June 15, 2008
Suzanne, on When OBGYNs think they’re helping women but are actually hurting them:
Physical safety? This is Canada. If you know you’re not a virgin, and you’re an adult woman, what are you doing agreeing to a traditional Muslim marriage? Shouldn’t there be some kind of protection and recourse against men who threaten their female relatives this way? If you know the husband is going to be upset, why are you marrying him (and having sex with him, blecch)?
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Frank Ruffolo, on Carolyn Bennett and the hidden agenda of pro-abortion folks:
Is it just me or do the people, politicians and political parties that accuse others of hidden agendas the ones that have the real hidden agendas. All they ever seem to say is the word hidden agenda without ever explaining exactly what the hidden agenda is all about.
Do we live in a country where a politician or political party yells hidden agenda and we’re all automatically supposed to believe them because they said so. Those politicians and political parties claiming that there is a hidden agenda really need to speak up and let us all in the big hidden agenda secret that only they seem to know.
It would seem to me that is the real hidden agenda isn’t it!
It’s like the boy who cried wolf isn’t it. When the wolf really did come and the boy really did need help nobody believed him. The same thing is going to happen with all those people, politicians and political parties that keep yelling hidden agenda all the time. Nobody is going to believe it when there is a real hidden agenda.
Perhaps all this talk about hidden agendas would make for the ultimate reality TV show called: Who's got the real hidden agenda? There could be a number of contestants with different hidden agendas that need to be solved by a select panel of judges that have to figure out who has the real hidden agenda over a period of a season's reality TV hidden agenda episodes. With a federal election just around the corner this would make for the perfect time and opportunity to broadcast.
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Joanne Byfield, on Carolyn Bennett and the hidden agenda of pro-abortion folks:
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. It does make one think the committee ought to be called the Status of Abortion Committee.
I’ve noticed other incautious remarks by the abortion defenders during this debate. Joyce Arthur admitted that, “If the fetuses are recognized in this bill, it could bleed into people’s consciousness and make people change their minds about abortion.”
“Make” people change their minds? No, it might make people think about life in the womb in a different way or perhaps realize that they actually think the baby is a baby but no one wanted to say it out loud. That’s quite a long way from “recriminalizing abortion” or “threatening a woman’s right to decide.”
I hope the opponents keep talking and lobbying publicly. With the majority of Canadians and 75% of Canadian women supporting this bill, the Carolyn Bennetts and Joyce Arthurs are in the minority and all the claims about defending women and protecting their rights are a tough sell. The killing of a pregnant woman is a shocking offense to almost everyone. Most people think justice is not served unless the perpetrators of such crimes are punished for both deaths. What does abortion have to do with that?
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Loretta Westin, on Carolyn Bennett and the hidden agenda of pro-abortion folks:
I wonder if the women repulsed by Carolyn Bennett’s motivation can possibly be in the minority. It seems to me, the more blatant the rabid abortion supporters are, the more open people are to recognizing why a child should be counted as a human being - to protect them from people who don’t give a ‘whatever’.
The ‘no’ side of Bill C484 cannot make themselves sound human. The very fact that they are afraid of the bill because it might open doors of reality (the actual value of the child) draws attention to their inhuman rationale, and how wrong their whole myopic focus is.
Keep talking, Carolyn!
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Michelle M, on Girls having sex:
Yes, those stats are pretty scary, but there have been other worrisome stats like those the CSF reports. I recall one here in Hamilton a while back. The newspaper article has been archived and I don’t have access to the archives (costs money) but here is the location of the archived article. The headline is “One in two Hamilton teens experiences dating violence”.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/hamiltonspectator/access/841534731.html?dids=841534731:841534731&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=May+19%2C+2005&author=Carmela+Fragomeni&pub=The+Spectator&edition=&startpage=A.03&desc=One+in+two+Hamilton+teens+experiences+dating+violence
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John R. Sutherland, on The elite versus the rest of us:
Polls simply don’t matter to ideologues. People that don’t agree with them are simply people who have not yet been educated properly. In fact, being in a minority position is an indication of special knowledge that only “a few of us” know.
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Loretta Westin, on We don’t know much about marriage:
The most reasonable way to perceive marriage - AND the perception which accounts for its institutionalization in society as the major bastion of family life, is God’s perspective. Unfortunately, without an understanding of marriage that recognizes God as Creator and cooperator with us in new creation, marriage is not quite important enough to withstand its current trials.
On what do we base our love of neighbor, family attachments, idea of ‘normal’, concern for anyone above ourselves (or even ‘as well as ourselves’, or ‘also’). Without God, why should we care at all?
All behavior becomes equal. All inclinations become rights. Nothing is done for family, or society- individual desires trump everything.
I’d say we’re already there in Canada. Pioneers in self-centeredness. Whooooee!
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Midas, on Women and politics:
Let’s look at the bright side: They (the scribes) are selling their readers the intellectual rope to ultimately hang them with. (Paraphrase of Lenin)
I say, keep them coming, Globe and Mail!
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Christy Knockleby, on It’s nice to know we care:
There is definitely an interesting parallel between having surgery to remake one’s hymen and having an abortion. Both attempt to “undo” an aspect of sex and to allow a person to have sex without certain consequences of it (be it the responsibility of a child or the anger from one’s family and friends).
It is interesting that many people who would support a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion would view it as a problem that some women choose to have their hymen rebuilt. I know the argument would be that having an abortion is the woman’s choice and that a woman only has a hymen rebuilt to please a man or protect her from men (boyfriends, fathers, whomever). Yet the idea of choice is so strange. Are the women being forced to marry people who care about their virginity? Would not those living in North America or Europe have some ability to refuse such a groom? (Maybe, maybe not. I really don’t know).
I don’t know where the boundary between is being forced and it being a choice. But any question of whether the women are really choosing to have their hymen rebuilt or whether it is forced on them is paralleled in the situation of a woman choosing to have an abortion. How much is choice? How much is force?
The story of the man having his marriage annulled is also interesting. I don’t actually have a problem with the idea of a man annulling his marriage for that reason. Unless we’re going to judge all the stupid reasons people get divorced, why should we judge that person’s annulment? It might not be over something we think is important but if it is to them…? We shouldn’t let people do something bad for religious or cultural reasons, but it seems in this case what the person is doing is pretty normal these days (leaving a spouse) and they are being judged simply because he’s doing it for a religious or cultural reason.
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nbt, on Comments are up plus the letter of the week:
Short for “illterate” is “illin”. Which in hip hop terms means you’re doing a fantastic job. lol
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Marysia, on What do you call the fear of tokophobics?:
Women who name themselves as pro woman, prolife should *especially* empathize with women who have tokophobia, instead of dismissing it as some species of political correctitude, chuckling at it, chalking it up to an inability to make personal sacrifices for children, or otherwise disrespecting or trivializing it.
Tokophobia is an *anxiety disorder. * It is the normal fears surrounding pregnancy and childbirth raised exponentially into something quite else. Imagine how often you encounter the objects of this phobia in daily life, and then imagine you are paralyzed by excruciating panic with each encounter.
And anxiety disorders, like other forms of mental illness, are not flaws in character, but diseases that the sufferers do not sign up to have. Putting that “character flaw” stigma on people with tokophobia does not help them, it only makes them feel worse.
Tokophobia is *real* and it is horrible to live with. And it causes more abortions that you might think, as well as other unnecessary, preventable forms of suffering:
Tokophobia: It’s Dreadful, But Treatable
By the way, the above link is to an entry on a *prolife feminist* blog and website, the Nonviolent Choice Directory, that I help to run. Thank you very much.