Following up on Faye’s post, this from ARPA Canada:

The Supreme Court of Canada has just declared that the prostitution laws in Canada are unconstitutional. A saving grace in the ruling however is that they have suspended their declaration of invalidity by one year, meaning that the current law remains valid until December of next year, giving our federal government time to rewrite the law.

It means that there is an opportunity for Parliament to enact legislation that could actually protect women.  Here’s hoping.  See more on this issue here, including a 6 minute interview with André Schutten, General Legal Counsel and Ontario Director for ARPA.

Watch these little two-year-old and three-year-old boys make basketball shots that the professionals would miss!

Kids are awesome!

I found this study to be amusing and consoling at the same time.   It reminds me of a study some years ago that appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail showing, much to the utter surprise of the researchers, that girls and boys are different.  Well, here we have it again, folks.  Men and women’s brains are wired differently.

The study, published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, found striking differences in the neural wiring of men and women giving credence to commonly-held beliefs about their different skills and behaviour…

Ragini Verma, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the greatest surprise was how much the findings supported old stereotypes, with men’s brains apparently wired more for perception and co-ordinated actions, and women’s for social skills and memory, making them better equipped for multitasking.  The study also found that women are much more intuitive, better at listening, and more emotionally involved when people talk to them.

Do twins have a special connection?  Stories of their almost psychic relationships are plentiful.  Like when my father and his identical twin brother accidentally booked into the same set of apartments in Rome, Italy.  One was booking from Vancouver, Canada, the other from South Africa, and they ended up in the same apartment block right across the hall from each other.  What are the odds?

Check out these two – the look they give each other is priceless.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to7uIG8KYhg]

Dr. Alveda King, niece of the great Martin Luther King, comments on the death of President Nelson Mandela.  You can read the full text here.

“President Nelson Mandela paid a heavy price to stand against apartheid while campaigning for human justice and human dignity. His message still resonates though his weary, battle worn body has gone the way of those gone before him,” she said. “Long may we remember his courage.”

However, John Smeaton, of the British pro-life group SPUC had this to say:

“May God rest Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa who died last night, but … leaders have a duty to stand up to public figures with  anti-life and anti-family records, however praiseworthy their record may be on other issues. The sanctity of human life and the dignity of the family are the foundation and guarantee of all other human rights.”

It is tragic that Mandella signed into law abortion on demand in 1996.

South Africa is the country of my birth and I have followed Mandel’s life with interest. But I have to recant my initial praise of him. I stood in his jail cell on Robben Island in 2005, and marveled at the resilience he must have had to withstand 27 years of imprisonment and hard labour.  Since his death, however, I have begun to learn more about this man.  He fought a brutal regime, but he also aligned himself with high ranking communists. His view on abortion and other social issues indicates that he had questionable values that in the end may tarnish his legacy.

In answer to Andrea’s moratorium on slamming the feminists, I thought that I would mention another group of wonderful women that I had the honour of meeting in 2007 at a UN Conference on the Status of Women.  Concerned Women for America are well known and do some really great work.

Assuming that there is no moratorium on slamming the killer pills (aka RU-486) that the CMAJ is suggesting we legalize here in Canada, I went back into the archives to dig up some of their work.  This was following the legalization of RU-486 in the US. Here is a snippet:

Concerned Women for America, along with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Christian Medical Association, filed a Citizen Petition with the FDA on August 20, 2002. This legal document outlines the numerous violations the FDA committed in its approval of RU-486 and how these violations resulted in the injury and death of women.

1. RU-486 was approved under a special “restricted distribution” approval process known as “Subpart H,” reserved only for drugs that treat “severe or life-threatening illnesses.”  …drugs approved under Subpart H treat fatal diseases, such as cancer or AIDS, and can have serious side effects —considered acceptable when the alternative is death.
2. The FDA waived the “pediatric rule” with no explanation. Any drug given to adolescents must be tested on adolescents. Teenagers’ bodies go through rapid hormonal maturation; their bodies are different from adults. No one under 18 (or over 35) was allowed to participate in the RU-486 clinical trials. Yet the FDA did not limit the age of females to whom RU-486 could be given.
3. Complications reported to the FDA demonstrate that RU-486 is a serious threat to the health and safety of women. These include two fatalities and 20 other near-fatal complications including a heart attack, two cases of systemic bacterial infection in 15-year olds and several hospitalizations for hemorrhaging. The FDA and Danco sent a letter to physicians in April 2002 warning of the complications reported since the FDA approved RU-486. This alone would cause an ordinary drug to be removed from the market immediately.

For the sake of brevity, I only include three of the seven very serious violations that the document outlined.  To see the complete list go here.

This is really horrifying stuff.  Women from an annual pro-abortion, pro-feminist conference called the National Women`s Encounter (a city sponsored event) go wild in Buenos Aires, covering the city in pro-abortion graffiti and attempting to attack the Catholic Cathedral.  It was valiantly protected by a human wall of young men, who received the brunt of violence and sexual harassment from the mob of topless women.  Considering my most recent post, these men were gentlemen, in the best sense of the word.

The video is extremely disturbing and it is a true indictment of modern feminist ideology.  This kind of radical thinking turns nice girls into barbarians.

_______________________________

Faye adds: I’m stunned speechless.

The police reportedly told the media they were unable to intervene because “they are women.”

One of the things I have marveled at of late, when walking through my neighborhood, are the young shady-looking men slouching around, with hoodies, and gangster pants that reveal various brands of underwear.  I live in a normal suburb, with nice houses and people who put up their Christmas lights each year, and offer Halloween candy to youngsters.  So I am often perplexed to see these characters slinking around and going to and from these quaint, and fairly expensive homes.

What has happened to our young men?  This article tries to address the issue of true male comradery and it’s absence in our culture. The video depicts friendship between men that is reminiscent of days gone by.

And most men desire this friendship—this tender, warm, (dare we say it?) loving friendship—but that desire receives no affirmation in our culture.  Men’s desires are circumscribed within a perverse Venn diagram, with one circle labeled “sex,” the other “mammon.”  Such friendship seems as foreign as the virgin Irish countryside, unattainable in the normal course of life in the 21^st century.

The video is a bit overly nostalgic, but it has a nice twist at the end, and is excellent advertising for Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey.  And the Parting Glass is one of my favorites.  In fact, I used to sing it with some of my brother’s school mates, who had the good fortune to experience this comradery.

CLC Youth are inviting people to send a Christmas card to pro-life heroine Mary Wagner as she spends her holidays behind bars for offering pro-life counseling to women in abortion clinic waiting rooms.

This is a simple action you can do to touch someone’s life and offer them hope and love during this Christmas season.

You can go here for more information including her address and instructions when sending a card that complies with prison guidelines.

Nice to see this perspective on euthanasia in the news by Johanne Brownrigg:

To those in the pro-life movement, euthanasia represents the culture attempting to devour itself. I think the root of this is our growing preoccupation with our selves. Margaret Somerville, a renowned McGill University professor and ethicist calls it “radical individualism.” It is a belief and behaviour in which individual autonomy almost always trumps the well-being of society. It shows in the popular support for Quebec’s Bill 52 and the right to suicide in general.

But as we have found, popular support is not as solid as the media claim.  The polling on this issue is not reliable, especially polls that ask simplistic questions – like this poll that has been featured in the National Post of late. To simply ask the question, ‘are you in favour of assisted suicide?’ assumes that the respondent knows what assisted suicide is, and that it differs from both active and passive euthanasia.

The issue of euthanasia is complex, to say the least.  There are a myriad of misunderstandings that surround it.  For instance, many people are unfamiliar with the rights of refusal that already exist, that patients can refuse any medical treatment, especially those that would prolong their lives unnecessarily.

They are also often unaware of the disempowering effect that the practice will have on patients. Doctors with the legal sanction to prescribe lethal medications, can and will do so without patient knowledge and consent, when it is seen, by law, as a medical practice employed for the patient’s “own good.”  In other words, people with a license to kill will use it.

I am compelled to give this shameless plug for the annual polling done by Environics (and commissioned by LifeCanada) that shows that when people are educated about the possible harms of euthanasia, support for it goes way down.