Human rights lawyer offended by tracking how people feel:

The Stampede hired Illumina Research Partners to conduct a market research study. While it mostly gauged people’s knowledge and opinions of the Stampede, one section asks opinions on a number of statements including, “The only acceptable definition of a family is a husband, wife and children,” and “Some jobs are best suited to men. Women should just accept this.” …

Human rights lawyer Mellissa Luhtanen said the two statements can be taken as a slight against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community as well as women in general.

“They are outdated, discriminatory and irresponsible,” she said.

I’m quite sure there’s a fairly large percentage of the population that agrees with both statements, but knows they can’t say anything for fear of being chastized by the likes of this lawyer.

In any event, why not wait for the results before getting offended?

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Brigitte can’t resist: Or why not suggest questions of her own? Like “Some jobs, like shopping for shoes or bearing children, are best suited to women and men should just accept that. Do you agree?”

A group of doctors in South Korea is decrying abortion, and the fact that they did abortions to make money:

We sold our soul for money,” said Dr. Choi. “Abortion was an easy way to make money.”

And that is what it is in North America, too. How many times have we heard those who are in favour of abortion say it’s a common, easy medical procedure? You think those doctors doing them are thinking about the women and children involved? I don’t. Very few of them, anyway. I’m not implying that doctors here make the big bucks off of abortion. But abortion remains a procedure on the roster like any other, one that an Ontario doctor is going to bill OHIP for, go home and have dinner. Done.

I hear on the radio today from a charitable group that one in four children in Afghanistan don’t make it to their fifth birthday… and I couldn’t help thinking–what’s the abortion rate in this country? The same statistic probably holds true here. Except kids here don’t make it to their first birthday.

I’m aware I’m not making any friends with that thought. Who wants to be the pro-life drone who takes every international catastrophe and compares it to abortion in Canada? Still, that’s what popped into my head and I thought I would share it here.

Good column on New Year’s Resolutions in today’s Citizen. I liked reading about Benjamin Franklin’s quest for self improvement. And the concluding idea of the piece should be the mainstay of parenting today, I think:

It is difficult to raise a good student, but it is much more difficult to raise a good person.

That’s Dennis Prager, apparently, and I’d think that if a parent raises a good person, they will be a good student, whether or not they get good grades.

Well, well, well. 2010 is upon us. If you’re looking for sage wisdom with which to begin the year, may I suggest you try another site because I’m coming up with nada.

Thank you however, for journeying with us down this sometimes frustrating, always alluring road of attempting to change the culture. Onwards, anti-choicers of goodwill (see how I’m taking back that term) and happiest of new years to all.

I’m off to complete a short and realistic list of what I”ll call “resolutions” for today (shower, make bed). I like to get the new year off to a good start and with lowered expectations, I find I can generally exceed ’em, thereby increasing self esteem. Nice.

Friends don’t let enemies see Up in the Air either. (Robert Fulford’s review is way too kind.) Friends don’t let haphazard acquaintances even mention the possibility of seeing Up in the Air. If you overhear someone on the bus saying they might go see it, stop and talk them out of it. A film so flat, so boring, so nihilistic, so uninspiring, so depressing–it’s the movie Nietzsche would make if he came back from the grave but that is actually giving it too much credit… You would prefer root canal, a tax audit, even divorce proceedings.

You have been warned.

Barbara Kay on the end of gender warfare and old-school feminism:

Kenedy is convinced, as I am, that we are exiting the gender wars. Feminism is increasingly “out of fashion” and recent years have seen “a crumbling of the [feminist] foundation.” Culturally sanctioned misandry is beginning to cause discomfort. Women today, he says, want equality without stridency, a return to feminism’s first principles.

I hope she’s right.

A nice little piece that I missed earlier this month about how men and women are different.

The author, Marni Soupcoff, describes varying reactions from men and women to rejected articles. As a woman who pitches articles to newspapers I can faithfully report I have a great deal of experience with rejection. And I can honestly say it never occured to me to challenge those rejections. You don’t want my article? OK. Can I do something else to please you? Change it? Make it better? Make you a latté? I’ve actually grieved articles (it was terrible, it will never be published) on the assumption that it will be rejected only to find, nope, it was fine, it’s going in and the editor just didn’t have time to get back to me.

What’s my point? I’m not sure, only that it is empirically true that men and women are different. That men will interact differently with women in the workplace. And that they should, in fact, interact differently with women in the workplace. Because we are different. (And any good editor should reject this blog post for using the word “different” four times in rapid succession. However, what I don’t do on my own web site is reject myself. Nothing but loving, nurturing, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it, people like me” here.)

One of the most contentious things one can say today is that abortion is being used as a form of birth control. With our abortion rates, it’s an obviously true statement, but yet this lives in the domain of the unspeakable.

Now UK Department of Health data shows it to be true.

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Brigitte rolls her eyes: Of course it’s happening. And everybody knows it (except perhaps those who aren’t yet sure quite how babies are made). But if we start admitting it then we’ll start having to debate why it’s a bad idea to use abortion so casually. And if we’re debating why it’s a bad idea to use abortion so casually, someone at some point will start wondering out loud why it’s OK to have one or two abortions but not four or six, leading to all kinds of awkward questions for dedicated pro-abortion types. So much easier just to deny it’s happening and move on right along.