timeimmortal

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!

It looks like the York Federation of Students (YFS) decided to let freedom of expression prevail after all. Maybe. I don’t actually have all the details of what machinations went on to bring this about. Be that as it may — Jose Ruba himself dropped me a line this morning to let us know that the previously cancelled pro-life/pro-abortion debate at York University between Jose and Michael Payton is back on, and is happening tonight at 5:30 PM.

FYI: The debate is back on today:

Event: Abortion - A Woman’s Right or a Moral Wrong?
Day and Time: Tuesday, March 18th at 5:30-7:00pm
Location: Curtis Lecture Hall E, Keele Campus at York University; the building is by Scott Library

http://www.yorku.ca/yorkweb/maps/keele-webmap-large.html (on the right hand side, find Curtis Lecture Hall)

Debaters:
Pro-Life: Jose Ruba from Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform
Pro-Choice: Michael Payton from Freethinkers, Skeptics and Atheists Group at York
Moderator: TBA

That’s excellent news. To Jose Ruba, I wish all the best in this debate — may he emerge the victor. To the students, and whoever else had a hand in this, at York, I wish to offer a measure of thanks and congratulations for finding a way that freedom of speech could prevail.

I wonder how avowed Marxist Kelly Holloway is taking the news that her attempt at Censorship has failed?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

In addition to making you an advocate for censorship, that is.

The York University Federation of Students — yes, the same York University group that denied pro-life students at York the right of freedom of expression — recently condemned McMaster University for censoring an anti-Israel poster which contained violent imagery and the phrase “Israel Apartheid.”

Just so we’re clear, here’s the apparent policy on freedom of speech at York University:

• pro-life students showing pictures depicting graphic, bloody images of aborted babies = not allowed
• anti-Israel students showing pictures depicting graphic, bloody images of Palestinians killed by Israeli weapons = must be allowed
• pro-life students comparing abortion to other notable historical injustices such as the Holocaust = not allowed
• anti-Israel students comparing the current situation in Gaza to other notable historical injustices such as South African apartheid = must be allowed

Or, to put it more succinctly:

• forbidding pro-life students from holding events or displaying materials = not Censorship
• forbidding anti-Israel students from holding events or displaying materials = censorship

Look, there’s a lot of evidence coming out now that details the drastic, devastating effects of birth control and other drugs on aquatic ecosystems (when you pee it out, ladies and gents, it has to go somewhere!). We know it affects animal life, and we know that current water treatment schemes don’t filter all of it out. We know that these drugs are getting into our Food chains and water supplies.

I swear…that has to be the explanation for why the York Federation of Students has absolutely no ability to understand why its banning of a widely publicized, multi-student-group event would be seen as an act of censorship, and for why the same student federation (apparently without a trace of irony) then has the temerity to criticize a different educational institution for an act of censorship. It’s got to be something in the water. I hope it’s something in the water.

The alternative? My God but progressives are dense!

Update: Welcome, Steynians! BCF also has some information pertaining to YFS hypocrisy.

Blazing Cat Fur writes in with a few comments about Kelly Holloway.

I just do not understand what could possibly be in the drinking water at York or any number of universities to cause such lamentable thinking.

Myself, I suspect that it’s due to an overdose of estrogen/progestin due to the increased concentration of birth control drugs known to be found in most sources of drinking water in the West. It turns fish gay and brings out the most sociopathic liberal tendencies in the average university student.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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!

In the minds of the York Federation of Students, debating whether abortion should be legal is like debating whether wife-beating should be legal.

Margaret Fung, President of Students for Bioethical Awareness (SBA), one of the hosting clubs, describes what happened: “I was told in a meeting by members of the York Federation of Students that debating abortion is comparable to debating whether a man should be allowed to beat his wife. They said that there is freedom of speech to a limit, and that abortion is not an issue to debate. They demanded that the event not take place and shut us down.” Present at this meeting in addition to Fung were Jeremy Salter, Executive Director of the York Federation of Students (YFS), Fuad Abdi, VP Operations of the YFS and also the Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Student Centre, and Amir Mohareb, President of the York Debating Society.

SBA, an official York University Student Club, worked with the York Debating Society to organize the debate. The debaters were Michael Payton from Freethinkers for the pro-choice side and Jose Ruba from the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Awareness for the pro-life side. It was to be an organized debate moderated by the York Debating Society. Both sides were ready and willing to debate, but after it was demanded the event be shut down, dozens of students planning on attending the event were turned away at the door.

I find it intersting how it was the atheist student organization that had stepped up to debate for the pro-abortion side.

But that’s a minor little detail. On one hand, it’s not so surprising that the York Federation of Students banned the event — like most campus student governments, YFS tends to espouse a fairly liberal worldview, and if there’s one thing that has become abundantly clear about liberal college and university students, it is that they are cowards who are so uncomfortable with the idea of having their views seriously and rationally challenged that they would rather just impose Censorship upon opinions with which they disagree.

And that’s really what this is — censorship, as surely as any HRC ruling would be.

And that’s a shame, and a major loss for the students of York University. The Reader is free to take whatever view s/he cares to take on the abortion debate (my own views are reasonably well-known), but I encourage the reader to look past this situation as being merely another instance of pro-lifers attempting to protest the killing of the unborn. This was supposed to be a debate which both sides were looking forward to — it was intended to be an intellectual discussion of the issue, with facts arrayed against facts and argument arrayed against argument. With both sides presented, the participants in the debate and the audience of the debate would be free, at the end, to make their own decisions about the abortion issue…and would be able to do so with a goodly deal of evidence and reasoning to draw upon. That’s the beauty of honest debate — it really brings things out into the open.

Of course, Jose Ruba is a persuasive speaker and devastating in debates, and probably would have carried the day. Which, I think, was something the YFS was afraid of — the risk that some students might swing their views around to the pro-life side was an unacceptable one, and so the event had to be cancelled. And that’s what’s shameful. Universities and colleges are supposed to be about critical thought, about looking at things rationally and making informed decisions after consideration of different arguments and evidence. They are supposed to be places of learning, not places where groupthink is the rule of the day. And yet increasingly, thanks to groups like the YFS, and thanks to university and college faculties and administrations which are likewise cowardly, the tradition of critical thinking in higher education is fading, being replaced by encouragement to follow the approved consensus view.

YFS couldn’t take the risk that even one more student might barbarically begin to believe that the unborn are every bit as human, and every bit as deserving of a right to live, as any of the students filling York’s lecture halls. So the debate about abortion was cancelled. That’s a loss for all the students at York, and one more nail in the coffin of freedom of expression and critical thinking.

Update: Mark Shea has the best one-line take on this whole issue:

I sometimes get the sense that Canada is about one half hour into America’s future.

Ouch, Mr. Shea…ouch.

Update, Part Deux: Welcome, Steynians!

Interesting observations:

Health promoter Pallavi Kashyap echoes this observation. The Kashyaps migrated from India to Canada 18 years ago and have a teenaged daughter. “We have to accept that our children, who are either born or raised here, will be influenced by the society they are living in. The key is to be totally clued into what is happening in their lives. We have to know them, their friends, what their interests are and talk to them about everything under the sun. It has to be an open relationship,” she says.

While there is a consensus on the need for open communication, there is no formula on how to bridge the gap between the culture that parents have grown up in and the one in which they are raising their children. “The main problem,” says Anumita Sharma, 18, who studies at York University, “is that our parents continue to live mentally in the country of their origin, whether it is India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. They expect us to behave and dress like our cousins back home. But they do not understand that things have changed there, too, and our cousins are not as traditional as our parents think.”

She also highlights the contradiction that marks the behaviour of many first-generation immigrants. Most want their children to excel in academics and integrate/assimilate into the society but are not willing to accept the western influences.

ANGER AND DISAPPOINTMENT

Ashima Kaul, 22, recalls the anger and disappointment she felt at being unable to attend birthday parties or go for sleepovers. She fumes at the preferential treatment accorded to boys over girls, citing various examples of gender-based division of labour at home and also a stricter conduct code for girls.

“I think our parents carry their fears from back home and that is what dictates their behaviour, especially towards girls,” says Ashima.

Example:

The task of balancing the East and West is understandably an onerous one. Krishnan Swaminathan, IT professional and a father of two girls, says his challenge is to ensure that “our (Indian) culture is retained at least to some extent without conflicting with our life here”.

His comment is representative of many first-generation immigrants: “As an Indian living in Canada, I still have my values and need to fulfil my duty and bring up my daughters, get them married to an Indian boy within our culture. I don’t want my daughters to deviate and go out of our culture.” He wants his daughters to integrate well into the Canadian society and “behave like them” when they are in Canadian spaces - but within “Indian cultural limits”. He believes that is possible because the country offers an opportunity for people to occupy different spaces.

“It all boils down to what kind of person you are and I believe that children can be moulded. But communication channels have to be open. Even if it is something against my own beliefs I should be willing to listen and reason with them.” This position may be fraught with contradictions but is the predominant one.

Unfortunately, this is one of those “you can’t have it both ways” situations. Either the daughters of parents of Arab and Indian immigrants will not deviate from the culture of their parents’ homeland, or they will integrate well into Canadian society. Oh, I’ll grant that there is plenty of room for crossover…but there are also plenty of mutually exclusive ideals that exist in one, and not in the other, as well. The issue of whom to marry is a particularly good one — above, Mr. Swaminathan is quite open about the fact that he insists that his daughters not marry outside their culture, that they settle down with “an Indian boy.” You can’t impress that belief upon someone and still expect them to “behave like” Canadians, because that’s just not how Canadians look at the issue of marriage.

(It’s probably true that a majority of people marry someone who is culturally and racially similar to them, but as a general rule the “Canadian way” is that you marry the person you fall in love with and feel called to be wedded to, regardless of what country they or their parents came from, and regardless of what particular shade their skin might have.)

The issue of how to dress is similar, with approximately the same considerations and ramifications. But the really important consideration in all of this is what happens when, in keeping with the values of Canadian society, a child — especially a daughter — decides to “go Canuck” and start dressing in jeans and t-shirts (and not in dresses and hijab), exercising her free right to attire herself. What is the reaction of the parents then? If the parents are still living “mentally in the country of their origin,” to what extent will they object when one of their kids does just that? To what extent will they respect Canadian values? To what extent will they attempt to impose the values of the “old country?” Will violence or murder be the result of that? Which culture takes precedence — the one left behind, or the one now all around? If the former, why was that culture left behind in the first place?

We should be asking these sorts of pointed questions of potential immigrants.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

Canadian multiculturalism, failing to combat racism and Muslim-phobia, is gradually moving towards adopting faith-based multiculturalism, allowing the formation of cultural ghettoes immune from social and legal scrutiny against violations of human rights. Such politics serve the interests of conservative Muslim leaders. Enjoying the formal recognition by different levels of government, they openly reject civic norms of conduct, and preach their obscurantist and rigid understanding of ‘piety’ and ‘modesty’ to an audience that struggles to adjust to life in the diaspora. Some religious leaders indirectly supported Aqsa Pervez’s murder by warning that culture cannot supersede religion and urged that their followers should ‘convince’ their daughters to wear the hijab.

[Haideh Moghissi, professor of sociology and women�s study at York University, Toronto] and [Shahrzad Mojab, professor and director of Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto] are of the opinion that ’s case represents a revealing example of the lives of many children of Muslim immigrants who came to Canada predominantly in the 1990s, and now are coming of age. The vast majority is inevitably influenced by the dominant Canadian culture and patterns of behaviour. Many parents have no problem with this and adopt a healthy mix of broader cultural practices and those of their own. A growing number of families, frustrated by the difficult conditions of life and influenced by imported orthodox imams, however, venture the impossible task of replicating their past way of life in their country of origin. They try to force their own ‘choices’ on their children. Many of these young Canadians, particularly young girls and women, live a double life and have to hide their true feelings and submit to their parents’ imposition. �Aqsa Pervez shed the mask of compliance with the Muslim womanhood her father wanted her to wear, hence the harshest imaginable punishment in his hands,� they add.

The two academics note that it is only in recent decades that political and economic failures, imperialist policies towards Muslim-majority societies, authoritarianism, and the unresolved Palestinian issues, have given prominence to the rigid totalitarian ultra-conservative Islam. Taking this voice as the voice of Muslims is a fatal mistake with dire consequences.

As Kate is often seen to remark, most Canadians seem to think that multiculturalism means “more pavillions at Folk Fest”. And to be fair, that has been one of the outcomes of Canada’s open attitude towards the cultures of other immigrants. My neighbourhood would be that much poorer were the little Lebanese take-away not present there.

But somewhere along the line, multiculturalism stopped being about welcoming other cultures into Canada (which as a concept still implies that Canadian law and values have primacy) and became about doing everything within our power to avoid giving even the slightest impression that there is anything about Canada which we, as Canadians welcoming immigrants to our shores, see about Canada that might just be…what’s the word? better?…than the places these people are coming to us from.

And the result has been predictable: Canada has not given those who immigrate to it the necessary basis in Canadian culture so that they might properly integrate into Canadian society, so those immigrants have (in essence) ‘imported’ the culture of their nation of origin to Canada in an effort to fill in the gap.

The problem is that some of those other cultures are, for lack of any better term, rather distasteful in their attitudes, especially their attitudes toward women. And we cannot afford — nor can we tolerate — such attitudes to be allowed to fester within Canadian communities. If we do, there will be many more Aqsa Parvezes that we hear about. And even one more is too many.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)