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This is not me

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Sometimes people take the time to send me articles. And sometimes it’s clear why. Other times, I wonder. Like with this one:

Does this sound like you? When there is a situation in life that you have no control over, you go shopping. You spend money on something you want but don’t really need, which acts as a gateway to alleviating stress. The moment you hand over your cash or credit card in exchange for a shopping bag, you instantly feel a rush of happiness and gloating pride.

Um, no, this doesn’t sound like me, actually.

I suffer from something different. A kind of Scottish Frugality combined with what I call “Polish Wartime Mentality.” We’ll call it SFPWM. What this means is that I privately agonize over every purchase, making sure there’s a very clear return policy before I plunk my card down. I’ll never forget the first time my share of a dinner came to 80 dollars, yes, 80 dollars!! The shock of which not even the many bottles of  wine we consumed managed to dull (And who chose those bottles, and how much were they? I ask you, because I can tell you this–it wasn’t me.) I told my mother how terrible I felt and she asked–but did you have fun?

I think it’s bad when your own mother is more concerned for how much fun you had over costs. And so, I am sure there’s a syndrome here for psychologists to examine. Sign me up! I’ll be the first volunteer for the “what to do with young people who act like their grandparents without any justification” study.

Stop reading this blog

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Not permanently, no–please keep reading. We value our readers.

But if you live in the Ottawa area, we are all meant to be outside right now. Immediately. On patios, on bicycles, by the canal, in the sun. Spring is officially here, and just as soon as I’m done plugging our t-shirt line as appropriate spring wear, I’m leaving the computer. For. The. Whole. Day. (For someone who has a blog, you’d be surprised to learn of my love/hate relationship with this machine. My next blog will be one uniting luddites of the world.)

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Brigitte adds:

Andrea adds: Brigitte, are these children frozen? Chiselled in ice? I’m concerned.

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Brigitte, a.k.a. Ms. Brown Thumb Of Death, says: It’s a garden statue, Andrea. That’s why it looks so lifelike… Still, it looks more alive than most of my flowers. (I need professional help, don’t I. Off to Home Depot!)

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Andrea adds: Well, phewf. Looked at your frozen ice cream children and I worried the White Witch was in town. But if it’s just a garden statue, then it’s all good. (Aslan is still on the move.)

Marriage and neurotic feminists

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How do you morph a centuries old traditional institution into precisely what you want it to be just like that?

I can’t help it. I chuckled my way through this earnest account of a girl’s struggle to incorporate feminism into her wedding. (An off-white gown? Money to charity? Wot?  Because no traditional woman would ever do that.)

Emboldened, I blogged again – this time about the ways I was incorporating feminism into the wedding. I wrote about keeping my last name and buying a not-quite white dress from a store that gives all the money to charity. I blogged about the struggle Andrew and I had getting engaged in the same month that California overturned same-sex marriage rights. We had actually discussed not getting married until everyone could; instead, we decided to use our impending marriage as a way to talk about same-sex marriage among our friends and family. In our engagement announcement, for example, we asked anyone considering getting us a gift to instead donate to an organisation fighting for same-sex marriage rights. It felt good, feminist even, to write about an institution so wrought with sexism and discuss ways to make it our own.

You know, if I were to stop laughing, I’d say, sure, one must know and understand what any tradition means before participating, in order for said tradition to be meaningful.

However, let’s pretend you have always found a particular tradition offensive, and have railed against it publicly–it is at least a little bit funny when you just drop it all and join in. Albeit in a random, haphazard way, accompanied by plenty of neurotic anxiety.

Missing in action

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Sex selection abortion in China has come up again. This of course happens in Canada too and there’s nothing we can do to prevent it, so long as choice mantras dominate the debate. We prefer not to discuss it, because we’d be forced to acknowledge that there are public ramifications to abortion. If we discussed it, we’d also be forced to admit there are indeed very bad reasons for having an abortion. And apparently acknowledging one bad reason to have an abortion topples the whole house of cards. So let me ask the question we are actually asking by remaining silent: Who really cares about 32 million missing women, anyway? (China is far away, and this is not our problem.)

What defines mental illness?

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I believe most mothers no matter the circumstance want to love their children. And that it is highly unusual for a mom to bear a child and not love that child. This is in part why abortion is an affront to women: to their dignity and personhood, because it denies what is natural and normal–sex, leading to pregnancy, leading to children.

So when a baby is born, and the mom immediately kills that baby of her own volition, what am I to understand?

I have a couple of different responses swimming around in my head (along with the cold virus that hit yesterday) right now:

She should be blamed and take responsibility.

She must be mentally ill to do such a thing.

Or she is following the abortion-friendly culture we have. Five minutes before birth in a sanctified legal clinic and this would not be in the news.

(cross-posted to The Shotgun)

More from the UK

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Abortion and condom advertising on TV at any time of day or night? That’s the debate in the UK.

There is a backlash to this idea as expressed in the article. Talk of “blushing” and “squirming.”

Well buck up, England. If you aren’t already blushing and squirming with what is on the television, then that is your first problem. Television is currently filled with all the acts that lead to the abortion clinic–let’s connect the dots, shall we? Say you’re watching Gossip Girl–a show about high school students having sex as far as I can tell–and it gets to the commercial break and there’s an ad for a pregnancy centre and an abortion clinic. Maybe you’d pause to consider what the ideas in hyper-sexualised Hollywood lead to. Sex can and frequently does lead to pregnancy–this is one of the great missing links on most television shows.

We have this quote from a pro-life advocate:

Ms. Aston, of Life, said, “Pro-life charities have no money, and pro-abortion charities have a lot. We will never be able to afford to advertise on television.”

Find the funding–there’s money out there–and create some really great ads. I’m sure it can be done.

I grant you that advertising abortion clinics would repulse me. But sex is advertised everywhere around me. Our society (advertising, the web, malls, TV shows) is well past the point of maintaining decorum and high moral standards everywhere else. So I’m sorry if I fail to get steamed about advertising on TV.

Getting back on track with regards to morals and sexuality will be a long hard road. I believe the UK has hit rock bottom. In that sense, this advertising debate is almost irrelevant.

Reduce, reuse, recycle!

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This is recycling, taken to a new height. Dude is very earnestly blinking as he talks to me (ie. he’s alive) about how he is recycle-able. Right down to his eyeballs. This creepy campaign courtesy of the Ontario Trillium Gift of Life Network. (Note the recycling bin full of bloody body parts, on your right hand side. Cute touch, that.)

I can’t think of a more inappropriate way to talk about organ donation, and I can’t think of something that would make me less likely to consider it. “Recycle me”? Um, no thanks.

(cross-posted to The Shotgun)

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Brigitte would like to add just one word: EEEEWWWWWWW.

Choice pushers

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This synopsis of comments about Sarah Palin saying she briefly considered abortion is interesting. Note the last one which mentions Canada:  

WillSeattle wrote, “…I wish we’d just move on, like they did in Canada, where it’s nobody’s business what the woman and her doctor decide.”

I think the point of Palin admitting she considered abortion shows nothing other than the pull of a bad option that appears to “resolve things” so quickly. The point should not be that Palin is a hypocrit, or that she’s denying the choice to others that she would not herself take–the point is that abortion is a magnetic, whispered seduction–“we can make this go away”–at low cost, at low risk, and you’ll never have to think about your mistake again. Abortion providers are the wicked witch in a fairy tale, holding a bright, shiny apple…

In short, it’s a malicious lie, pushed at the cost of babies’ lives and women’s health–but it’s attractive nonetheless, all in an anxious moment.

I’ve met women who were staunch pro-lifers, competent, in good marriages, OK for finances–and they briefly considered this idea that their unwanted pregnancy could just go away. I think it’s a human thing to admit. The main point is we should not be making such a vicious “choice” so easy.

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Rebecca adds: The point of free will, and the definition of virtue, means choosing the right course of action when we could choose to do otherwise. I don’t think you’ll find an (honest) person on the planet who has never contemplated something they know is morally wrong: having an affair when they knew their spouse would never find out; walking out on a spouse during times of distress or conflict; stealing something under their noses; driving home when they’ve had too much to drink. We don’t judge people based on whether or not such thoughts cross their minds, we judge them based on how they behave. Someone who chooses not to have an affair when they know they could, to make a marriage work when they could end it, to scrimp and save to afford something, or do without, rather than steal it, to call a cab, or their parents, or a friend, for a lift home when they’ve had too many when they’re pretty sure they would make it safely home undetected – that’s someone being virtuous.

My Grandfather’s Son

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I just finished reading My Grandfather’s Son, Justice Clarence Thomas’s autobiography, published in 2007. Absolutely compelling reading—and what that man had to endure over the course of his life brought tears to my eyes numerous times. What he wrote also opened my eyes to the realities of discrimination and racism in America. Naturally, I knew racism existed, but there are those who beat the discrimination drum today when none exists and that waters down real racism, real discrimination. (It’s like the words “women’s rights”—I generally ignore those words in the press today because in Canada they are code for abortion “rights” or otherwise used falsely. But the same words “women’s rights” are rightly used to describe the egregious infringements on true women’s rights in places like Afghanistan. One has to be careful.)

Back to Justice Thomas. My reason to post about him here is twofold. First, his personal story is one of courage, rising above every possible injustice when he would have had good reason to give up. Second, his highly contested nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States came down, ultimately, to his position on Roe v. Wade. Prior to his nomination, Justice Thomas calls himself “a lazy libertarian”—meaning, he essentially had no opinion on abortion defaulting to a let women decide position. As I read his book, I couldn’t help but think that when it comes to the oh-so-very-settled issue of abortion, there was no length to which his opponents were not prepared to go to try and keep him off the bench on the suspicion that he would not be sufficiently pro-choice. (They were right, he wasn’t—which speaks to my notion that when undecided, non-ideological individuals do thoughtfully apply themselves to the topic of abortion, they come out pro-life. In 1992 Justice Thomas wrote a dissenting view in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, saying Roe v. Wade ought to be overruled because it had been wrongly decided.)

There’s another takeaway for the pro-lifers who simultaneously stand up for women’s rights—in particular those who are smart and powerful enough to actually make real changes. One might look at a woman like Sarah Palin as an example. Justice Thomas is and has been his whole life an advocate for equality for blacks, and ardently against racism. But he didn’t do it the way others were, and he didn’t buy into some conventional thoughts of the day and he paid dearly for that in his personal life, in particular. Media vultures were then, as now, all too happy to report on his alleged misdemeanours, while ignoring his side of the story. He prevailed through the hearings, and sits on the Supreme Court today, still, there are parts of his personal reputation he’ll likely never get back. Woe betide the individual who colours outside the lines on conventional dogmas.

I highly recommend his autobiography.

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