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Polygamy bust opens debate

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Andrea has an op-ed on polygamy in the Sun today. Read it here. My favourite part:

From prehistoric times until the late 20th century, marriage was understood as a child-centred institution between one man and one woman, for life.

Though you’d be hard pressed to find this view on any university campus, marriage served to protect women and children, chiefly by obliging men to stick around to help raise them. (Sex was confined to marriage so any resulting children were identifiably linked to both parents–finally both men and women were held responsible.)

Today, marriage is chiefly based on love and weddings are an opportunity to have a party. We (well, the Supreme Court) already agreed marriage should not be limited by sexual orientation.

What justification is there now to limit the number of partners?

We already collectively accepted it needn’t be for life and it needn’t be between members of the opposite sex. If you are against polygamy, but in favour of same sex marriage, you’re between a rock and a hard place.

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Rebecca adds: As to whether or not the care, legitimization and support of children is the prime role of marriage, nobody has explained it better than David Blankenhorn in his magisterial book The Future of Marriage. Yes, the details have varied, and yes, virtually all societies have recognized marriages that did not, or could not, involve procreation, but the essence of marriage is to create a functional context in which to produce the next generation.

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Andrea adds: Blankenhorn makes this comparison to highlight his point–he says that not everyone buys a car to drive it, but that doesn’t mean cars aren’t primarily meant for driving. Some people, it’s true, they only collect cars. But because that is true, we’d never say that there’s no connection between cars and driving. (I’m paraphrasing.)

I also just read this in Marriage and Caste in America: “…no culture has ever designed a model of fatherhood without matrimony.” When we separate child bearing from marriage (and this is not to say that every married couple absolutely must have kids–just that kids ought to have married parents) it is an unprecedented experiment.

He says, she objects

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I was in Toronto all weekend on family business. It snowed quite a bit last night and most of today. As we left to drive back home, we saw a dude get the snow off his car with a leaf blower. Dear Husband said he’d wondered about asking the dude for assistance clearing our own car, which made me burst out laughing. I mean, how idiotic, right? There was only about 4-5 inches of fresh, fluffy snow, not 19 feet of icy crud. We have a biggish car and it only took a few minutes to clear the snow off it with a cheesy ordinary snow thingy.

Turns out hubby was semi-serious. And that made me wonder what, exactly, is it in the male psyche that makes them want to use any power tool for any reason whatever, and the louder and most ridiculously out of proportion with the task at hand the better (hey, gotta keep the mind occupied during those dull 401 stretches). I think it’s just to annoy their wives. [It works.]

Does that mean I have to stop eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts?

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Not sure what this means exactly…

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies — just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet “free” can be.

Freedom of choice? These guys are trying to clarify the matter. I hope it’s just a poor, er, choice of words. I like Krispy Kreme doughnuts and would not enjoy boycotting them.

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Tanya adds: I foresee in the very near future a carefully worded public statement on behalf of Krispy Kreme to clarify all of this (as they chasten their marketing department for not catching this double meaning faux pas).

In the meantime, Miami News Times is featuring this opinion:

File this under “Overreactionary Wing Nuts” and another attempt of conservatives to redefine words for their political means (You can try to rewrite the Constitution, but not the dictionary). Of course, the “overreactionary libtard” counter to this is that conservatives want to demonize all choice from America until we’re living under a fundamentalist dictatorship. A fundamentalist dictatorship without doughnuts.”

Perhaps some haven’t yet heard of FOCA.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0__ctD48nfQ]

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Andrea adds: I’ve been “boycotting” Krispy Kreme since they came out. (I never liked them!) So this should be relatively easy for me.

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Tanya updates, Monday: Here’s the carefully worded public statement.

Revenge!

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I’m very fond of this comic strip…

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Update: Reader Dianne wants to know the name of the strip. It’s called Stone Soup and it’s available here.

News you need

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Temperatures in this here part of Canada have plunged to dramatic levels. Like minus 54202. Rebecca says it’s even colder in Winnipeg and I believe her – last time I was there, in May, it snowed. In May. Winnipeg is in a league of its own. But so, today, is Halifax. Their sewage treatment facility malfunctioned, so they’re advising people to avoid swimming in the harbour.

It’s almost poetic to think that someone, somewhere, believes it’s possible to swim in this weather… outside.

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Andrea adds: Brigitte of all people will know from my pathetic moaning over email that my body went on strike, along with Ottawa’s transit system. It succumbed to some sort of flu Monday night after karate (I wasn’t feeling well in the class, but how was I to know whether it was a virus or the fact that we were practicing “break falls”–an extremely counterintuitive process whereby I am to allow a partner to flip me to the floor, falling “properly” and apparently, with a smile on my face. But I digress.) Since Monday night, I have not really removed myself from the couch, unless it was to transfer to the bed, or back to the couch…you get my point. However, in all this, and the minus 400, I did briefly consider going for a swim in the Halifax Harbour. So this news item does come in handy–news you can really use.

For Véronique…

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And all the other mothers out there.

[h/t Paul Tuns]

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Rebecca adds: This is wonderful:

This shared challenge — of surviving parenthood together — has brought us closer to you in ways that we could never have imagined. We have entered the trenches of childrearing together and despite all of our complaints, you never bailed on us.

And that is even better than what we had before the kids, which in hindsight seems a tad selfish and much less profound. Now you have seen the best and the worst of us, the patient and the irritated of us, the fat and the thin of us, the rested and the exhausted of us. And still, you put your arms around us at night. At six weeks, six months or six years, that is truly and unmistakably sexy.”

Sunday was our tenth wedding anniversary, so I have been reflecting on how lucky I am to have married a man who is such a wonderful father to our children. Having a baby to save a marriage is of course an awful idea; nonetheless, I think that when you are the parents of the same little person, when you have weathered the bad moments and shared the good (and the good and bad times associated with children seem more vivid and acute than those in the rest of life) the bond between you is not just stronger but thicker and more multi-stranded than it ever was before.

An exercise in logic

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A reaction to our Ottawa Citizen opinion piece, here. I especially like this bit:

What Brigitte Pellerin and Andrea Mrozek failed to take into account in their main objection to unregulated abortion is that making any sort of regulation, however seemingly harmless (such as regulating late-term abortions, which rarely happen save for medical emergencies) or even “good” (harsher penalties for criminals who kill a fetus in the process of committing a crime) will set a legal precedent that will be impossible to reverse or ignore.

As soon as there is even one regulation on abortion, more will be able to follow, and much more easily after that precedent is set, until eventually, abortion is no longer legal.

Two things: A) We do take this into account even though we are not actually trying to get legislation passed that would limit access to abortion – see here for details. But more importantly: B) Why is it that “as soon as there is even one regulation on abortion, more will be able to follow”? This letter writer is not the first one to make that point. But as far as I know nobody has explained why… Why, do you think?

Because once you start thinking about what abortion actually is, it becomes a lot harder to justify allowing (or worse, condoning) it, to the tune of 100,000 cases a year in this country alone, maybe?

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Andrea adds: What I absolutely love about this letter is it lays out what I’ve been saying for quite some time: That pro-abortion activists can’t have a debate, because debate (freedom of speech) leads to thinking–and thinking about abortion and what it does leads to curtailing the practice. Which very much means most Canadians have their hearts in the right place and are against killing our smallest–the powerful should not have indiscriminate rights over the powerless.

On a sarcastic note, I’d say this to her–sure, I’d take the good at the expense of the perfect. The good being some limitation on abortion, the perfect, the ideal being to remove all abortion from the Canadian landscape in favour of real compassionate help for women.

Or maybe she’s just nuts

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A bit of a kerfuffle in France over Rachida Dati, the Justice minister, who went back to work (quite stylishly at that) five days after giving birth to a baby girl – by c-section no less.

I’m sure all those who fiercely criticized Sarah Palin for returning to work days after delivering her fifth baby will be equally critical of the fetching French woman. Right?

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