timeimmortal

York University graduate student “did not mean to spark a debate on freedom of expression” when she helped stop (read: censor) an abortion debate on the university’s campus.

With all (un?)due respect to Kelly Holloway: what did you expect, Missy? Precisely how could this young woman have thought that her support of an act of Censorship wouldn’t lead to a debate over the right to speak freely that all people, according to the UN, ostensibly enjoy? Perhaps she thought that the pro-lifers would simply do as they were told and meekly obey the order to keep silent?

“I actually don’t think this is very controversial,” the graduate student at York University said of the decision to cancel a Feb. 28 event that would have shown graphic images of abortion and asked participants whether the procedure should be criminalized.

If the event wasn’t so controversial, why was it cancelled? If the abortion debate isn’t very controversial, why was a debate about abortion not allowed to take place on the campus of York University? If this isn’t that big of a deal, why did Kelly Holloway and others advocate for the cancellation of the event and, by extension, censorship of the pro-life opinion?

“Most people understand that every woman has the right to choose what she does with her own body and that moral considerations about abortion are a very personal matter for individuals to decide,” said Holloway, who helped make the decision as vice-chair of the student centre where the debate was scheduled to be held.

It would be easier to accept the pro-choice talking points if they weren’t so mired in ignorance, half-truths, and outright lies. The fact of the matter is, abortion is not about what a woman does with her own body, because it is not the woman’s body that gets chopped up and vacuumed out of the womb. The fact of the matter is, there is another human being — yes, one that resides, for the time being, within the woman’s body, but nevertheless one which is distinct from the woman at a genetic level and which is, by any metric one might care to employ in a rational and objective way, a distinct being with its own body.

If for no other reason than that abortion involves a minimum of two people — the woman and the unborn child — the question of the Morality of abortion cannot be relegated to the realm of individual choice, because the outcome of the moral decision impacts more than one person (and, indeed, a wholly different human being than the one making the moral decision will be the one to pay with its life if the “right to choose” is exercised). This is to say nothing of the way our post-modern society’s permissive attitudes to abortion have diminished the birthrate to such a low level that only a massive program of Immigration can keep the population at its present level. Abortion may be an individual choice, but the implications and ramifications of the choice affect the lives of others, and impact on society as a whole. For those reasons, the moral issues surrounding abortion cannot be left in the hands of individuals to decide.

“The legal precedent in Canada is that abortion and those women who choose to have the medical procedure will not be criminalized,” said Holloway, who is also president of the York University Graduate Students’ Association. “So every York student has the right to make up their own mind and there is no need for an event, organized by anti-choice campaigners, that is disguised as a debate.”

Except that it was actually going to be a debate — Jose Ruba against a pro-choice student named Michael Payton chosen from the ranks of the Freethinkers, Skeptics, and Atheists at York (a student group). Yes, it was being put on in part by the pro-life group at York, but it was also being put on by the other group as well. Both pro-life and pro-choice people were, in other words, putting on the event.

God forbid, though, that pro-lifers ever get to speak their minds, eh, O Reader? Even in an ecumenical setting, it would be dangerous to let “anti-choice” types speak. Kelly Holloway: censor.

Holloway said banning discussions of the pros and cons of abortion was never the point. Her beef was with inviting the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, (CCBR) a Calgary-based pro-life group that compares abortion to genocide and pushes to make it illegal.

Holloway remembers the display the group brought to University of Toronto a few years ago when she was an undergraduate bioethics student there and active in the student union.

“They erected huge signs in full colour of fabricated fetuses alongside people dying in the Holocaust and also pictures of people being lynched,” she said. “So we set up a table outside of that display as the student union to encourage students to tell us what their reactions were so we could understand the effect it was having on students. We collected hundreds of statements from students who said they were upset, they were appalled, they were traumatized and they were worried about the fact that the student union hadn’t taken responsibility to actually interfere in the matter.”

Maybe people should be upset about abortion. Maybe people should be confronted with the reality that the unborn child is a human being, and that it is alive. Maybe people should be confronted with the reality that more often than not, what is “aborted” is not an indistinct clump of cells, but something that is very obviously a somewhat smaller version of a human infant. Maybe people should be shown that abortion doesn’t just excise a growth from the uterus, but that it in fact does rip a tiny human being into pieces to be discarded with the trash.

And maybe people should be disgusted by what they see, and disgusted by the practice of abortion, and by the realization that something so brutal is considered both legal and moral by many in Canada (and around the world).

God forbid people should see both sides of the story — even if one side is very traumatizing to behold — and be allowed to decide for themselves what is and is not moral.

She was not about to let that happen again.

Kelly Holloway: censor. Thanks, Ms. Holloway, for violating the right to freedom of expression of pro-life students at York University. How does it feel, Missy, to know that you’ve now contravened the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

When the student centre executive learned about the event — billed as a debate on abortion rights between Jose Ruba from CCBR and Michael Payton from a student group called Freethinkers, Skeptics and Atheists at York — they held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously to cancel it.

Because it’s too dangerous to let students make their own choices after all, isn’t it!

I tend not to believe the label “pro-choice,” because too many self-professed pro-choicers — Kelly Holloway included — actually don’t care about people having the right to exercise “choice” freely. Such people are more accurately described as being pro-abortion, because their concern is that abortion remain legal in Canada. They then dress their opinion up in the pretty language of individual choice, but it’s just a lie.

It is a lie because those same people who call themselves pro-choice don’t believe in allowing other people the freedom to make their choices in a free and open way. Certainly, Kelly Holloway did not respect the right of the pro-life student group to choose to associate themselves with the CCBR, or the choice that both the pro-life students and the Freethinkers. She didn’t think twice about respecting the choices these groups had made to hold a debate. Instead, when she was informed of their decision to hold the event, she acted swiftly and decisively to deny them their right to choose, to deny them the right to hold the debate, and to deny them their right to freedom of expression.

And now she’s shocked that people called her on the carpet for being a censor.

How stupid does one have to be to be a “pro-choicer,” anyhow? I guess, in the specific case of Kelly Holloway, being a Marxist gets you most of the way there.

Update: Welcome, Blazing Cat Fur readers!

I’m dead tired this morning, so this will kind of just be a list of things that I noticed on my morning browse through a few parts of the internet. Regular posting will resume tomorrow, ideally.

Apparently, the Milky Way is twice as thick as was previously thought — 12,000 light years, instead of 6,000. That’s kind of interesting, admittedly, although also rather “ho hum” — given the massive distances we’re talking about here, what’s a factor of two? Apparently, the researchers at the University of Sydney were just doing some basic fact-checking on internet-available data and realized the error after a few hours of computation. Guess it just goes to show: science is never 100%.

Moving on to more terrestrial matters, it appears that Danish “youths” — “mainly with immigrant backgrounds” — are burning things again, mainly cars, but also schools and trash bins. Officially, it’s not clear what caused the riots to trigger. Personally, I’m thinking that this is another case where we can strike out the words “immigrant youths” and replace them with “Muslims.” Probable cause? Here’s one guess:

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: RightGirl)

Speaking of Terrorism (since really, what else can we call it when Muslims are rioting and burning things?), the possibility is emerging that those undersea cables that got cut, thereby denying Internet access to millions of users across the Middle East and Africa, may have been destroyed in an act of sabotage, not in an accident as previously thought.

I hope nobody is too surprised by that.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about demographic winter, I see that Vox Day has added his own thoughts on the phenomenon to the virtual din.

You can’t completely grasp the extent of Europe’s post-Christian decline until you walk through the ghost towns of Italy, populated by no more a dozen elderly women and one old man sleeping in the sun. It’s not something that any tourist is going to see in Florence, Venice or Rome, much less Milano, but go outside the tourist tombs and the desolation of demographic winter is impossible to miss. And the imported African hookers scattered along the truck routes in the countryside are hardly adequate compensation for what were once famously vibrant family units.

There’s a large and spectacular church on the outskirts of a town near which we like to wander. Its doors are only unlocked for an hour or so every month, because despite its gorgeous interior architecture and painted ceilings, there’s not only no one around to attend it, there’s not even anyone left to visit it.

There is no cause of the demographic decline that is now afflicting much of the West that has done more to exacerbate the problem than secular progressivism and related ideologies. Put plainly, the societies we have built for ourselves (and, indeed, most human societies in general) are predicated on the expectation of a populace that maintains an almost “Catholic” birthrate — an average of 2 to 3 kids per woman. Our present fad of 0 to 1 kids per woman, and then usually one “designer” baby at age 35 (I shamelessly crib Mark Steyn’s phrasing here) is, quite frankly, insufficient to sustain Western society. To keep up our end, we need immigration.

That will, I think, be our untimely end.

Should Canada require its immigrants to “earn” their citizenship?

In the past, simply having lived in Britain for a sufficient length of time was enough to qualify a person for citizenship there. Now, a move is afoot to have immigrants “move on” through a system that encourages citizenship by encouraging the adoption of national traditions and values (possibly at the expense of the traditions and values those immigrants have brought with them from the “old country”), at the end of which they may achieve citizenship…or may be asked to leave, if in fact they do not integrate satisfactorily.

Methinks we need something like that in Canada.

According to the Associated Press, pro-lifers and other ‘domestic’ extremists account for “most of the damage” from terror-type attacks committed on American soil, to a larger degree than even Islamic terror.

As a pro-lifer, I’m pretty accustomed to having all manner of lies told about me and my beliefs — it comes with the territory. But the above assertion is pretty egregious, if somewhat easily refuted. Just for context, Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in one day back in 2001, and destroyed two of the tallest skyscrapers in America in the process. Since 1973 (the year of Roe vs. Wade), misguided pro-lifers have killed just seven people in the U.S.

But clearly, those pro-lifers account for “most of the damage” done in acts of terror on American soil. The newsman says so!

Ezra Levant remarks that since it’s clear that Stephen Harper is gunning for an election, the Conservative government might as well try passing a few different pieces of increasingly more ambitious legislation, all via confidence motions, until Stephane Dion finally slips up and stops trying to avoid bringing the government down.

Gun control, the Wheat Board, tax cuts — and how about a gentle amendment to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act?

The irony is that last bill wouldn’t be controversial at all. Other than a lone Liberal lobbyist who hasn’t been in the party’s good graces for four years, and a fringe ethno-political special interest group, I don’t think anyone in the country would even consider such an amendment controversial.

As they say in the funnies…”it’s just crazy enough to work!”

And speaking of pro-life issues, the ladies of ProWomanProLife are suggesting contacting the Governor General directly to let her know that Henry Morgentaler does not deserve the Order of Canada. Fully 85% of online respondents to the Globe & Mail’s poll on the issue said “no,” and while that can hardly be called a truly “representative” number, I think it does indicate rather clearly that a majority of Canadians think that giving Morgentaler this sort of official recognition is a very bad thing.

The PWPL ladies also provide the names of the various people who sit on the “independent” advisory council that considers nominations for the Order of Canada.

Update: Suzanne Fortin sends in the following additional information by email. Here’s the process one can follow to contact the Governor General’s office:

It’s easy.

First call the Governor-General’s Office. Phone numbers:

Ottawa: 613-993-8200

Rest of Canada: 1-800-465-6890

You will get a receptionist.Ask to speak to Madeleine Proulx (pronounced “Prew”). She deals with the Order of Canada. When I phoned today, I got a voicemail and I have been told by another pro-life caller that calls about Henry Morgentaler are being re-directed to her voicemail. State your name. Tell her that you want to register your objection to Henry Morgentaler receiving the Order of Canada. State the reason why. Please try to be neutral in your tone– calling him a bloodthirsty murderer probably won’t gain us a lot of credibility. I stated that he’s a symbol of inequality as he is the reason that unborn children have no legal status today and that I believe in the equality of all human beings, and that he fought this struggle in my name as a woman, and I resent that.

And that was it.

If you’re a pro-lifer, O Reader, or even if you aren’t but nevertheless think that Henry Morgentaler doesn’t deserve the Order of Canada, I encourage you to follow the steps above. Be civil and be articulate, and choose your words carefully. Calling him a murderer with blood on his hands might seem like a reasonable objection to raise, but it’s also a very good way to ensure that your phone message gets ignored. Present your case fairly and without appeal to emotion or horror, and it will be listened to.

Seems pretty straightforward — the DVD apparently chronicles diminishing birthrates world-wide, although its principal focus seems to be on Europe, where no nation has a birthrate at (or even near) “replacement level” — 2.1 live births per woman. This replacement rate is the absolute minimum necessary birthrate for “zero population growth” to be a reality.

Most European nations have birthrates approaching half of replacement rate. There is no parallel in history for the kind of demographic implosion that is now imminent in places like Russia and Spain. Not that any of this comes as a surprise, of course. A replacement level birthrate basically requires a Catholic moral approach to marriage and childbearing, and every European nation (even once-strong Catholic bastions like Italy and Spain) have largely given themselves over to secularism, progressivism, and moral relativism — abortion and casual sex are now almost the rule, rather than the much-derided exception.

Funnily, that transformation in the soul of the nation has turned out to be destructive for the nation. Who ever could have seen that coming?

Besides the Church, that is?

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Mark Shea)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!