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!

A beautiful and meaningful reflection from Pope Benedict XVI delivered earlier this month just prior to leading the Angelus on March 2nd. And in addition to being yet another good example of why any sane person should reject theodicy as a legitimate objection to the Christian faith, it discusses another very visible trend at work in the post-modern world.

In the face of men and women marked by limitations and suffering, Jesus did not think of their possible guilt but rather of the will of God who created man for life. And so he solemnly declares: “We must work the works of him who sent me…. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (Jn 9: 5).

And he immediately takes action: mixing a little earth with saliva he made mud and spread it on the eyes of the blind man. This act alludes to the creation of man, which the Bible recounts using the symbol of dust from the ground, fashioned and enlivened by God’s breath (Gn 2: 7). In fact, “Adam” means “ground” and the human body was in effect formed of particles of soil. By healing the blind man Jesus worked a new creation.

But this healing sparked heated debate because Jesus did it on the Sabbath, thereby in the Pharisees‘ opinion violating the feast-day precept. Thus, at the end of the account, Jesus and the blind man are both cast out, the former because he broke the law and the latter because, despite being healed, he remained marked as a sinner from birth.

Jesus reveals to the blind man whom he had healed that he had come into the world for judgement, to separate the blind who can be healed from those who do not allow themselves to be healed because they consider themselves healthy. Indeed, the temptation to build himself an ideological security system is strong in man: even Religion can become an element of this system, as can atheism or secularism, but in letting this happen one is blinded by one’s own selfishness.

Atheists, secularists, skeptics, and other materialists do not tend to notice that they make the same mistakes the accuse the religious faithful of making; they are blinded to their own lack of reason and rationalism about a great many things, especially when the discussion turns to thinks like doubts about the scientific consensus (as has been happening, recently, with the global warming alarmists and those, like me, who doubt them), or religion itself. Moreover, they are blind to the consequences of their own views, as a reader of Vox Day’s recently noted in a comments thread at the Bad Astronomy blog, which is run by a self-professed skeptic.

Because the plain fact of the matter is that, if the secularists are right and if a human being is little more than a meaty outer container for an internal stew of random or hormonally-driven chemical reactions, why should human beings choose to sacrifice even a moment of the fun- and pleasure-driven “get what you can while you can” hedonistic ethos that is the highest moral reasoning of a purposeless existence for something so banal and demanding as a baby? It is in the “reasoning” of atheism and godlessness that humanity finds the strongest justification for its own extinction — why let something so taxing as procreation get in the way of an endless succession of Friday night romps and Thursday afternoon trips to the shoe store?

Moreover, how can we even say — rationally, and from reason — that human beings, being (in the secular view) little more than a meaty outer container for an internal stew of random or hormonally-driven chemical reactions, are even capable of reason? That seems to be one of the most irrational faith claims yet made, even more irrational than the notion that if in fact there is a God, He sent His only Son to Earth to die and rise again for the forgiveness of sins. At least it makes sense that a deity, if one of such power as the Judeo-Christian God did exist, could arrange for such a set of events to transpire. Reason from randomness? Not so much.

Allowing for the base assumption of the existence of the deity, the claims that follow from that assumption are reasonable. Conversely, by allowing only for the base assumption that humanity seems to have arisen randomly, and that human beings are just animals — some muscle and some bone, and a slough of random chemical interactions — it is wholly irrational to claim that reason even exists, let alone that human beings are capable of grasping at it.

Not that one is surprised that atheists are so muddle-headed, of course — when one is wandering in darkness, away from the light of truth, it is not surprised that one stumbles about as though blind. The same, by and large, can be said for religious folks who have fallen into the (temporary) darkness of sin. The Pope’s statement, above, addresses both realities, and the rest of his Angelus statement remarks on the method by which all people can be cured of this blindness and emerge from the darkness in which we are caught up — Christ. But to be healed by Christ, we must first allow ourselves to be healed by Christ, which begins with admitting our need for healing. Jesus will not force salvation upon any of us, because to love God and to desire to be with God is something each human being must choose, both by force of reason and by living out his or her life in a manner which is suitable and in accordance with both God’s teachings and one’s own desire to dwell with God in eternity.

Christians who have fallen into sin can and do often choose to return to Christ. Atheists and secularists may never even understand the need to do so. Theirs, then, is the darker night…theirs is the deeper blindness.

It’s hardly enough, but any law which recognizes that the unborn are living, human beings worthy of some manner of protection from harm is a good thing. And with the Liberals paralyzed for fear of triggering an election, and the NDP and Bloc Quebecois to weakened at the moment to present serious opposition to the bill, now is the perfect time for the Conservative government to be passing it.

A controversial federal justice bill that would make it a separate crime if a fetus dies when its mother is attacked passed through the second stage of proceedings in Parliament on Wednesday.

But MPs opposed to the bill — who say it’s a back-door attempt to attack abortion rights — say they will try to make sure the bill never makes it out of committee.

“I think the NDP, the Bloc and about half the Liberals will mobilize at committee stage to try and nip this in the bud,” said New Democrat MP Pat Martin.

The Unborn Victims of Crime Act passed second reading Wednesday evening by seven votes, splitting support among the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP.

Martin and other critics — including pro-choice groups — fear that, by giving the fetus a right through this legislation, it opens the door for anti-abortion groups to go back to court and argue against abortion.

I like how the newspaper reporter didn’t bother to seek out the opinion of pro-life groups or supporters of the bill, preferring to stay safely on the pro-choice side of the issue and only quoting those who oppose the bill. Media bias aside, though, there’s good news here.

It’s beyond all reasonable debate that the fetus is human, and that it is alive, and that it is a unique being set apart from either of its parents; it is, genetically speaking, different from both the mother and the father. Observations of that nature tend to do away with most of the pro-abortion arguments one tends to encounter, including the notion that the only issue is a woman’s right to “control her own body” (because it’s not just her body, is it?).

Indeed, the only recourse that the pro-abortion lobby has, in the face of the facts, is to argue that the unborn are not “persons” under the law, and to oppose any and all attempts to grant them some or all of the rights enjoyed by those who, under the law, are considered “persons.” If that sort of reasoning sounds familiar, it ought to — notions of personhood have been used to justify the bigotry and murderous excesses of many a dictator, and even a few racist groups, throughout history. Marching in lockstep with the notion of personhood is the notion of “wantedness,” and the suggestion that it is legal and morally acceptable to kill those unborn children which are not “wanted” by the mother. Apparently, though, that reasoning is only valid up until the moment of the child being born — if the mother should decide a couple of years later that she no longer “wants” the child, she’s out of luck.

Not that one could ever accuse the pro-choice side of having the most consistent arguments, logically speaking.

And yet, the plain fact of the matter is that if someone does kill a pregnant woman, two lives are ended; if a pregnant woman is attacked and loses her baby, a human being has still died. Any reasonable person ought to be able to see that in that circumstance, a punishable offence has occurred, and that Canadian law should include provisions to prosecute those who commit such crimes. If nothing else, this bill — Bill C-484 is its technical name — is a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking from a government that, two years on, continues to impress.

And it should pass, not only because it will throw pro-choicers everywhere into hysterics, but because it reflects a biological reality.