From Carleton University. For more information, click here.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYffo9dV8rI]

A nice letter to the editor from one Stephen Woodworth, the Member of Parliament for Kitchener Centre. It’s a reasonable letter asking for discussion about abortion, but let me assure you, those who favour our abortion anytime status quo are chiselling him into the “anti-choice” side of the ledger as I type:

Because it is also, clearly, abusive.

CAIRO — Year after year, the 42-year-old Saudi surgeon remains single, against her will. Her father keeps turning down marriage proposals, and her hefty salary keeps going directly to his bank account.

The surgeon in the holy city of Medina knows her father, also her male guardian, is violating Islamic law by forcibly keeping her single, a practice known as “adhl.” So she has sued him in court, with questionable success.

Adhl cases reflect the many challenges facing single women in Saudi Arabia. But what has changed is that more women are now coming forward with their cases to the media and the law. Dozens of women have challenged their guardians in court over adhl, and one has even set up a Facebook group for victims of the practice.

Read the whole thing…

Canadian “justice”: Kill your disabled daughter, get life in prison for her murder, get full parole after less than 20 years.

VICTORIA — Robert Latimer, the Saskatchewan farmer who killed his severely disabled daughter, has been granted full parole and will be home by Christmas, says his lawyer.

Jason Gratl says Latimer was granted full parole as of Dec. 6 at a hearing on Thursday.

Gratl says Latimer does not want to discuss the conditions of his release or his current emotional state.

The 57-year-old farmer was convicted of second-degree murder and given a life sentence for the 1993 death of his severely disabled daughter, Tracy.

He described the carbon monoxide poisoning of Tracy at his farm near Wilkie, Sask., as a mercy killing.

Latimer was released from prison in February 2008.

He has been spending five nights a week at the Victoria halfway house for the past two years, and two in his Victoria apartment.

I think this article probably sums up quite well what many women are feeling when they go for abortions.

That’s some scary survey, that is:

A new survey says that more than one in three South African men admit to having committed rape.

A study led by the government-funded Medical Research Foundation says that in Gauteng province, home to South Africa’s most populous city of Johannesburg, more than 37 per cent of men said they had raped a woman. Nearly 7 per cent of the 487 men surveyed said they had participated in a gang rape.

More than 51 per cent of the 511 women interviewed said they’d experienced violence from men, and 78 per cent of men said they’d committed violence against women.

A quarter of the women interviewed said they’d been raped, but the study says only one in 25 rapes are reported to police.

I don’t know how reliable this is. It’s possible the numbers are skewed for some reason, and that future surveys will provide some downward adjustment. I sure hope so. But still, that’s a lot of men who ADMIT to having raped a woman. How many more do it and shut up about it?

In this morning’s Ottawa Citizen, a journalist asks: “… as women happily display themselves as sex objects. It raises the question: Is feminism dead?” I don’t know if feminism is dead but I wanted to point out that feminism is not about women displaying themselves as sex objects but about equal rights and equal opportunities. And when it comes to equal rights and opportunities, there is often more than meets the eye.

Take abortion for instance: poster procedure for women’s rights and equal opportunities… Or is it? I don’t need to start linking to previous posts: just scroll down long enough to find the next post on campus free speech, informed consent, pregnancy crisis centres, abortion counseling or post-abortion trauma (post-abortion what??) and you will find a world that doesn’t really want women to know what’s going on with abortion as long as they get it done. How equal is that? And I’m not even getting into coerced abortion (coerced what??), whether the coercion is physical or psychological.That’s it girls, just go and be whatever you want to be: firefighter, CEO, Secretary of State. Just don’t bother us with your babies. Everybody is treated equally here, like a man.

Go ahead and soothe yourself thinking that women still have a long way to go because there are 50-foot posters of half-naked girls adorning the outside walls of La Senza. It reminded me of walking back to the office on a warm summer afternoon, a couple of steps behind a co-worker who had just had her breasts, ahem, “enhanced”. Yes, men were ogling. But that’s — arguably — why she had it done. Where’s the inequality? The last time I went to La Senza, it was a woman’s store selling women things. Unless this has changed radically, the titillating images are selling something to women, not men. Poor taste? Probably. Inequality? No. Just like a boob job.

Roxanne’s Law is Bill C-510, a bill to ban coerced abortion. It’s named for Roxanne, who was brutally beaten and left in a snowbank to freeze to death because she wouldn’t have an abortion. But what if she had managed to protect herself and killed her attacker? Looks like that’s what happened here:

I almost missed this one. George Jonas on what you can and can’t say on campus. Naturally pro-life speech falls into the category of what you can’t say. My favourite part on why freedom of speech is curtailed:

Second, because the centre-left, in charge of both universities and the justice system, has a soft spot for the far-left from which free-speech deniers are launching their forays. Centrists and extremists of the left are kin under the skin. Left-centrists embrace illiberal institutions from “human rights” tribunals to affirmative discrimination, just like the far-left. While the centre-right is embarrassed by its far-right cousins and disowns them, the centre-left tries to find excuses for the black sheep of its own ideological family.

No matter how we got there, the end result is that we have police taking away pro-lifers in handcuffs.

Good grief:

LUCKNOW, India — A northern Indian village has banned unmarried women from using cell phones for fear they will arrange forbidden marriages that are often punished by death, a local official said Wednesday.

The Lank village council decided unmarried boys could use mobile phones, but only under parental supervision, council member Satish Tyagi said. Local women’s rights group criticized the measure as backward and unfair.

Marriages between members of the same clan are forbidden under Hindu custom in some parts of north India, where unions are traditionally arranged by families. In conservative rural areas, families sometimes mete out extreme punishments, including so-called honor killings, for those who violate marriage taboos. In some cases, village councils themselves have ordered the punishments, though police often intervene to stop them.

The Lank village council feared young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange forbidden elopements.

Part of me laughs, but mostly I’m horrified, of course. Marriage is tough enough without all those ridiculously backward rules one finds in ridiculously backward societies. Shame on these people.