible Church.

It is estimated that 27 million people are enslaved around the world at any given moment.

80% of the victims of sex trafficking are women, 50% or these are children.

Human trafficking has risen to become the second most profitable crime globally after the drug trade.

Young women have and continue to be trafficked in Ottawa and forced into sex slavery.

The Justice Summit will feature presentations by international human rights advocates, human trafficking survivors, and activists.

I don’t agree with this op-ed about the sexual revolution. But I was able to read to the end without feeling offended and aggravated.

This is how I aspire to write: in such a way that someone else might say “Nope, not my bag, and she’s inconsistent on X, Y and Z,” but still make it to the end of the piece and perhaps even think about it a little bit more after that.

So here it is: a somewhat illogical view on the sexual revolution, and one I can easily poke holes in. However, I won’t, and will instead applaud her light and airy writing style that seems to say to me that I could possibly have coffee with this woman and enjoy it.