Oh, look! An excellent oped in today’s Ottawa Citizen by one A. Mrozek, about the new all-day “learning” program being somewhat less flexible than people were led to believe. Here’s the, ah, money quote:

So how exactly is the Ontario Ministry of Education legislating choice out of existence?

For starters, simply by introducing a monolithic taxpayer funded plan — legitimate and regulated child care providers can’t compete. When the government subsidizes a service, it means others are put out of business.

All-day kindergarten also takes five-year-olds out of existing centres. These children are a day-care’s bread and butter. Care of five-year-olds is substantially cheaper than infant care, which runs into the tens of thousands of dollars annually. Since no child-care centre could possibly charge parents the true infant price, they have balanced their businesses by charging less than the real cost for younger kids and more for older ones. The older ones who will now enter the “free” state centres.

Families with a spouse who stays home are, as usual, totally pooched. Their taxes will rise for a service they don’t ever choose to use. Pascal-plan advocates swear up and down the block we can fund the new system, parents at home and everything in between. The problem is they haven’t told anyone where the money tree is growing.

It bears repeating, again and again, just how expensive these programs are. Costed out, the full Pascal plan comes to $6.1 billion annually. All-day kindergarten rings in at a likely $1.8 billion annually. If money spent on all-day kindergarten went to parents instead, it would come out to more than $9,000 per child, annually.

Indeed. But Andrea, you forgot one thing: Parents wouldn’t know what to do with that money. Better let the government manage it.

Fight fire with fire, they say. Outraged by the ridiculous statement from a senior Iranian cleric that “immodestly dressed” women were the cause of earthquakes (I mentioned it a few days ago), one university student decided to stage a “boobquake”:

An Islamic cleric’s suggestion that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes has drawn thousands to join an American student’s busty bid to shake up the world — by revealing cleavage.

Jen McCreight is the creator of Boobquake, an event scheduled for Monday, which has already garnered the support of more than 40,000 people on Facebook.

[…]

“With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake,” she wrote on her blog. “If not, I’m sure Mr. Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble.”

I am usually more on the side of modesty, but I think I’ll make an exception in this case. But fear not: You don’t have to bare more than you really want in order to participate:

Ms. McCreight, who describes herself as an liberal, atheist feminist, said women don’t have to show off their cleavage or wear a short skirt to participate.

“The name of the event may be about boobs, but feel free to show an ankle on Monday — that will still be immodest to someone, somewhere,” she said.

Premier Dalton McGuinty was caught today actually listening to his constituents. He’s giving up on the new sex ed curriculum.

Cherish these moments.

Margaret Wente on the new Ontario sex-ed thing:

I do have one objection to the way sex ed is taught in schools. It is so scrupulously gender-neutral that it ignores the fundamental differences between teenage boys and girls. Boys want sex, all the time. Girls want relationships. It’s hardwired into their biology. The more that girls absorb this cruel fact of life, the better off they’ll be. Teenage girls need to learn that having sex as freely as guys do is not necessarily empowering. In fact, it’s a lot more empowering if they don’t.

Darn right! But there’s more: Not only are girls looking for something other than just casual sex 24/7, they are the ones most at risk when it comes to long-term consequences from sexually-transmitted diseases (what a surprise it must be to find out, in your early thirties, that the family you are now ready to start can’t happen because you are sterile), and they’re also the ones who end up having to deal with a pregnancy when, you know, things don’t go quite as planned. As a very predictable result, many girls are made to feel that, should they get pregnant, it’s their “problem” and theirs alone even though it usually takes more than one person to create a baby. That, too, is far from empowering. Go read Unprotected if you don’t believe me.

On an another note, I also agree with this bit from Ms. Wente’s column:

If you’re a parent, it’s not sex ed that deserves to drive you nuts. It’s green ed. Today is Earth Day, as you have surely noticed – the holiest day in the school calendar. All across the land, millions of schoolchildren are being reminded that the glaciers are melting and the polar bears are drowning and the entire planet is in peril. The schools are there to teach them that they are stewards of the Earth (it says so, right in the Ontario curriculum), which can only be saved by turning out the lights and recycling the dryer lint. Time to make them watch An Inconvenient Truth again! Poor kids. Now that’s indoctrination.

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Andrea adds: I guess I read recently that even in marriage a husband knows his wife loves him if she has sex with him, and a wife knows her husband loves her if he talks with her. Not that I’m reading any relationship self-help books, no, no. But people keep sending them to me! (And I’m not above the help, either.)

The letters page in the National Post is filled with people against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia, from absolutely every angle. The second reading vote on Francine Lalonde’s “Death with Dignity” bill is today. Let’s hope these letters speak into it NOT passing (which would push it to committee stage). Hopefully this bill will die today.

(here, here, here, here and here–just buy the paper)

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Brigitte adds this update: The bill was defeated, and soundly at that (228 to 59).

Sex week at Yale. Read it and weep. Truly.

While the sadomasochism marketer was attaching pinching devices to her breasts, another presentation was in progress next door. A speaker invited by Yale’s Anscombe Society, a small campus group devoted to the cause of premarital abstinence, was explaining that the sexual revolution made “consent” the only moral test of a sexual relationship, ignoring the idea that “some sexual acts are incompatible with human dignity.” He asked the audience, “Can we move from saying what is permissible to asking what is right and what is good?” Attendance at “Babeland’s Lip Tricks,” in which a New York stripper demonstrated oral sex techniques with rubber props for 90 minutes: 2,000 (more than a third of the undergraduate body). Attendance at the lecture advocating sexual restraint: 14. Yale’s motto: Lux et veritas (light and truth). Privilege of attending Yale in 2010: not quite as priceless as it used to be.

Ontario Premier defends sex-ed curriculum. No big surprise there. But I had to give my head a shake (or two) when I heard this on the radio:

I think I speak with an understanding of the information available to children today. They are going to get this information. We [can] provide it in a format and in a venue in which we have some control, or they can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources like their friends at school.”

The revised curriculum, which will be implemented in Ontario schools beginning in the fall, will see Grade 3 students being taught about gender identity and sexual orientation. This is the first time this topic has been specified in the sex education curriculum.

Students in Grade 6 will learn about masturbation and wet dreams while those in Grade 7 will be taught about oral and anal sex.

I won’t argue that more sex-ed happens in school buses than I care to admit. However, there is a marked difference between a 7-grader telling her schoolmates about anal sex and learning about it in a classroom from a teacher. Being taught in school gives it a legitimacy that school-bus discussions do not. My children have heard things in the bus that I would never have taught them myself but because they had received this information from unreliable sources, they asked us parents about it.  This is where the school should not usurp the parents’ better judgment, beliefs and values. My children, my house, my spin. Or is this what Dalton really means when he says “uninformed sources?”

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Brigitte wonders: So, what’s the next logical step? If we really do care about children getting as much accurate and reliable information about sex as early as possible, why aren’t they staging live demonstrations (along with practice sessions) supervised by licensed experts right there in the classroom?

The students who do the Genocide Awareness Project on U of C’s campus are being threatened with expulsion. Here’s what one Cameron Wilson had to say about that at a press conference on Monday:

Welcome friends and members of the press.

We of Campus Pro-Life have been told countless upon countless occasions that the Genocide Awareness Project, and the pictures contained therein, are offensive and hurtful to look at. But if an action is too terrible to look at, how then can it be tolerated? Why should we leave unchallenged and undebated a practice so horrific that words alone fail to describe it? In the many times we have exhibited this display, we have opened up discussion on campus, a place where ignited and educated debate should always feel at home. Furthermore, we have watched and offered counsel to many men and women who have been hurt by abortion, and who have never openly confronted this pain. There is an immense capacity for healing inherent in this display, and that – in and of itself – makes this display, without a shadow of doubt worth the cost that the university seeks to exact from us individually.

We hold that the university campus is meant to be a place of frank discussion and debate.  A place where viewpoints are judged by their merit rather than extinguished by the use of force based on their relative unpopularity.  We of Campus Pro-Life have a long history with the University of Calgary documenting our commitment to the principle of freedom of speech which needs not be long expounded here.

We simply wish to deliver a message to the University of Calgary about their suppression of our freedoms which we but used to defend society’s weakest elements.

Our message to the University is this: do unto us whatever you desire, punish us however you wish; but our convictions shall not change, and we shall not alter our actions based on intimidation.

We shall not abandon the unborn child to be murdered.
We shall not desert the single mom in crisis.
We shall not allow the evil of abortion to remain unexposed.
We shall not be intimidated by the threat of force.
We shall not be scared by the threat of expulsion.
We shall not back down from the stand we have made.

If they are to punish us, then we are content to let history revile them for their suppression of liberty.
If they are to punish us, then let the blood of the unborn child be upon their heads.
If they are to punish us then let the pain of the suffering mom be upon their conscience.
History will not remember what illegitimate excuse they used, other than as a derogative footnote; but history will remember their transgression against freedom, and it is upon this that posterity shall judge them.
So let the university do whatever action their twisted worldview sees fit, for we fear not the judgment of tyranny.

And it is an oppressive tyranny that reigns today, all because of… silence. If I had a dollar for every person who said “I’m not personally in favour of abortion, but…” and so it goes and so it goes. It’s no small thing to forego your university education for a cause, but that speech sort of conveys that these guys don’t care. Good for them.

Local MPP seems surprised that the introduction of full-day school-based daycare will spell the end of that school’s half-day program. I’m not sure how she managed to fail to see that one coming.