timeimmortal

Either that or this is the most tasteless statement of the year:

‘I’m like a newborn baby,’ Dr. Henry Morgentaler told the CBC’s Evan Solomon about surviving a recent stroke and heart operation. ‘I enjoy being alive.’

The irony wasn’t lost on Solomon, who then asked the Canadian abortion doctor ‘how does a guy who’s seen so much death (in Auschwitz and Dachau, where he was imprisoned as a youngster) fight for a cause which many people believe is a form of killing?’

‘I won’t deny there’s an inconsistency,’ Morgentaler answered. ‘Maybe I’ve deluded myself.’

Like a newborn, eh, good doctor? One that you didn’t manage to chop up into bits?

Delusion is, I suspect, just the tip of the iceberg.

Following up on a post from yesterday, it would appear that the condition known as anencephaly — which I note is being more and more often trotted out by pro-abortion sorts to justify the continued legality of that detestable practice* — does not always result in the near-immediate death of the infant born with it. In plain point of fact, it is quite common for such infants to survive for weeks, months, and (in some cases) even years. What is more, the infants still develop to an extent; in one case, the baby was even able to perceive the presence and absence of its mother.

* one wonders how many of these same people would decry the use of the “ticking time bomb” argument as a justification for torture?

Mark Shea has a powerful article up at Catholic Exchange, and I was particularly struck by this paragraph in it.

When we put it that way, we suddenly realize: Knowing that the baby is going to die sooner rather than later is no reason to kill the baby. It is, says Janet, a reason to love the baby for as long as you can while it’s here. That’s very painful, but that is the risk we take every time we choose to love because everything we love in this world is mortal. It may be objected that an anencephalic baby cannot appreciate our love. I would reply that a healthy baby does not appreciate our love either, because a healthy baby has no more mind than a baby born without a brain. The whole point of parenthood, especially in its earliest stages, is radical self-giving (like Christ) to a being who is wholly incapable of giving anything back besides a sucking reflex. It’s an analogy of the grace of God, the great wake-up call, enfleshed, that It’s Not about Me and What I Get from It. A short course in the life of the Blessed Trinity.

I think this hints at exactly what is wrong with abortion, both including and apart from the fact that an innocent life is take. What is seriously wrong is that the entirety of the act is marked by a profound lack of love, of a certain kind. Babies require unconditional, self-giving love from their parents if they are to have any chance of development, formation, and maturation; even a perfectly healthy baby will wither if it is not showered with affection to give it is first ever lessons about the existence of something that exists beyond itself.

Note, O Reader, that what I’m talking about is not the same as an inability to love; all human beings are capable of loving something. Rather like the question of Religion, the issue is not whether we love, but what we love. And in the case of abortion, all we demonstrate the capacity to love is ourself. And in so doing, we effect a most terrible destruction not only on human life in its most fragile and innocent state, but on the world around us as well.

Love is a terrible risk, and love of anything outside the self necessarily leaves us vulnerable to being hurt in a multitude of powerful, shocking, and terrifying ways. But that’s the risk we accept, because to love something outside ourselves is also an act of majesty and beauty that is unparalleled by anything else in this mortal, temporal world.

And love — that ability to love another — is what is truly lacking in the act of abortion and the desire to seek the service out. It is a depravity that is, quite frankly, horrifying. And here’s the rub: this is just as true in the case of a disabled/terminally malformed baby as it is in the case of a pregnancy due to rape. Whatever the deformity, and whatever the trauma, there is an innocent life there which we should only ever love and see brought into the world (if only for a few moments); any other response diminishes and demeans not only that new and innocent life, but us as well.

It speaks volumes about Canada that we saw fit to give a man a medal for his efforts in making such an abhorrent thing legal in this country.

I haven’t really been commenting much on Omar Khadr, mostly because until recently there wasn’t much to comment about. Khadr, as I understand it, comes from a Canada-based family that has been investigated numerous times for ties to Islamis terrorism. In fact, aren’t some other members of the Khadr family currently incarcerated for their connections to terrorism?

Be that as it may, Omar is a dutiful son of this family, and signed on some years ago with the Taliban in Afghanistan vis-a-vis his father, who had moved to Afghanistan in 1996 and who later (in the wake of the September 11th attacks, in fact) moved into the mountains of that country, where it is thought that he closely associated himself with Osama Bin Laden (to such a degree, in fact, that the bin Laden and Khadr children were playmates).

Omar received weapons training at some point, produced videos for the Taliban, and was even photographed handling explosives for them. He looks like a fresh-faced youth, but it would seem that at every turn he has chosen to align himself with Islamic terrorists.

Khadr was captured after a firefight between Taliban militants and American soldiers worked out decidedly in favour of the Americans. The battle was fairly intense, requiring air support, and the Americans had thought that all of the Taliban fighters had been killed. Khadr, however, had survived. Confilcting reports exist, but it appears that Khadr took one last opportunity to throw a grenade at approaching U.S. troops before being subdued, mortally wounding Sergeant Christopher James Speer.

Recently, footage of Omar Khadr being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was released to the Canadian public. In it, two CSIS officers interview Khadr about his condition. He appears wounded in the video, and complains of his injuries. Information coming out of Guantanamo isn’t exactly the most reliable, but what evidence is available suggests that Khadr was tortured by U.S. interrogators at various points, using methods such as short shackling and stress positioning, as well as sleep deprivation and a few other methods.

Which, if true, is disgusting. Torture is a grave moral evil, regardless of how depraved the recipient thereof might also be. Yes, Omar Khadr seems to be neck-deep in terrorist connections, and he evidently has no small measure of blood on his hands as well. That doesn’t mean it’s right to torture him.

Now, a brief tangent. I like Matthew Good’s music, for the most part. When he wants to rock, he rocks, and then very well. And his subject matter, while often strange, tends to be a bit deeper and more thought-provoking than one might typically expect of alt-rock and post-grunge music.

That said, I don’t entirely agree with his stance on the Khadr issue:

Legally, Khadr should never have been taken to Guantanamo. International law dictates that he should have been classified a child soldier and treated as such. Instead he was shipped off to the world’s foremost black hole and has been a prisoner there ever since, subjected to God knows what. If FBI documents released this year are any indication, entirely unethical interrogation practices were certainly on the menu.

International law is actually not on the side of Omar Khadr in this matter. For the record, Khadr was 15 when the firefight in which he was captured took place. With that in mind, it should be noted that the UN convention on children’s rights stipulates that “state parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” Of course, there are two obvious problem with applying this principle to Khadr’s situation: first, the Taliban are not a “state party”, in that they do not represent a national government but are, rather, a terrorist organization attempting to violently overthrow the government of Afghanistan. The second, of course, is Khadr’s own age at the time of his capture.

There is an optional protocol to the aforementioned UN convention which stipulates that state parties “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited into their armed forces.” Note that this does not explicitly prohibit people between the ages of 15 and 18 from voluntarily participating in hostilities. From what evidence we have available, Omar Khadr very gladly and freely participated in the cause of Islamic terrorism.

Moreover, as has been noted, the Taliban (and, by extension, al-Qaeda, which Khadr has also been associated with) are (again) not “state parties”. One could argue that this is a semantic objection, and that while the letter of the convention’s stipulations is perhaps left unsatisfied, the spirit thereof still applies. This, I think, is true. But even in that case, by the UN’s own definition a “child soldier” must be under the age of 15 years. Khadr did not meet this criteria at the time of his capture. So if one wants to appeal to UN conventions to decry Khadr’s situation, one is (sorry to say) out of luck.

Of course, the question can be raised as to whether a UN convention is really the foremost international legal authority in this matter. It might be better to look at the International Criminal Court’s statutes instead, since (unlike the UN), the ICC actually has power to prosecute “war criminals” to some degree.

With that in mind, the ICC’s Rome Statute stipulates that “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities” is a war crime.

So here again, international law does not work out in Omar Khadr’s favour: at the time of his capture, he was (just) old enough to not be designated, under international law, as a child soldier.

Note that I’m neither agreeing with Khadr’s being incarcerated at Gitmo. Given that prisoners there are often tortured, I can’t really say that I support sending anyone there. However, I do dispute Matt Good’s appeal to international law on this matter; unfortunately, as regards young Mr. Khadr, the law is inapplicable here.

Of course, your average kill-em-all pundit thinks it all pathetic, that the video demonstrates that the CSIS agents that questioned Khadr displayed a semblance of compassion. But let’s remember one thing — they left him there. In fact, they, and the government of this country at the time, and currently, are just as complicit as those holding Khadr.

So what does that make us, exactly?

Well, it doesn’t say much about the moral fortutide of the Canadian government, admittedly. But then, neither does the fact that Henry Morgentaler is still apparently going to be receiving the Order of Canada. And unfortunately, Mr. Good is also over-simplifying matters somewhat in his statement here: it’s not as though the CSIS agents could have just escorted Mr. Khadr out of the prison at their leisure. Yes, he’s ostensibly a Canadian citizen, but he was arrested in the course of engaging in hostilities against American soldiers in Afghanistan. Under the same international law that Mr. Good erroneously appealed to earlier on, the U.S. does have a right to detain him in a facility of their choosing.

We can add to this observation the Chestertonian wisdom that to have a right is not at all the same thing as to be right in exercising it. Equally, though, Matt Good’s charge of Canadian “complicity” in the Khadr affair is off-base and incorrect; under the applicable laws, there’s actually not much the Canadian government can do. And now that Mr. Khadr is 21, the question also might be asked why anyone should feel that the Canadian government is obligated to do anything at all for an open supporter of Islamic terrorism whose own direct actions led to the death of a U.S. medic.

And in typically left-wing fashion, Mr. Good can’t resist implying that those with whom he disagrees are irrational, uncompassionate, and “back woods xenophobes”. Oh, and “Conservative mouthpieces” — leaving aside the fact that Mr. Good is himself something of a mouthpiece for Amnesty International, an organization that I (for one) no longer support because they now include abortion advocacy in their mandate.

Well, if you’re a Conservative mouthpiece from rural Saskatchewan that adorns their blog with the picture of a deal animal, it makes us noble allies in a xenophobic war against a religion of evil. If you’re a rational and compassionate human being that has the ability to view the complexities and personal history of Khadr’s situation, one that isn’t some back woods xenophobe and has grown up in a highly diverse multicultural area, it makes you sick to your stomach. If you’re a Canadian that believes that this nation is not the sort of nation that stands shoulder to shoulder with those that have been responsible for holding individuals for years only to discover that many of them are innocent (see the McClatchy reports from June), despite the fact that they’ve been denied their rights under the law and international conventions while, at the same time, those holding them profess to be globally instilling the virtues of the rule of law, then you have cause for serious concern. Because that is not what my grandfather and two of my great uncles fought to defend sixty some odd years ago, and that is certainly not the nation in which I want to die.

With respect to Mr. Good, I grew up in a fairly “diverse multicultural” environment, but this is not what makes me sick to my stomach regarding the issue of Mr. Khadr. Quite frankly, I don’t care what the colour of his skin is; I care that he chose to side with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and I care that he killed a U.S. medic with a grenade. What makes me sick to my stomach is the fact that he has been tortured, but I have no problem at all with the fact that he has been captured and incarcerated.

Were he Caucasian, I would say as much. Were he Catholic, I would say as much. Were he my own kin, I would say as much. In each case, I would say as much because I believe that people must accept the consequences of their actions, and I note that Omar Khadr’s documented actions were, at every turn, antithetical to the very principles that Mr. Good’s grandfather and two great uncles fought to defend.

I have traveled across this country almost seventy times, coast to coast, and seen more of it, and its people, than the majority of Canadians ever will. And I can honestly say, given my experiences, the acceptance, and even the participation, in such criminality is not what this country stands for.

If CSIS agents interviewed Khadr that means that our government has been complicit in condoning US detentions and all that they entail.

I agree that Canada should not be complicit in torture. But equally, I don’t think Canada should be complicit in releasing known terrorists back into the wild, so to speak. I don’t think it’s right that Omar Khadr has been tortured — that is, as I have said, a grave moral evil. But by saying that, I in no way mean to suggest that he should be released from custody.

If Canada stands for human rights, if Canada stands for freedom, and if Canada stands up for what is right, then Canada should work to ensure that known supporters and agents of terrorism are captured, tried, and incarcerated accordingly, with every bit as much vigour as she should work to oppose the use of torture against same.

In saying as much, I suppose that I do disagree, somewhat, with Small Dead Animals, the blog that Mr. Good is directing his ire against. Generally, on political matters, I agree with SDA to one degree or another, and it is one of my daily reads. But as far as I know, the operator of SDA, Kate, is not Catholic, so obviously I don’t agree with her sentiments that Omar Khadr “deserved to be dispatched then and there” (i.e. on the battlefield, by the surviving U.S. troops).

Former Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick, Gilbert Finn, has sent notice to the Prime Minister and the Governor General of Canada that he will be returning his Order of Canada in protest over Dr. Henry Morgentaler being inducted into the Order.

Finn was the second person of Acadian descent to be appointed to the office of Lieutenant Governor in New Brunswick, and held the office until 1994. He’s a respected businessman, and was the head of Assumption Mutual Life Assurance; his leadership transformed that business into one of the premiere companies in Eastern Canada.

He is joined in returning his award by the Directors General of Madonna House, a Catholic lay apostolate training foundation, who have personally returned the Order of Canada awarded to their foundress, Cathering Doherty (may she rest in peace), to Rideau Hall.

Now, I am not the occupant of Rideau Hall. Were I that occupant, however, I think I would at this point be questioning — deeply, harsly questioning — the wisdom of bestowing the Order of Canada on a man like Henry Morgentaler. Is it really worth decorating an abortionist when doing so will tarnish the decoration itself so profoundly?

Mind you, were I the resident of Rideau Hall, the closest Morgentaler would ever have gotten to the Order of Canada would have been the distance between him and the exhibit thereof in a museum somewhere. But that is another matter, O Reader.

At least, that would seem to be the logic in this letter to the editor:

To me, pro-lifers are really advocating that Canadian society should add a potential 100,000 more children every year to our poverty statistics and increase demand for foster care for children.

We need to be careful what we wish for. Unless we can provide a magic solution to prevent unwanted pregnancies from occurring, then we must contend with the fallout. Either we choose abortion or childhood poverty.

Dr. Henry Morgentaler not only saved the lives of thousands of women who would seek dangerous, illegal abortions out of desperation but he has played a big part in limiting childhood poverty and suffering. He deserves credit.

Yes, Morgentaler has played his part in “limiting” childhood poverty — let us leave unmentioned that his “method” of “limiting” poverty involves killing off those who would otherwise have to endure living in poverty. Because in this modern, tolerant, post-Christian world of ours, it is indeed better to be dead than to have to go without — better to be killed in a grotesque manner indeed rather than have to suffer the indignity of e.g. a Christmas without many presents, or a simple meal instead of Hot Pockets for lunch.

On such banalities is abortion justified, it seems. God forbid that a few more orphanages be the price for thousands of lives preserved.

The ladies at ProWomanProLife have a suggestion which bears repeating:

STEP 1: Program numbers listed below into your speed dial (the most important being the Secretary to the Governor General (613-993-0259) and the Deputy Secretary Order of Canada (613-998-8731)).

STEP 2: Call these numbers every 2nd day and leave a message saying something like, “I am calling to tell you I do not agree with Morgentaler’s appointment to the Order of Canada and to ask you to have it rescinded (taken away).”

STEP 3: Save the following e-mails in a group (smcook@gg.ca, esajous@gg.ca, media@scc-csc.gc.ca , reception@scc-csc.gc.ca,info@pco-bcp.gc.ca, info@rsc.ca, info@aucc.ca, iserrurier@gg.ca, meletourneau@gg.ca, pm@pm.gc.ca, scheea@parl.gc.ca, mclachlinb@scc-csc.gc.ca,copelandj@scc-csc.gc.ca).

STEP 4: Write a letter expressing your heart regarding Morgentaler’s appointment to the Order of Canada.

STEP 5: Hit send (to this group list you created in Step 3) every 2nd day!

Go thou and do, O Reader!

This decision to award Morgentaler the Order of Canada really helps focus the debate over the issue of abortion, and I think — in looking back at the letter which began this article — it also has helped refine the debate over what it means to be Canadian. If Canada truly values things like social justice and lifting other nations out of poverty, and if Canada values human rights as much as it claims to, then surely it cannot allow something which in part is justified as a method of keeping poverty rates down (and then by the method of killing people!) to persist within its borders.

If it allows such a thing, and rewards those who effect such a thing, then all its other platitudes are mere talk, chatter, and drivel. And if so, we are little better than the eugenecists of old, killing off those who would be of lower stature in our society.

Grace and I went to see the fireworks last night, and while we were waiting (Edmonton fireworks never start on time, except on New Year’s) for the show to begin, we got to talking about the state that Canada was in. In particular, Grace wondered what, exactly, the men and women Canada has sent to fight in e.g. Afghanistan are really fighting for. Obviously, they’re fighting to establish and preserve the Agfhan government…but what is it about Canada that is worth their sacrifice?

There’s a lot about this country that’s pretty great, to be sure. We are (more or less) a democracy, and Canadian citizens enjoy a reasonable degree of freedom, especially when compared to other nations in the world. The climate is decent (it’s been hot, lately, but one expects that in summer…and a couple strategically-placed fans around the apartment seem to at least partially mitigate the worst effects thereof). We are a fairly prosperous nation, with a good economy. And evidently, there must be something about Canada that thousands of immigrants every year see as being worthwhile — why else would they uproot themselves and, in many cases, their families and move here from halfway around the world?

At the same time, though, there’s much about Canada that is anything but great. We are tragically soft on crime, and far too many unborn Canadians never see the light of day due to the fact that abortion law in Canada is practically non-existent; in most jurisdictions, it’s perfectly legal to terminate a baby at pretty much every stage of development prior to actual birth. Our culture, in pace with most Western cultures, has slipped further and further down the well of moral depravity, especially in regard to various sexual “preferences” and “lifestyles”. And while we are ostensibly a free people, that freedom can be (and has been) severely curtailed in many instances — thanks to human rights commissions, even human rights that Canadians supposedly possess as per the Charter that is the foundational document for this nation’s governance have been stripped away to suit the whims and demands of activists and the too-easily-offended.

And Grace and I came to the conclusion, standing there waiting for the fireworks, that about the best we could reasonably say about Canada is that it’s a good place to live, but that it could be better. And we both came away wishing that we didn’t have to think about the country that has been our home in such terms.

Over in Europe, and in the U.S. as well (and probably here in Canada, although it has not yet been publicized to any extent), a “rape epidemic” is in progress, as more and more immigrants from various (primarily Islamic) nations come to the West and attempt to impose their values onto the predominant culture. Most recently in Brussels, Belgium, the example of a woman who was assaulted for not wearing “the veil” (e.g. the hijab) can be found, over and over again. In the U.S., there is the recent example of the Said sisters, two honour killing victims. In Canada, we have the sad case of Aqsa Parvez, also an honour killing victim.

In a way, this sort of thing shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. Beginning with Pierre Trudeau’s attempt to re-invent the image of what Canada was, our societal attitude has moved steadily leftward, toward the socialist and multicultural ideals that are now so pervasive in every aspect of Canadian society. And somewhere along the line, we lost something — we lost confidence and courage, specifically. We now lack the confidence and the courage to say to those who immigrate here that they have come to a nation that does not necessarily follow the ways of “the old country”; indeed, we have bent over backward to reject all the many positive things about Canada’s founding heritages in a misguided (and ultimately false!) effort to pretend that every culture in the world is equal.

And yet we know that not every culture is equal, and that some cultures are, frankly, barbaric or inferior by comparison to our own. Any culture that would give sanction to a father to murder his daughter solely on the basis of her style of dress has no place in Canada, until and unless it is willing to give up that aspect of itself. And people from that culture have no place in Canada until and unless they are willing to give up that aspect of their heritage. To claim that such views can somehow be wedged into the “cultural mosaic” of Canada is, ultimately, to give the culture of Canada over to its destruction.

Even more that just rejecting those imported cultural attitudes that are incompatible with what Canada stands for, however, Canada needs to work to re-elevate itself about the level of “it could be better.” Canadian society needs to stop being so limp-wristed where dealing with crime is concerned. It needs to stop being so permissive where sexual immorality is concerned. It needs to stop encouraging its people to be thin-skinned complainers by providing them a forum (in the HRCs) to effect government-mandated financial ruin on those with whom they disagree. And along the way, it might just do well to add the right of private property into the Charter.

Canada needs to be worth fighting and dying for again — it needs to be more and better than it is now, if for no other reason than to give purpose to the sacrifices it demands of its men and women in uniform. Is it really worth the sacrifice, to die for a country that could be better?

Ugh. Just…ugh.

Still, I suppose there’s one silver lining to be gleaned from the fact that Canada’s leading abortionist is being awarded the Order of Canada. This is apparently the first time in recorded history in which the award has been given with less-than-unanimous approval of the governing committee.

Talk about a dubious honour.

A teenager in Bristol, England has died from the complications related to a chemical abortion.

The reason she chose to abort? She didn’t want to strain her relationship with her boyfriend, who evidently was not keen at all on being a father.

Just horrible, isn’t it? Two lives lost so as to appease a boy so selfish, he’d gladly put his penis inside someone but wouldn’t dare accept one possible outcome of doing so.

Chris Johnson strikes the perfect tone, I think, in responding to the latest round of utter insanity to emerge from the animal rights organization.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has sent a proposal to the Somerset County commissioners to lease their jail for the world’s first Lobster Empathy Center.

What exactly is a Lobster Empathy Center?

“A prison is the perfect setting to demonstrate how lobsters suffer when they are caught in traps or confined to cramped, filthy supermarket tanks,” PETA wrote in a June 2 letter to the commissioners. “The center will teach visitors to have compassion for these interesting, sensitive animals while also commemorating the millions of lobsters who are ripped from their homes in the ocean off the coast of Maine each year before being boiled alive.”

…Sounds like a wonderful family vacation. Be kinda like that “Dodge the Scissahs” ride at the Fetus Empathy Centah over t’ Wahtahville.

“Mainers have been dragging lobsters from their ocean homes for generations,” said PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. “It’s time for them to learn that these fascinating animals deserve more than being treated as mere commodities.”

I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that Ms. Newkirk would dare dream, for any fraction of a second, to protest the way in which Planned Parenthood clinics, and other abortionists, drag unborn infants from their uterine homes, nor would she ever assert that it’s time for people to learn that these fascinating young humans deserve more than being treated as mere commodities.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

Count Roland follows up on an observation he had previously made concerning the fact that Time Immortal is blocked at the Catholic high school in Lloydminster, Alberta. Apparently, I’m classified as an “advocacy organization” by the IT personnel there.

But it appears that the rabbit hole goes even deeper than that. Roland has done quite a lot of investigative work, and his conclusions are…surprising, on one hand, and yet unsurprising as well.

O Writer,

I did a more extensive perusal of a small sample of organizations that have websites.

You are still blocked as an advocay organization; FreeMarkSteyn is blocked as a message/discussion board.

I was allowed to go to Planned Parenthood, CHRC, COLF, CCCB, CCRL, and Lifesite.

Given the Catholic position on abortion, I was surprised that PP was allowed, but as a defender of free speech it must be allowed - dynamic tension that is better than simple dichotomies, no?

CHRC and CCRL are opposing legal organizations. Lifesite was to test if the Catholic organizations were only allowed because the developers were told to allow Catholic sites — it was allowed as a non-Catholic life issues site, which is good.

But I am stil surprised that they, in general, were allowed considering they are as advocative as you are, if not more.

Right away, I confess myself surprised by the level and scope of the site categorization that is in play here, not all of it accurate. Lifesite is more or less correctly categorized: it is a life issues site, though not one that takes a specifically Catholic perspective.

On the other hand, Time Immortal is very incorrectly categorized: I am just one guy, not an organization, and though I do have a couple of guest bloggers (e.g. my wife) there is no explicit advocacy done through the site, certainly not in the sense of “one cause/raison d’etre” that my being categoriezed as an advocacy organization would imply. Contrast this with the allowance of Planned Parenthood’s website, despite the fact that PP openly admits that (pro-abortion) advocacy is part of its mission.

(Note that I’m not suggesting that the Planned Parenthood website should be banned — unless the ban on advocacy groups is to remain in place: consistency is important!)

And then there’s the issue of Binks’ FreeMarkSteyn aggregator, which is not really a discussion board (not more than any other blog that allows comments is, at any rate), nor a message board (according to the normative definition of the term). It is more properly termed an aggregator; that is: a collection or compliation of links to various stories from around the internet, which may or may not revolve around a common theme.

But this is also not as deep as the rabbit hole goes, O Reader. Roland notes, in a follow-up message, that a rather peculiar, though perhaps predictable, trend has begun to emerge.

Here is a list of more sites I tried.

Blocked:
Real Women of Canada - advocacy
National Rifle Association - weapons
Stormfront - hate
Black Panther - advocacy

Allowed:
PETA
National Organization of Women
Jack Chick
Coalition for Gun Control
Canadian Islamic Congress
Jihad Watch
SteynOnline
Reverend Wright on wiki -> tucc.org
Christianity Today

From my observations so far, the blocked sites all seem to be from the “conservative” side of the spectrum. Many allowed sites, from PP to now to PETA to Gun control, are largely advocacy groups but are on the “progressives’” approved list, although it also has a fair number of ‘conservative’ sites. How, though, realwomen/nra is blocked while now/gun control is not is beyond me.

Also, how is Jack Chick or TUCC not a hate site, or at least problematic on advocacy grounds for black liberation / anti-Catholic Theology?

I am somewhat confused (although I guess the web-block company likely has a liberal bias) and dismayed. I would hope that any censorship be in favour of groups closer to Church teaching and that Censorship be minimized, or if more widespread, to be at least not in favour of non-Church teaching sites.

This is a confusing trend, to be sure. For all intents and purposes, the person or persons responsible for policing the Internet access at the Catholic high school in Lloydminster — Holy Rosary High School — seems to be operating under something of a liberal bias in terms of how he or she applies the school’s presumably extant web access policy.

To wit: if advocacy groups are banned, why can the websites of organizations like PETA, Planned Parenthood, NOW, and the CIC still be accessed? If weapons-related sites are banned, why can the websites of gun control groups still be accessed? Roland points out other dichotomies which would appear to exist as well.

The extent of the bias is not great, but in general this situation doesn’t pass the old “sniff test” — there does seem to be some effort that has gone in to reducing access to conservative opinion on the Internet at Holy Rosary. And since censorship in any form is unacceptable…

Holy Rosary High School

Principals
Principal: Mr. T. Brochu
Vice Principal: Mr. Vince Orieux
Vice Principal: Mr. C. Musyj

Contact Information
Address: 6611A-39 Street
Lloydminster, AB T9V 2Z4
Phone: (780) 875-3600
Fax: (780) 875-9516
Email: hrhs@lcsd.ca

Do drop them a line, O Reader. There’s quite enough censorship — especially censorship of conservative opinion — going on in this country of late as it is, without some tin-pot IT dictator adding to the list of problems. That this sort of thing is happening at a Catholic hich school, especially one which states that its mission is to “nurture spiritual, academic, emotional, social and physical growth in every individual.”

Update: Welcome, readers from Sleepy Old Bear, Walker, and BCF! And welcome, Steynians!

…but I will agree, to the end of my days, that he has a right to voice his opinions. And it’s good news indeed that the Supreme Court of Canada agrees with that sentiment, and will not hear an appeal to overturn a lower court’s ruling that Whatcott’s right to freedom of speech had been violated.

Whatcott’s tactics seem, to me, on the extreme side, but the fact that the Saskatchewan Association of Licensed Practical Nurses suspended and fined him for his off-hours, anti-abortion advocacy was detestable and a violation of Whatcott’s human rights.

Nurse Bill Whatcott staged his anti-abortion protest at the clinic in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 2002, and Planned Parenthood subsequently launched a complaint against him at his professional association. Whatcott had earlier served jail time for demonstrating against an abortion clinic in Toronto.

The Saskatchewan Association of Licensed Practical Nurses found Whatcott guilty of professional misconduct, suspended him as a nurse and ordered him to pay C$15,000 ($15,150) in legal costs.

Whatcott argued that he had been demonstrating in his free time and that his protest was simply a case of free speech. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association had also weighed in on the debate, saying that while it favored abortion rights it was concerned over attempts to squelch debate.

He tried to run for mayor here in Edmonton a while back. Got about a thousand votes, as I recall.

Vox Day brings to light a statistic of which I was not aware:

The ratio of girls per 1,000 boys in these areas hovers around the 700s and 800s, with as few as 300 girls per 1,000 boys in some high-caste urban areas of Punjab. As investigative journalist Gita Aravamudan argues in her 2007 book, “Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Feticide,” “Female infanticide is akin to serial killing. But female feticide is more like a holocaust. A whole gender is getting exterminated.” The problem extends beyond India….

A new study suggests that female feticide may be disturbingly common in some American communities. In an analysis of 2000 Census data published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Columbia University economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund examined the sex ratio of births among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean and Asian-Indian parents. They found “evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

Abortion was supposedly the ultimate guarantor of women’s rights in this, the age of enlightened post-Christianity. Equally, it’s supposed to be the ultimate expression of a woman’s right to “control her own body” (whatever that actually means).

And abortion seems, now, to be shaping up as the tool or mechanism by which women will all but disappear from many regions of the world.

I see that York University’s student government is once again trying to ban pro-life groups from the campus, on the grounds that “pro-life organizations seek to deny women of their basic human right to choose.”

Of course, Gilary Massa, the vice president of the YFS, doesn’t call them “pro-life” — she prefers the term “anti-choice.”

One of the ladies at ProWomanProLife points out an obvious problem with that misleading label:

I always am skeptical of a body that insists on calling a pro-life organization “anti-choice.” It pretends abortion to be the only valid ‘choice.’ (Note to pro-abortionists: Choice and abortion are NOT synonyms.)

Then again, perhaps in the minds of many pro-abortionists, abortion is the only valid choice out there; after all, Canada’s dismal birth rate has to come from somewhere.

The plain fact of the matter is that the YFS is just looking to censor those with whom they disagree; this isn’t really about human rights or women’s rights. Pro-life groups have no power to deny anyone access to anything in particular — most are only interested in introducing additional information back into a discussion that has become increasingly one-sided (and then in favour of rampant birth control use and pro-abortion advocacy). It’s becoming increasingly difficult to discuss pregnancy in a university campus’ health centre without having the option of abortion rammed down one’s throat as a first option.

If anyone here is anti-choice, it’s those who would deny pro-life groups their right to hold and articulate a contrary opinion. What’s truly odious is that at no time has abortion been legally declared a human right in Canada. Meanwhile, the freedom of expression of these pro-life groups, which York University is seeking to deny, is enshrined as a human right, and is being taken away in favour of a demand that York students only be exposed to approved opinions.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how the truth is precisely the inverse of the rhetoric of the progressive elements in this story?

Update: What the heck?

I was extremely shocked to discover that the increasingly notorious Gilary Massa is a hijab-wearing Muslim woman. I mean, radical pro-choice activist does not bring the hijab to mind. Islam is against abortion. But one thing I unfortunately do associate with Islam in Canada right now (but not all Muslims, of course, and especially not the ones I know personally) is assaults on Canadian freedom of speech. In Halifax. Against Ezra Levant. Against Mark Steyn. Against the MCC, which suffers death threats from fellow Muslims. Ditto Irshad Manji. What, I ask, gives here?

Maybe she’s a progressive Muslim, you know? One of those moderates we keep on hearing about in the various mythologies that percolate through political discourse these days? She’s just fine with the hijab and what it represents, but don’t you dare get between her and the right of a woman to “control her own body.”

Sorta like those pro-choice Catholics, O Reader. Except, in a headscarf.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Gastric bypasses. Stomach stapling, as I gather the procedure is also known — a last-ditch treatment for obesity, to stave off a heart attack or stroke.

Being married to a nurse, I occasionally get to hear about this kind of procedure, and I gather that it really is intended to be last-ditch. The long-term survival prospects aren’t exactly stellar, nor are the odds of the surgery really doing all that much to help a person*. It does, I gather, occasionally work as intended, but not often.

Still, as more and more people in society are becoming obese, such procedures are expected to be commonplace. Britain has seen a 41% rise in the number of bypasses done in the last year, at an average cost of 7,000 pounds per operation.

It’s on the rise here in Canada too, although I don’t know by what percentage.

The problem is: surgeries like this are, more often than not, like rearranging deck chairs on…well, you know which ship, O Reader. Treatment is one thing, but a problem like obesity has more and deeper causes that are, frankly, not always addressed, nor always rectified:

I worry that not enough is being done to make sure people don’t gain the weight back. See, a lot of people think the surgery is a miracle cure. It’s not. I have talked to dozens of people who have had it done, only to go back to their old habits and gain all the weight back. This is not a good use of public money. I realize that obesity is a serious issue (my fat ass reminds me of that every day!), but I would rather see the price of green peppers go down before I would want to see so much being spent on a cosmetic surgery that may not solve the long-term problem. Progressives are always on about “root causes”, and this is one area where I agree with them. You cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery. A person has to be in the right headspace in order to lose weight. Sometimes it takes a health scare. Sometimes it’s a nasty comment from a trusted loved-one. Sometimes it is a positive, like wanting to be more fertile and start a family.

But like going into detox for that last time, you need to have hit your bottom (no fat pun intended) before you can lose the weight. The NHS is spending a lot of money on the symptom, not the disease.

This is something Grace and I talk about every once in a while. The plain fact is, a lot of people who go in for this and other forms of surgery related to complications from obesity do not change their own lifestyles, which are the real cause of the problem in the wake of the surgery. If a person’s liver fails because the last time they didn’t eat at McDonald’s was sometime in the 90s, they expect a new one. And when they get a new one, they finish the post-surgical healing time and go right back to the Big Macs.

(Basically, it’s the culture entitlement at work again, with the usual lack of understanding that rights are tempered and accompanied by responsibilities. People have the inalienable right to eat at McDonald’s, and when something fails in their own body they demand, as though they are owed, corrective treatment. God forbid it cross their minds to amend their own destructive habits to prevent a re-occurrence of the failure!)

To be fair, some people do transform their lifestyles, and they deserve to be commended for that; this is especially true from within a Christian understanding of the world, since we should rejoice every time someone turns his or her life around, in same way that God rejoices over every sinner who repents.

But I agree with my wife when she observes that responsive treatments like this are, ultimately, a losing battle. As long as people in places like Canada and England know that the government will foot the bill when their body craps out, there’s no real incentive for them to change…especially when that same government mandates and enforces a human rights regime that basically encourages people to feel entitled to…well, everything.

What ultimately needs to happen, and this is hinted at in the excerpt above (i.e. “green peppers”), is that health care services need to focus more on preventative medicine, instead of just on responsive medicine. Surgery is all well and good, but we could do more and better to fight obesity if we focused on responding to people at risk of becoming obese, and getting them to change their lifestyles accordingly. Yes, programmes of this nature would still have quite a cost associated with them, but in the long term they would probably save quite a lot of dollars if they were, in fact, succecssful to any meaningful degree.

A person really “cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery,” and our health care systems need to be able to address this reality. At present, as I understand it, patients in for bypass surgery do receive counselling, and (correct me if I’m wrong, O Reader) have to have demonstrated the ability to lose a certain quantity of weight on their own prior to undergoing the surgery itself. That said, somewhere along the line that person did begin down a path that led them to become obese, and one gets the sense that more could have been done for them earlier on to perhaps prevent them ever becoming so morbidly overweight as to require drastic surgery in the first place.

The elephant in the room is a pair of questions: what could be done, and how do we get people to take it seriously. And this brings us back to our culture of entitlement, because while such a thing persists it may well be nigh-impossible to put in place programmes that work to prevent morbid obesity by way of counselling, teaching, and exercise.

In a way, the prevalence of gastric bypass surgery, and obesity as well, is just one more testament to the way in which our rights-obsessed, responsibility-free, post-Christian society is ultimately destroying itself.

It might be entirely predictable of me to point out that modern atheism bears a goodly deal of the blame for this self-destructive trend in society, as surely as it bears the blame for other such trends (e.g. demographics). But I observe that I’m not the only one who thinks so…and the sane Hitchens brother has quite the thing to say about another trend with the same root causes.

I did mention Atheism at the beginning. For that is at the root of all this. Once people don’t acknowledge any moral authority outside themselves, they can choose which rules to take seriously and which not to entirely according to their own feelings at any time. They will generally do this on the basis of what suits them. It begins with little things, and moves on to the great. We are now at the stage where it is moving on quite fast.

One of the key features of atheism is that atheists themselves are unable to grasp this point. We’re just as good as religious people, they respond, if not better. Maybe so. Religious people who understand their creeds know perfectly well that they’re no better than anyone else. That’s not the issue. What is?.

It is this. What do you really mean by ‘good’? Why (for example) is fidelity better than adultery, patience better than impatience? Watch people who are nice to you in the office, as they drive, in a hurry, in frantic traffic, and you may see another side of them. ‘Road rage’, where we are unrestrained by fears about how we will look to those we live and work with, is an interesting measure of what we are really like. Cars are a powerful moral lie-detector.

The connection might not seem immediately intuitive, but it is there, and it has a great deal to do with both individual liberty and the distinctions drawn between what are considered private matters, and what are considered public matters.

What we eat, most people would agree, is a private matter. What, where, and how fast we drive can be similarly classified, but in the case of a car it is easier to observe that what can at first be viewed as a private matter can very rapidly become a public matter, if in fact we drive too fast or too recklessly. What we eat can similarly become a public matter, if we are reckless about it as well. This is perhaps not as true in places like America, given that one pays for one’s health care there, but it certainly is true in places like Canada and England, where the government generally foots the bill. Obesity — which, psychological considerations aside, arises out of too much consumption — and the expensive surgical treatments for it are an example of how the private issue of what we eat becomes a public issue; basically: we have eaten too much, and are now a burden on the public purse.

Drugs? Take them. Sex? Have it now and to hell with the consequences. Abortion’s easy now. Manners? Who cares. Patience? What’s that? Parents? Ignore them as soon as you can, and especially once you’ve got to university thanks to their money and effort. Teachers? What do they know? Rules? They’re for other people. Religion? It’s a wicked fraud designed to keep us down. This belief is itself a moral code, but one which is entirely based on the desires of the person involved — and which is destined to cause growing problems as more and more unfettered egos bump into each other.

The same attitude could probably be observed, I suspect, in response to the above suggestion that medicine become more preventative in nature — this is the illustration of the elephant, so to speak. For as surely as our society believes that rosaries should be kept far away from ovaries, we believe every bit as much that nobody is allowed to tell us to put the cheeseburger down in favour of a green vegetable…even if that is exactly what we need to do.

It might seem strange for a “freespeecher” to be thinking in this manner, but let us come back to what was said above, O Reader. Let us look again at the issue of where the private exercise of rights becomes a public issue. With freedom of speech, that line ostensibly exists at the exact point where the articulation of an idea or viewpoint becomes incitement to violence. We have laws against that sort of thing (and rightly so).

Where does that line exist regarding the issue of what we eat? Does it exist at all? Should it exist, if it currently does not? How might we effect such a thing in real life? One possible answer is that receiving treatment is contingent upon meeting a set of criteria both pre- and post-surgery, although what the penalty would be for breaking such an agreement post-surgery would be, I do now know (a gastric bypass can’t really be undone, after all). The idea of a user-pay system for obesity treatments is a tempting thought, but given that even in the U.S. obesity is on the rise, the effectiveness of that idea is called into question. Denial of treatment to those who did not seek counselling earlier on in their obesity is a possibility, although that raises other issues.

Social upheaval would probably achieve the best results, but it would be rather unrealistic to expect such a thing to occur.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!