Here we go again. Seems to me that there truly is a double standard. President Obama was able to get away with getting the number of states in his own union wrong, as well as saying he was looking forward to meeting the president of Canada. His vice president is known for making factual errors.

But when Michele Bachmann gets John Wayne’s birthplace wrong, well then. This is news:

Bachmann officially launched her campaign Monday in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, but got a key fact about the city wrong during advance publicity for the event.

‘Just like John Wayne was from Waterloo, that’s the kind of spirit I have,’ Bachmann told a TV interviewer, referring to the iconic movie star.The only problem? John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa. Waterloo was once the home of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted of raping and murdering 33 boys and men in the 1970s.

I don’t know a lot about her. What I do know sounds impressive. She’s an attorney, with five kids, who also took in foster kids. It’s hard not to feel like there’s already a media campaign mounted against her.

What would it take for the media to be disinterested observers? Is that too much to ask? Or to do investigative reporting that doesn’t involve slamming Christians for being Christian? (I didn’t read too far into that last link. I did find it funny that apparently the author takes it as some sort of strange apocalyptic sign that Bachmann thinks God is calling her to run for the nomination. Newsflash, newsflash, pull out your notepads hostile journalists: Every practicing Christian out there thinks God is calling them to do something, and has placed them where they are for a reason. Believer or not, that’s the story of the Bible from start to finish: the idea that God uses people, aka us, to work in this world. So it’s not just crazy Republican candidates. I’d hazard to say Jimmy Carter thinks precisely the same thing.)

Anyway. I’ll reserve judgment until I know more but headlines indicating that Michele Bachmann doesn’t know where John Wayne was born do not disturb me. Sorry.

This is a lovely story. A woman has a child at 18, gives him up for adoption, and he contacts her some 36 years later on Facebook. Meanwhile, she’s had two other children, one of whom passes away, and feels like her first son coming back into her life is a comfort, especially considering the loss of her third son. 

Of course she might have chosen abortion, and that would have been the end of the story.

…Overrule ’em:

Planned Parenthood of Indiana expects to start offering services to Medicaid patients again Saturday after a federal judge ruled the state is not allowed to cut off the organization’s public funding for general health services solely because it also provides abortions.

Big article in the National Post today, a book excerpt from Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada runs your life:

There were respectable legal arguments on both sides in the Morgentaler case. McIntyre and La Forest were no mean jurists, and they disagreed with the majority decision. There were three separate judgments from the justices in the majority, each significantly different from the other two. The conclusion may have been clear, but there was no clear reason for the conclusion. The decision was five to two. Richard Posner has written of the U.S. Supreme Court, “Many of the landmark decisions were decided by close votes and would have been decided the other way had the Court been differently but no less ably manned.”  The same is true of Morgentaler.

Parliament is where decisions of this sort should reside, not the Supreme Court.

I like this column about Toronto’s mayor not marching in the pride parade over Canada Day. But I’ll quibble with this point:

The knives that are out for Mr. Ford have nothing to do with this particular decision, though. The exaltation of homosexuality is second only to the reverence paid to unfettered abortion as a litmus test for political correctness amongst our cognitive and cultural elites. Rob Ford’s sin is that he does not believe in mixing politics with sexuality pride. Rob Ford is not a homophobe, but nor on the other hand does he think it is any particular honour to be homosexual. Many Canadians not schooled in the catechism of gender correctness agree with him.

You may remember that I grew up in Toronto and it’s the only city where I can find my way without a map. I further, for better or for worse, travelled in circles that included our cognitive and cultural elites. And while I’d probably rather not be the vocal pro-lifer at a downtown Toronto cocktail party, I am 100 per cent certain I would not want to speak in favour of Rob Ford on this one.

The exaltation of homosexuality in Toronto is second to absolutely nothing.

The “M” word (for morality) might even be slightly less popular than the “A” word. Nonetheless, we can’t escape it. More on the riots:

What Cacnio is telling us, then, is that, on a night in which she says she was so jumped up with adrenaline and booze that she found looting a store to be a perfectly rational thing to do, she was also morally aware and clear-headed enough to put her love of the natural world into action by saving some trees.

The same sort of morality is often on display in the abortion debate. I’ve met vegetarians/environmentalists who have had abortions. It’s a question of what you believe to be right and wrong, and I say that in a dispassionate tone. We teach today that the natural environment is sacred. We simultaneously teach that it is a choice to have an abortion.

It doesn’t matter that those two contradict each other or that our sense of morality is skewed. (People, not trees, anyone?) People respond to the teaching they have received. I don’t know anything about Cacnio, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she had also learned that capitalists are immoral, and if that didn’t inform her choice to steal from the “greedy bastards.”

Liked this one. Because today we don’t remember the heroic and laudable qualities of men often enough: 

The feminist movement introduced an unbelievable amount of tension into the relationships between men and women. Feminism gave us women permission to nag and criticize our husbands, which most women can do just fine without any special permission. The legacy of the feminist movement has been to turn the home, which should be the place of cooperation, into a sphere of competition between men and women. And ironically, feminism, which was supposed to be about getting beyond stereotypes, supported the most negative of stereotypes about men.

I have my own pet theory about the stereotype of men dragging their feet about getting married. The socio-biologists claim that men want to invest their seed in as many women as possible, and therefore do not want marriage. I think this is only a dim shadow of the whole truth. The whole truth must include this great fact about men: They are capable of heroic loyalty. When men finally do marry, they are capable of committing themselves to the care of their wives and children. Many men spend a lifetime working at jobs they don’t like very much, for the love of their families. When men marry, they take it very seriously. It is women who initiate most divorces. It is divorced men who commit suicide at twice the rate as married men, while divorce has little impact on the suicide propensities of women.

The Susan B. Anthony List sponsors a pro-life pledge that they ask presidential candidates to sign. That’s fine, but in some cases, these sorts of pledges are political ploys. Point proven, here. Does anyone doubt that Herman Cain is pro-life, through and through? But he won’t sign the pledge:

I support right-to-life issues unequivocally and I adamantly support the first three aspects of the Susan B. Anthony pledge involving appointing pro-life judges, choosing pro-life cabinet members, and ending taxpayer-funded abortions,” Cain said in a statement. “However, the fourth requirement demands that I ‘advance’ the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. As president, I would sign it, but Congress must advance the legislation.”

“I have been a consistent and unwavering champion of pro life issues,” Cain added. “In no way does this singular instance of clarification denote an abandonment of the pro-life movement, but instead, is a testament to my respect for the balance of power and the role of the presidency.”

 To this I say, way to go Herman. I’m not looking for people to sign on the dotted line, I’m looking for action, which speaks louder than words. Oftentimes the pro-life groups pushing the pledges get so caught up in the legalism of it all that they fail to see the forest for the trees. It’s not wise politics.

Kathy Shaidle asks, based on this book review of Unnatural Selection:

There is so much to recommend in “Unnatural Selection” that it’s sad to report that Ms. Hvistendahl often displays an unbecoming political provincialism.

She begins the book with an approving quote about gender equality from Mao Zedong and carries right along from there. Her desire to fault the West is so ingrained that she criticizes the British Empire’s efforts to stamp out the practice of killing newborn girls in India because “they did so paternalistically, as tyrannical fathers.”

She says that the reason surplus men in the American West didn’t take Native American women as brides was that “their particular Anglo-Saxon breed of racism precluded intermixing.” (Through most of human history distinct racial and ethnic groups have only reluctantly intermarried; that she attributes this reluctance to a specific breed of “racism” says less about the American past than about her own biases.) (…)

Ms. Hvistendahl is particularly worried that the “right wing” or the “Christian right”—as she labels those whose politics differ from her own—will use sex-selective abortion as part of a wider war on abortion itself. She believes that something must be done about the purposeful aborting of female babies or it could lead to “feminists’ worst nightmare: a ban on all abortions.”

It is telling that Ms. Hvistendahl identifies a ban on abortion—and not the killing of tens of millions of unborn girls—as the “worst nightmare” of feminism. Even though 163 million girls have been denied life solely because of their gender, she can’t help seeing the problem through the lens of an American political issue. Yet, while she is not willing to say that something has gone terribly wrong with the pro-abortion movement, she does recognize that two ideas are coming into conflict: “After decades of fighting for a woman’s right to choose the outcome of her own pregnancy, it is difficult to turn around and point out that women are abusing that right.”

Commenting on true infringements of women’s rights is something PWPL likes to do. This was always Brigitte’s domain, for no particular reason, just because she always got to it first. But since she is no longer blogging here with us, I will try to keep up, by drawing attention to the Saudi women challenging a driving ban, today.