Once again, a pro-life student group is having a rough start to being granted club status.

Dec. 19, 2011. Fredericton, New Brunswick:  Pro-life students at the University of New Brunswick’s (UNB) Fredericton campus were shocked last week to learn from their student newspaper, TheBrunswickan, that their club would not be recognized by the Student Union due to a “lack of information”.

“The whole situation has been incredibly frustrating,” says Amanda Magee, the President of UNB Students for Life.  “We have given the Student Union information.  We have offered to be present to answer questions.”

UNB Students for Life applied for club status in October, not anticipating any issues given that a pro-life club is active at the UNB Saint John campus and had also existed at the Fredericton campus only a few years previous.  When their contact on council, Andrew Martel, requested additional information from the club, they replied, ensuring that the information would be received before the next Council meeting on November 20th.  Despite this, Andrew Martel stated at the meeting, according to the Nov. 20th minutes, that he did not receive any information from the club.

“We’ve had to rely on the student newspaper and the minutes of the meetings to piece things together,” adds Magee.  “And the Dec. 4th minutes still aren’t available so we’re not entirely sure what happened.”

Read the entire press release here.

If anyone has any further information on this, I’d be much obliged. The Salvation Army has put out a statement that condones abortion if the baby has an abnormality that means he/she might not live very long, and also in cases of rape and incest.

I am particularly concerned about this business of termination in cases of disability. This is a double whammy since I heard on the news today that Salvation Army workers in Ottawa will consider going on strike as early as tomorrow. I naively believed people working at the Salvation Army did so from a sense of calling to help those in need, but apparently not.

The holidays are busy, and as my children get older Christmas seems to be morphing into an infinite loop of mall, grocery store, party, mall (repeat as necessary). It’s overwhelming, and it can be easy during these busy days to forget the things that are at the forefront of our minds during the other eleven months of the year. For me, this means not letting my volunteerism slide just because I have something to bake or buy before C-Day.

There are lots of charitable things to do in December, and among those is ensuring that our most marginalized and vulnerable populations don’t feel forgotten, this includes our growing senior population.

Right now in Calgary, 29 per cent of senior citizens live alone, and are subsequently at high risk for depression, injury, malnutrition, and fraudulent activity – which is to list only a few of the most common and unjust circumstances they face every day.

I recently started a volunteer group called PAIR which aims to unite marginalized groups, and the current ongoing event aims to bring mothers with young children together with seniors. We meet for about an hour every month. If you’re in Nova Scotia, you can learn more about the group and events here.

Vaclav Havel, RIP.

Taken from a speech broadcast on radio and television on January 1, 1990:

…But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships…

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all, though naturally to differing extents, responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are also its co-creators. …”

I believe that when a pro-life angle on a story comes up involving one Christian Bale, it is absolutely compulsory for me to post it. With a photo.

Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, talked with LifeNews about Bale’s attempt to see the human rights activist. “Christian Bale is right that the true heroes are the Chinese citizens who have been beaten and detained trying to visit Chen, and yet Bale is a hero as well. He is starring in the most expensive film ever made in China, which China hopes will win an Academy Award. Nevertheless, he has the courage to stand against official injustice and has greatly raised the visibility of Chen’s case,” she said.

I’m not a big fan of Hollywood stars taking political stances–but that’s because they usually choose to be brave and courageously outspoken on the most popular, mainstream, politically correct causes. I’m not suggesting Bale is an activist against the one-child policy, but then again, he didn’t have to go and visit this dissident, either.

When we think the government is taking care of things, we are less personally responsible and less generous. Also when government takes care of more, we are personally poorer, and therefore have fewer of our own funds to donate. A good article here, describing the personal generosity of Canadians.

Charity begins at home. But it isn’t supposed to end there. And yet it does end closer to home in some regions than in others. For the thirteenth year in a row of the Fraser Institute’s annual tracking report of generosity in the United States and Canada, Quebec has come out on the bottom of the generosity scale on the charity scale.

Of the provinces, Manitobans are the biggest givers, with 26% of those filing taxes donating to a registered charity and 0.89% of total income donated. Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island tied for second place. PEI had a higher percentage of tax filers donating to charity than Saskatchewan (25 per cent vs. 24.7 per cent), while Saskatchewan had a higher percentage of total income donated to registered charities (0.72 per cent vs. 0.71 per cent). Ontario, Canada’s largest province, tied Alberta for fourth place with 24.2 per cent of its tax filers donating 0.74 per cent of total income to registered charities.

And then there’s Quebec. Oh dear. Only 21.7 % of Quebecers claimed donations to registered charities and gave only 0.30% of their total income to charities. Of the average dollar value, Alberta led with $2,112. And Quebec limped in at $606, half the national average of $1,399.

Quebec is the least religious of the provinces (and in fact the most militantly anti-religious). Quebec is also the most statist (and highly taxed) of the provinces. Quebecers figure their taxes are taking care of all the social problems, or should be taking care of them, and it is therefore no surprise that they are the least likely to take responsibility for the afflictions of others. Which is a great argument against statism.

Indeed.

Linda Gibbons is the grandmother who has been in jail, on and off, for eight years, since 1994 for protesting inside an abortion clinic’s “bubble zone.” She had her day in the Supreme Court of Canada yesterday. A most excellent piece about her situation in today’s National Post.

Linda Gibbons has been nothing if not tenacious and today is her day in court. Looking forward to hearing what the outcome of this will be.

Daniel Santoro, Ms. Gibbons’ lawyer, will tell the Supreme Court of Canada his 63-year-old client was abused by a criminal justice system that overstepped its bounds.

He will not argue about Ms. Gibbons’ rights to freedom of speech nor freedom of religion, but that the criminal court should never have been involved in something that began as a civil matter.

“A civil court could have used a scalpel instead of a butcher’s knife to come out with a better solution,” Mr. Santoro said. (…)

In July, 2010, while behind bars at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, Ont., Ms. Gibbons said she has a Charter and God-given right to counsel against abortion, to stand in front of an abortion clinic and offer advice. She said to do otherwise was no different than watching Nazis dragging Jews out of their home in 1938 and saying nothing.

A perfectly unfair letter, from one Sandra Sharpe, the President of the Island Party, who fails to acknowledge any complexity in the abortion debate at all and repeats some falsehoods while she is at it. (There is no obligation for any physician to refer for abortion.) It’s not that she comes across as a myopic political hack in this letter, it’s that she does so with a wanton spite, pushing out all the old tropes about pro-lifers. (“They don’t care about poverty! Or women!”) I understand pro-lifers and pro-choicers have the obvious differences, but truly, some dialogue is possible. Not with people like this, though.

What is the difference between pro-life advocates and pro-choice advocates? Pro-lifers wish to impose their beliefs on all of society, while pro-choice advocates are exactly that – pro-choice which includes having children. If those advocating for the abolition of abortion spend half as much time working for and supporting the millions of impoverished children already living, the world would be a better place.

To be sure, I was disappointed when I learned about Herman Cain’s behaviour and his extramarital affair(s). But I do tend to agree with Dennis Prager’s assessment of what adultery tells us about a political candidate, which is to say, not much. This is as true for Herman Cain as it is for Bill Clinton.

Nothing here is in any way meant to be a defense of adultery. As a religious Jew, I believe it violates one of the Ten Commandments. As a married person, I know how much it would hurt my wife and how much it would hurt me if the other had an affair. But marriage is too complex an arena to draw any immediate conclusions about a person. Are we to label a man who takes loving care of his chronically ill wife and who has a discreet affair no more than an adulterer who merits disdain and mistrust? Is a woman who stays in an emotionally abusive marriage for the sake of her children someone with little integrity because she sought to be held in another man’s loving arms? The questions and nuances are innumerable.