You may have just been complaining about this or that, as I was, when this story came into my inbox. But if you watch this, you will stop complaining. As I did.

An amazing story.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq621Dvp6ng]

My workplace had a booth at the Manning Networking Conference this past week. And network I did. As a result, I met some very interesting folks. Highlights include a self-described politically conservative, wiccan/pagan pro-lifer and a really great conversation with a young man who is gay, pro-gay marriage and strongly pro-life, who may want to run for a seat in the House of Commons at some point in the future.

Now I’m not going to claim that I meet a lot of pro-lifers who open with “I’m a witch,” but at the same time, don’t let “them” tell you who pro-lifers are. Because “they” (I think by this I mean hostile pro-choicers) like to lay claim to tolerance and diversity, where, in reality I think they are only “tolerant” because they refuse to acknowledge there are other points of view. It’s really easy to be tolerant when you’ve never tried to engage with someone who thinks differently.

This morning, wearing my EFC hat, I asked Members of Parliament to condemn sex-selection abortions:

Dear Member of Parliament,

Today is International Women’s Day. Today is a global day to celebrate the “economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.” It is a day that “honours the work of the suffragettes, celebrates women’s success, and reminds of inequities still to be redressed.”

Inequity continues to exist in Canada. Before girls and women even have an opportunity to go to school, to vote, to choose if and where they will study and work, if and with whom they will fall in love and spend their lives with, they are being aborted simply because of their gender.

You can read the rest here. Learn more about Motion M-408 at DefendGirls.ca.

Interesting article over at The Public Discourse. What intrigues me most is the discussion of freedom. I’ve recently been trying to unpack what freedom really means. It’s not the same as endless choice. And how do we live truly freely, unencumbered by the wrong expectations of us? Interesting questions. And of course, there is so much to critique about Betty Friedan. Lots of good stuff to discuss.

For all her talk about freedom, Friedan ultimately wants women to lead lives according to her own preference. Friedan attests that all housewives feel the burden of the feminine mystique. Throughout the book, Friedan condescendingly writes passages like: “for the housewife, the world is indeed rushing past her door while she just sits and watches.”

It’s a busy season so I don’t have time to give the treatment I’d like to the front page story in yesterday’s Post about a surrogate mom carrying a baby who the parents wanted to abort due to health problems (eugenics alert). When the surrogate refused, the parents sent a legal letter demanding she abort. I assume that we are hearing about the case because the parents are continuing to pursue a legal case against the surrogate; this bold woman actually picked up and moved to a state where she’d have more rights as the surrogate mother to not abort the baby she was carrying.

So many things wrong here, starting with the idea that we can do perfect strangers the favour of carrying a baby for them, without there being repercussions. But the problems all go back, in my mind, to the abortion-friendly culture and the manner in which people are disposable. I want a baby; but not a baby like that. For all the rhetoric of the parents in the article saying they didn’t want a baby to be born and suffer through health problems, their desire for abortion was not compassion. They didn’t want to care for a child like that, since we can hardly assume what the feelings of those who are sick and disabled are. We don’t get to choose the level of health we, or our children, will have. The choice mentality gets punctured pretty quickly in the real world–and yet the rhetoric is so rampant that it actually surprises some when they realize that some things are not a choice.

I think I agree with this assessment–that professors should focus on subject material except where students come looking for mentorship, which, I would hope does happen, but outside the classroom.

The problem with this article: Chief amongst the learning men and women get from casual hookups at a fertile age is pregnancy. And what do we do there? Encourage couples not to learn, but rather, to abort the learning, all because sex seemed like a good idea after a couple of drinks.

Of course, abortion brings with it it’s own hard lessons. However, as any Silent No More woman will tell you, the learning remains buried often for many years (which is why many Silent No More women are already in their 40s, 50s and beyond).

Yes. Our hook-up culture does indeed allow us to learn. But I won’t raise my glass to that, because it’s a painful, tear-filled lesson for so many.

When I was eighteen, I spent the summer in New Zealand. I spent about a month doing adventuresome stuff like climbing Mount Ruapehu, a then-dormant volcano; bunking in cabins that had previously housed Lord of the Rings crew and hobbits; and Blair Witch-ing it alone in the woods for 24 hours with nothing more than tarp, string, a blanket and some granola. I spent the last month working as a teacher’s aid in a small, private Catholic school. I still have fond memories of the students and the staff.

But I do not have fond memories of bungee jumping. I took a few days off during my teacher’s aid stint and headed off to Taupo with some friends. I was the last one to jump, for reasons I do not remember.  I watched them all dive off the platform. Bravely. I remember one friend jumping off the platform as soon as her boots were strapped on. Her arms were spread wide as she flew through the air, à la Superman.

Then I walked to the ledge and looked down. Horrifying. Nauseating. Surreal.

And, of course, the bungee centre had a no-refunds policy. Convenient. The cranky staff woman somehow got me to step off the ledge. I cried all the way down…and up…and down…and up…and down.

Once pulled out of the boots, I ran into my friend’s arms and cried even more. It was a horrible, horrible experience. Why in the world did I think it was a good idea to pay cash to jump off a ledge, attached to a giant elastic band?

So it was with horror that I watched this guy push his girlfriend off the edge of cliff. (She apparently forgives him for it.)

I tripped over a journal article while going through a legal database and came across this:

In another experiment testing the correlation between a tendency to feel disgust and moral judgments, the researchers noted that disgust sensitivity tends to predict more conservative responses to moral issues, particularly “purity” issues like homosexuality and abortion. Thus, a person who feels disgust at the thought of drinking from a stranger’s glass is more likely to view homosexuality or abortion as morally wrongful.

If you want to read the original study, you can find it here. I haven’t had the chance. I did come across this summary article in Psychology Today:

Disgust is a marked feeling of revulsion or profound disapproval aroused by something unpleasant, distasteful, or offensive. The things that consistently arouse disgust are also things that make us sick, such as excrement and corpses, which are sources of life-threatening bacteria and viruses. So it is believed that the disgust response helps us avoid contaminated items that could give us a disease and, in evolutionary terms, reduce our chances of survival and reproduction. Because of its role in survival as well as the particularly old region of the brain (anterior insula) that is most active when people experience disgust, it is often described as one of the original emotions and thought of as a building block for other emotions.

So what’s the political connection? Evidence suggests that harm avoidance and the need for fairness underlie people’s moral judgments in a number of cultures. While liberals rely primarily on these two values, conservatives also rely on desires for group loyalty, authoritative structure, and, most importantly here, purity. Following this logic, Kevin and other researchers became interested in the potential for a relation between disgust and political orientations. They speculated that conservatives are more disgust sensitive than liberals as a result of their concern with purity-related norms and that this difference would manifest itself on issues that some may associate with sexual purity (e.g., homosexual sex and, therefore, gay rights). […]

I believe Kevin and I share an important and vastly underappreciated perspective on political behavior: some political attitudes are biologically influenced. People do not fully control their responses to disgust, just like they do not fully control their responses to evolutionary predispositions … A broader understanding of this may take some of the nastiness out of our current political rhetoric as people comprehend how their political opponents can sometimes come to what seem like incomprehensible positions.

Again, I don’t have time to look into the study’s methodology, but at face value, what do you think of their findings? Is being pro-life simply a nature versus nurture outcome? (I don’t.)

I’ve been pro-life since I was about 19 years old. Did my “nature” suddenly change 11 years ago?

Do you dance in the parking lot on the way in to work? No, neither do I. Anyway, this brought a smile to my face. Tim’s Place. I would like to visit it. In spite of the fact that I’m not a terribly “huggy” type of person. (The video clip tells the whole story, but Tim has Down Syndrome and owns his own restaurant.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6He0FWoFj0]

The House of Commons will debate Mark Warawa’s motion to condemn sex selection abortion on March 28.

The very next day,  Conservative MP Mark Warawa‘s non-binding bid to get the House to collectively condemn the practice of sex-selective abortions will make its parliamentary debut — which, due to an unfortunate twist of timing, falls on the very same day that the Commons is set to adjourn for its annual two-week spring break, which will likely result in an even lighter-than-usual turnout in the Chamber for the first round of debate.