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The conspiracy files

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It’s important to be aware of emerging threats. Read about the “medical right” here and their dangerous use of The Ultrasound. (Da da da… that was three notes of scary music.)

An interesting and immediate contradiction emerges:

…[The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice] describes the anti-abortion movement’s multimillion-dollar immersion into the non-medical use of ultrasound equipment and questions the ethics of using medical diagnostic technology to persuade women to continue a pregnancy. Lost in the craze for non-medical ultrasound imagery is the potential risk to the developing fetus…

Speaking of “potential risks” there’s this thing called abortion, which proves to be a potential risk to many a developing fetus.

But still, I’d like our readers to be aware of how dangerous The Ultrasound can be. Sometimes its use reveals a baby alive and kicking in there.

In the next edition of the conspiracy files, we’ll show how some doctors recommend women my age and stage take folic acid even when they are not yet pregnant. Certainly implies that I should be pregnant-a nefarious plot to force women to have babies. Stay tuned.

Women who know too much

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This article isn’t meant to make you sad, but that’s what I felt after reading it.

…today’s young women are questioning abortion not because they know too little, but because they know too much. They have paid the price for the modern feminist embrace of counterfeit liberation…

Yes, we all know too much. So perhaps my feminist “foremothers” will forgive me if I don’t thank them for bestowing on me a false notion of equality, an “equality,” they themselves, in many cases, never had to experience.

How to reach the Governor General

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How and why: Here’s info on how to reach the Governor General so that you can express your concern about Dr. Henry Morgentaler being received into the Order of Canada.

If you are feeling keen, you could copy that letter to each of the following people who sit on the independent advisory council:

Beverly McLachlin, PC, Chief Justice of Canada, Kevin Lynch, clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to the Cabinet, Judith A. LaRocque, CVO, Deputy Minister, Canadian Heritage, Karen Kain, CC, chair, Canadian Council for the Arts, Yvan Guindon, CM, PhD, president, the Royal Society of Canada, Thomas D. Traves, chair, Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, Patricia A. Baird, OC, OBC, professor emerita at the University of British Columbia, Daurene E. Lewis, CM principal of the Nova Scotia Community College Technology Campus, L. Jacques Menard, OC; chairman of BMO Nesbitt Burns, J.E. (Ted) Newall, OC chairman of Nova Chemicals Corp, Marie-Lucie Morin, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade

Incidentally, that Globe and Mail poll never tipped in favour of Morgentaler, and was never published in the list of past polls.

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Clarification: Sorry, my post is not particularly clear. We know Morgentaler has been nominated and that the Governor General’s office has a file on him. The letters are to show there is a level of concern and controversy over his nomination and that Canadians are very much divided on this issue, thereby hopefully preventing him from being received into the Order.

Castro mildly demurs

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Fidel Castro is resigning from another “term” as President. The media report this as if he had been elected and actually had a democratic mandate. Now they’ll need a replacement, which is kind of like when the Liberals held a convention after Paul Martin stepped down, right?

Unbelievable, the way people discuss Cuba. This morning the CBC asked their “woman on the ground” (she was in Mexico, but I digress) what his legacy was, and she responded with talk of free public health care. They then pondered poverty in Cuba–whether it had been caused by Fidel or whether the American boycott was to blame.

I’m going to conclude now with a short lesson, Communism 101, if you will. And I’ll Keep It Simple, so the CBC can understand:

Communism=poverty

Now I have to go see whether some savvy stylist can replace the hair I just lit on fire.

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Update: I had not noticed this in the Post today, an article about a Montreal exhibit of Cuban art, which avoids and evades the “politics” of Cuba–namely the notion that Castro is and was a tyrannical dictator. Thank you, Robert Fulford.

¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today lacks both critical intelligence and historical honesty…

Still, its romantic, half-blind approach calls for a strong antidote. Fortunately, there’s one available. A visit to the MMFA show should be followed by a viewing of Before Night Falls, the superb film that Julian Schnabel made in 2000 from the memoirs of Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990). As a teenager Arenas welcomed the revolution but later found himself classed as its enemy because he was gay and because he sent his poetry outside Cuba for publication. Schnabel shows Arenas (brilliantly played by Javier Bardem) brutalized by the goons of homophobic communism, which established prison camps for the punishment of gays. Exiled in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, Arenas arrived in New York. He killed himself in 1990, leaving a suicide note that blamed Castro for ruining his life.

Neither Arenas nor anyone who shared his fate gets mentioned in the Montreal show. The governing principle of the exhibition is neither artistic nor historical. What the MMFA has delivered on this occasion is a distorted and pathetic expression of cultural diplomacy.

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Rebecca adds: Orwell famously described his dystopia as a jackboot stamping on a human face, forever. The always-interesting John Derbyshire added a codicil: “Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.”

Indoctrinate U

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Saw this movie last night. Good times, a really funny (well, in that scary kind of way) movie, which highlights how Marxist professors prevail at the average American university, and being Republican, conservative, libertarian, anything vaguely associated with the right side of the political spectrum is baaaaaaaad (bleat that word like a sheep, please).

Those of us who think differently from the status quo don’t even have to be particularly smart (and so many sceptical readers will pause here to say, “that’s right! cuz you’re not!”). But the mere fact that we see things differently gives us a leg up in this world. When you are consistently forced to present your views to a hostile public, you end up doing more reading, more pondering, more debating. Rather than just saying, time and again, right on! I agree with you.

Which reminds me of a column I read yesterday. The author acknowledges all her friends think, well, just like she does:

I’m an atheist. So is everyone I know, or maybe they’re being Canadian and refraining from mentioning their religion.

And that is a good indication you might need to broaden your horizons, lest you merely follow like a lemming and end up jumping off a cliff, in spite of yourself.

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Brigitte adds: Right on! I agree with you…

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Andrea bleats: Baaaaaaaa.

A hot commodity

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The embryo is a hotly contested item these days. But few actually consider what it is. Enter Embryo – A Defense of Human Life, by Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen. The book is non-religious, and indeed the authors argue that it is science and not religion that shows the embryo is human from conception.

I might highlight some of the existing contradictions in Canada: Our Assisted Human Reproduction Act outlaws choosing the sex of an embryo for couples undergoing invitro fertilization. But sex selection abortion on the flip side, weeks or months later, is completely legal. In some cases, then, embryos in Canada are afforded greater protection than the fetus. Canadian hospitals are also fundraising to develop embryonic stem cell research centres. We ought to ask ourselves whether humans are meant to be created, used and discarded. This book might help with that.  

What Bill Clinton thinks about pro-lifers

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Hear Bill Clinton lash out at pro-life students:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XfmJeIJpns] 

The sound is not great. I will spare you the joy of listening to bad audio several times. He says:

I gave you the answer. We disagree with you. You want to criminalize women and their doctors and we disagree. I reduced abortion. Tell the truth, tell the truth, if you were really pro-life, if you were really pro-life, you would want to put every doctor and every mother as an accessory to murder in prison…

Is that a fact?

As a pro-life advocate, I find the issue of criminalization anything but straightforward. On the one hand, I do not share concerns about imposing my morality on others since the purpose of criminal law is to impose a minimal morality on those who might not have it. When we live law-abiding lives and expect others to do the same, we impose our morality on others. When John Robin Sharpe tells us that child porn is a valid form of self-expression, we impose our morality on him by not putting up with it. On the flip side, the Supreme Court of Canada imposed their morality on me in Morgentaler and again in Tremblay v. Daigle.

When people say that they don’t want to impose their morality on others in the context of abortion, what they really mean is that they don’t want to do it in that particular context. This is problematic because it recognizes abortion as a legitimate choice in some cases thereby seriously undermining the pro-life position.

On the other hand, I also find myself at odds with calls for the criminalization of abortion. Not because I think that abortion is a legitimate choice but because I believe that in our present socio-cultural environment, criminalizing abortion would further victimize women. And I am not talking about clothes-hangers. Bear with me:

I believe that criminal law serves its most important purpose as instrument of social ordering not by its coercive force but by the general sense that the limits it imposes on free choice are legitimate and necessary. Unfortunately, abortion has been seen as a necessary and legitimate choice in Canadian society for many years.

As things stand now, abortion is not seen as an anti-social act from which society needs to protect itself. Even worse, right now Canadian society benefits from the (induced) infertility of its women. We all benefit from the strong economy fueled by the presence of women on the labor market. We all benefit by the consumer prices driven down, in part, by not paying the real cost of having mothers in the labor force. And we will not pay the real cost of having women in our labor force as long as our fiscal and social policies cast childrearing as a personal choice that women must assume.

In Canada – indeed, in most Western societies – women who get abortions do not behave in an anti-social manner. I will go even further and say that women who have no children or few children act as our stuff-hungry, profit-making, economically-growing, materialist society expects them to.

Pro-life reader, we have some work ahead of us before abortion could be made illegal. It is simply not enough to say abortion is wrong. Women need to be convinced that it is.

“Yes we can.”

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I have to admit that I find Barack Obama charming. But then, the author Rumer Godden described her first husband as “charming”, adding “I have mistrusted charm every since”.

In the same way, I find something compelling and catchy about this “yes we can” video.  If nothing else (and I’m pretty sure there is nothing else), it’s catchy. At the same time, the rhythmic chanting of glassy-eyed, “I’m too cool to have facial expressions” celebrities is faintly creepy. 

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY]

My seven-year old summed the whole message up after about 5 seconds of viewing: “Yes, we can what? That’s dumb.” 

But I have discovered a way of increasing  the entertainment factor of the video exponentially: every time one of the celebrity-automatons echoes “Yes we can”, answer “No you can’t”. This provides good training for dealing with politicians with grand ideas for “change” and, incidentally, small children. After all, if you have to say a phrase eighty times a day, it’s good to have a catchy beat to go with it.

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Andrea adds: “Yes, we can” look profoundly serious and important while saying nothing of substance. Yes, we can. (From time to time I consider whether I could join a political party. Just when I start to think perhaps I could, I see something like this…and it’s back to square one. No, I can’t.)

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