Vaclav Havel, RIP.

Taken from a speech broadcast on radio and television on January 1, 1990:

…But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships…

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all, though naturally to differing extents, responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are also its co-creators. …”

I believe that when a pro-life angle on a story comes up involving one Christian Bale, it is absolutely compulsory for me to post it. With a photo.

Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, talked with LifeNews about Bale’s attempt to see the human rights activist. “Christian Bale is right that the true heroes are the Chinese citizens who have been beaten and detained trying to visit Chen, and yet Bale is a hero as well. He is starring in the most expensive film ever made in China, which China hopes will win an Academy Award. Nevertheless, he has the courage to stand against official injustice and has greatly raised the visibility of Chen’s case,” she said.

I’m not a big fan of Hollywood stars taking political stances–but that’s because they usually choose to be brave and courageously outspoken on the most popular, mainstream, politically correct causes. I’m not suggesting Bale is an activist against the one-child policy, but then again, he didn’t have to go and visit this dissident, either.

When we think the government is taking care of things, we are less personally responsible and less generous. Also when government takes care of more, we are personally poorer, and therefore have fewer of our own funds to donate. A good article here, describing the personal generosity of Canadians.

Charity begins at home. But it isn’t supposed to end there. And yet it does end closer to home in some regions than in others. For the thirteenth year in a row of the Fraser Institute’s annual tracking report of generosity in the United States and Canada, Quebec has come out on the bottom of the generosity scale on the charity scale.

Of the provinces, Manitobans are the biggest givers, with 26% of those filing taxes donating to a registered charity and 0.89% of total income donated. Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island tied for second place. PEI had a higher percentage of tax filers donating to charity than Saskatchewan (25 per cent vs. 24.7 per cent), while Saskatchewan had a higher percentage of total income donated to registered charities (0.72 per cent vs. 0.71 per cent). Ontario, Canada’s largest province, tied Alberta for fourth place with 24.2 per cent of its tax filers donating 0.74 per cent of total income to registered charities.

And then there’s Quebec. Oh dear. Only 21.7 % of Quebecers claimed donations to registered charities and gave only 0.30% of their total income to charities. Of the average dollar value, Alberta led with $2,112. And Quebec limped in at $606, half the national average of $1,399.

Quebec is the least religious of the provinces (and in fact the most militantly anti-religious). Quebec is also the most statist (and highly taxed) of the provinces. Quebecers figure their taxes are taking care of all the social problems, or should be taking care of them, and it is therefore no surprise that they are the least likely to take responsibility for the afflictions of others. Which is a great argument against statism.

Indeed.

Linda Gibbons is the grandmother who has been in jail, on and off, for eight years, since 1994 for protesting inside an abortion clinic’s “bubble zone.” She had her day in the Supreme Court of Canada yesterday. A most excellent piece about her situation in today’s National Post.

Linda Gibbons has been nothing if not tenacious and today is her day in court. Looking forward to hearing what the outcome of this will be.

Daniel Santoro, Ms. Gibbons’ lawyer, will tell the Supreme Court of Canada his 63-year-old client was abused by a criminal justice system that overstepped its bounds.

He will not argue about Ms. Gibbons’ rights to freedom of speech nor freedom of religion, but that the criminal court should never have been involved in something that began as a civil matter.

“A civil court could have used a scalpel instead of a butcher’s knife to come out with a better solution,” Mr. Santoro said. (…)

In July, 2010, while behind bars at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, Ont., Ms. Gibbons said she has a Charter and God-given right to counsel against abortion, to stand in front of an abortion clinic and offer advice. She said to do otherwise was no different than watching Nazis dragging Jews out of their home in 1938 and saying nothing.

A perfectly unfair letter, from one Sandra Sharpe, the President of the Island Party, who fails to acknowledge any complexity in the abortion debate at all and repeats some falsehoods while she is at it. (There is no obligation for any physician to refer for abortion.) It’s not that she comes across as a myopic political hack in this letter, it’s that she does so with a wanton spite, pushing out all the old tropes about pro-lifers. (“They don’t care about poverty! Or women!”) I understand pro-lifers and pro-choicers have the obvious differences, but truly, some dialogue is possible. Not with people like this, though.

What is the difference between pro-life advocates and pro-choice advocates? Pro-lifers wish to impose their beliefs on all of society, while pro-choice advocates are exactly that – pro-choice which includes having children. If those advocating for the abolition of abortion spend half as much time working for and supporting the millions of impoverished children already living, the world would be a better place.

To be sure, I was disappointed when I learned about Herman Cain’s behaviour and his extramarital affair(s). But I do tend to agree with Dennis Prager’s assessment of what adultery tells us about a political candidate, which is to say, not much. This is as true for Herman Cain as it is for Bill Clinton.

Nothing here is in any way meant to be a defense of adultery. As a religious Jew, I believe it violates one of the Ten Commandments. As a married person, I know how much it would hurt my wife and how much it would hurt me if the other had an affair. But marriage is too complex an arena to draw any immediate conclusions about a person. Are we to label a man who takes loving care of his chronically ill wife and who has a discreet affair no more than an adulterer who merits disdain and mistrust? Is a woman who stays in an emotionally abusive marriage for the sake of her children someone with little integrity because she sought to be held in another man’s loving arms? The questions and nuances are innumerable.

I’m not ignoring this story, doing the rounds, I promise, showing that there are no negative mental health effects after abortion. I just feel like with a topic as political as this one, I should read the study before I link to it and have some commentary on what they did or did not do.

I have not yet had the time to do so. But I will say this: This study flies in the face of a great number of other studies indicating precisely the opposite. And I will also add that all those other studies showing abortion does indeed harm a woman’s mental health did not get the press this one is getting.

My beef is with the media for quickly picking up on this story, while concealing other studies that show the opposite outcome. They think they are being “feminist” or woman-friendly by reporting this story, because they are “pro-choice” but in fact what they are doing has quite the opposite effect. Since so many women do indeed suffer after their abortions, this type of press tells them their suffering is unwarranted and that there is something wrong with them for feeling bad.

This is not to say that every woman feels bad after an abortion. Some don’t. But for every one woman who doesn’t, there’s a defensive woman who, quite frankly, hasn’t quite processed what she’s done, and then there are, of course, those who truly do feel bad and suffer suicide, suicide ideation, increased drug and alcohol use, etc.

I’m sure we could get to a point where no woman ever felt bad about her abortion. This is fully possible. But is it desirable? Would this not mean a distancing from our own selves? A truly clinical approach to something so intimate and personal is not the direction we want to go. I’m not asking for women to feel bad, no. I’m asking for them to be empowered enough that they wouldn’t make the decisions that leave them with lousy decisions in the first place.

All of these ideas on what it means to be a truly strong woman, one who is confident, bold, assertive and makes good decisions as a result is whispering into the wind when it comes to the media who are stuck on the notion that apparently there is an “undo” button for sex. Which there isn’t. Sex isn’t a recreational activity–therefore the outcomes of poor choices–babies or killing said babies–aren’t recreational either. A lack of poor mental health after killing your baby is possible, but wholly undesirable. When we truly reach that stage where studies return this outcome based on good research methodology, we’ll have a lot more than abortion to worry about.

Beyond the disappointment of Herman Cain, this insightful little piece uses his example to talk about the kind of decorum that is necessary in order to avoid inappropriate engagements between members of the opposite sex, in government or business:

One congressional wife says emphatically: “Receptions are a danger zone. Members need to quickly learn that attending receptions is optional, and there are very few they actually need to attend. Members need to learn where to buy quick meals and how to use the microwave. Receptions should not be viewed as the place to get dinner. Married Members should avoid alcohol use in public and private conversations with single women. Do not give out or request private contact info. Staff can handle legitimate requests. Talk about the wife and kids to any and all women!”

I have a friend who pointed out to me when I complained to her about the unwanted advances of a (single) man that emails with too much detail can send the wrong signal. I had been emailing a single man with whom I had what I wanted to remain a fully platonic relationship. He did not perceive my emails thus. In any case, I took it as instructive. Merely emailing, forget any personal contact, was quite enough to get things started. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to put rules in place for male/female friendship, if one values one’s marriage, because something small and innocuous can get the ball rolling–and it gets away from people often enough.

Interesting research showing babies are learning to talk in their first year of life:

New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that during the first year of life, when babies spend so much time listening to language, they’re actually tracking word patterns that will support their process of word- learning that occurs between the ages of about 18 months and two years. …Lany’s studies show that babies as young as 12 months can identify “adjacent relationships” in which a phrase or sound like “it’s a” occurs immediately before an object.