What Father De Souza discussed in the piece Andrea linked to yesterday.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr7CppUHNQc]
Good, but not enough
So the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario backed down from its ridiculous proposal that would see doctors punished for taking their moral and/or religious beliefs into their practice. Good, but not nearly enough, says Fr. Raymond de Souza:
Good for the OMA for not advocating some middle way between a healthy recognition of human rights and the diseased approach of the OHRC. But more aggressive confrontation of the OHRC’s overreaching is necessary. It is not enough just to prevent the cancer from spreading, which is what was achieved yesterday. It needs to be eliminated.
Professional groups such as the OMA — those representing writers and clergy, for example — have been sounding the alarm on the human rights commissions for some time now. There needs to be a corresponding sense of urgency from Canadian governments, whose statutes sustain human rights commissions. Provincial ministers of justice have been largely silent. The federal minister of justice, Robert Nicholson, a good man who surely knows better, has been disconcertingly reserved in regard to the abuses taking place on his watch. The federal government’s irresponsibly lackadaisical approach sends signals to otherwise respectable bodies, like the CPSO, that the OHRC and similar bodies are not to be challenged.
That needs to change–otherwise we shall eventually be whistling past the graveyard of Canadian liberty.
Saturday morning coffee
Read this morning over coffee:
This feature from the Globe & Mail. I will go on the record saying that the stigmatization, guilt and shaming of women who have abortions is wrong. It doesn’t make abortion right however. This quote caused me to reflect:
Twenty-four years later, Ms. McDonnell says, little has changed: “When the characters in a hip contemporary comedy like Knocked Up can’t even bring themselves to say the word ‘abortion,’ something’s still very wrong.”
Uh… could that be abortion??
On that topic, it seems that the writers of Knocked Up are not the only ones suffering from that affliction. See Fr. Raymond de Souza’s excellent commentary on Morgentaler’s nomination to the Order of Canada.
And on a lighter note, I never thought I would be linking to this guy — and for his defense, as a former Liberal speechwriter, he will probably be mortified at being linked to by a pro-life blog — but this article made me laugh out loud.
Have a great weekend.
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Andrea adds: Pro-lifers never have to shame or guilt women who have abortions. They do it to themselves. Apparently, because the
abortion involves a web of complex physical and psychological processes that themselves pull us in two directions at once. It involves our bodies, our emotions and our spirits in a way that engages us on many levels simultaneously, and that ensures that our response will be anything but simple.”
And now in severely non-academic language, because you are killing your own offspring, which certainly would engage those emotions on many, many levels, indeed. Yeeesh. I’ll go on the record saying I’m glad for the stigma. It’s not that I have ever, ever, treated anyone who had an abortion with anything other than respect, and to be frank, in the same manner as I treat everyone. It’s that what the “stigma” here is, is our conscience: that guilt that kicks in when you’ve done something terrible, and you know it. No need for me to look down on someone who has had an abortion, I’ve experienced this terrible feeling for other reasons, at other times. And if we “eradicate that stigma”–we would be paving over our consciences. People have been known to do it. But distancing your actions from your conscience so entirely is not generally a good thing.