A conversation I had with Jeff Gardner on Catholic Radio International. My bit starts about 20 minutes in.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZDEggAlSEA&feature=player_embedded]

Thank you to those who are paying attention for letting us know: ProWomanProLife has been nominated for the Pro-Life Blog Awards! Voting is set to begin tomorrow.

The first round of voting is still underway at the Canadian Blog Awards. We’re in the “political” category.

Car safety experts at Virginia Tech University, funded in part by Ford Motor Company, are trying to develop a computerized crash test model to determine how best to protect pregnant women and their unborn children during a collision.

I suppose pregnancy was not invented for the car age – not sure there is much to be done to protect someone who insists on riding right in front of the steering wheel. But who knows, maybe the researchers will find something good and even if they don’t, well, at least they’re trying. Good for them!

[h/t]

Margaret Wente says she has a lot of sympathy for Tiger Woods and even likes him better now that he seems more human. I couldn’t disagree more. If the cheating stories are true, he’s just a regular, run-of-the-mill, jackass. Oh, and an idiot, too.

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Andrea adds: We sure are on the same page today, Brigitte. Couldn’t agree more. I might add that my family-friendly web site doesn’t allow me to use the words I might like to apply to a man–or woman–who cheats.

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Brigitte updates: Stories like this sure aren’t going to make me change my mind. And what about the kids, huh? How many millions of dollars is it worth not to mess up their lives?

My review of Going Rogue: An American Life over at Mercatornet.com. If you’re a fan of Sarah Palin, you will love her book.

A hard look at the sexual revolution of the 1960s and how it has led to the degradation of women. [Warning: contains awful ugly pictures of naked hippies.]

Some stories are so clueless they’re almost cute. Like this one:

When Université de Montréal assistant professor Simon-Louis Lajeunesse launched his project with men in their 20s, he wanted to interview subjects who had never been exposed to pornography — porn virgins — but he couldn’t find any.

“Guys who do not watch pornography do not exist,” Lajeunesse said Wednesday.

So his study examined the habits of 20 university students who consumed X-rated material — that would be all of them — and the impact on their sexual identity and how it shaped their relationships with women.

Lajeunesse found that most boys sought pornography by age 10, about the same time they became curious about sex. They chose what they wanted to see and soon rejected what they found offensive, such as bestiality or violence.

Where to begin, where to begin?

1) I find it absolutely, almost boringly, normal that boys should seek images of naked women when they start getting interested in sex. I’ve met a fair number of healthy heterosexual males in my time (I’m also married to one) and I’m pretty confident 100% of them, at one time or another when they were growing up, looked at X-rated images of women. They enjoyed it, too.

2) The fact that most, if not all, men have seen pornography does not necessarily mean that “Guys who do not watch pornography do not exist,” as the researcher said. Having seen pornography, even coming across it every now and then, is not the same as “watching” it. I’m prepared to believe there are no porn virgins anywhere around, but come on, it’s wrong to say that all men watch porn. They don’t. (Not even online; social networking sites are now more popular than porn.)

3) Hey, have you been out on the street lately? Have you visited any store with a magazine rack? Have you been driving anywhere? Then you, too, have been “watching” porn. Welcome to the club.

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Andrea adds: I agree with you, Brigitte. There is a huge difference between seeing some images in a magazine or online and “watching porn.” My concern when I saw these reports is that the takeaway would be hey! watching porn is AOK. And that, no matter what “studies” say, is not true. In any event, you are also correct in stating the obvious–I can’t get milk from the corner store without seeing soft porn. So that we are boiling ourselves to death here doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t mean our culture is flourishing.

Barbara Kay is not happy with Burka Barbie.

I have seen some pretty tawdry advertising campaigns in my time, but I must say this one takes the cake for insensitivity. What’s next in dolls that are “important for girls” to play with? “Illiterate Barbie”? “Forced-Marriage Barbie”?

One has to wonder what was going through the heads of these people. Mattel is a gigantic company with, one would presume, the cream of the advertising world’s crop at its beck and call. Save the Children has for many decades been in the business of rescuing children from poverty, despair and injustice. And yet neither the world’s biggest advertising brains nor the world’s most child-sensitive hearts saw the impropriety of “clothing” the world’s most instantly recognizable toy in the world’s most instantly recognizable symbol of oppression.

Apparently, Opposition parties are boycotting the 20th anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre because “Conservative policies have ‘rolled back the fight for women’s equality and safety.'”

Citing the elimination of the court challenges program and the move to abolish the gun registry as reasons that the Conservatives have endangered women, Bloc MP Nicole Demers said the ceremony remembering the victims was a “hypocritical gesture”. And Liberal MP Anita Neville said: “I find it difficult to stand beside a minister who chooses not to advocate for women, who chooses to follow the party line, who chooses to endorse the elimination of the long-gun registry.”