Was it because his opponent was gay? On Oct. 25, Toronto city councilor Rob Ford won the Toronto mayor’s race, defeating openly homosexual former Ontario cabinet minister George Smitherman, 47.1 per cent to 35.6 per cent. Smitherman, who was an early front-runner, lost decisively trailing Ford by nearly 100,000 votes. Ford ran on a populist and fiscally conservative platform of [...]
Congressmen Chris Smith (R, NJ) and Dan Lipinski (D, IL) are two of the most outspoken and hardest working pro-life members of Congress so it is no surprise that they were elected co-Chairs of the Bipartisan Congressional Pro-life Caucus for the 112th Congress. Jill Stanek has a copy of the press release of the announcement. I hope that the Republican leadership understands what Democrat Lipinski [...]
Our December cover story is now online: "Christmas, battleground in a culture war." It notes that trying to get rid of Christmas is nothing new -- Oliver Cromwell and the Soviet Union tried to ban the celebration of Christ's birth. The article concludes, "as Tom Fleming of Chronicles magazine wrote a decade ago, the war against Christmas is at heart battle for [...]
Our Amusements columnist Rick McGinnis has a non-moralizing piece on the ubiquity of zombies in popular culture in the December edition. We ran the column under a headline that came with double cheese, for which the editorial staff, not the columnist is responsible. An excerpt from the column: The Walking Dead glistens with gore, which you would have to expect from drama [...]
Dennis Prager on the growing acceptability of swearing in music, including a Grammy-nominated song entitled "F--- You": [T]he music industry, from producers to artists, is largely populated by people who regard social and cultural norms as stifling. Their professional lives are dedicated to lowering that which is elevated, destroying that which uplifts, and profaning that which is held sacred. I don't entirely [...]
If you asked Canadian pro-lifers to compile a list of the five most important pro-lifer activists and leaders in Canada over the past 40 years, British Columbia activist Heather Stilwell would be on most everyone's list. She played leading roles in every major pro-life organization in the country including Campaign Life Coalition, Alliance for Life Canada, REAL Women, and the Christian Heritage Party, as well as provincial [...]
Cromwell and communists banned Christmas, too On Oct. 4, the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on the ban on “celebratory religious music” upheld by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in the South Orange-Maplewood district in New Jersey. The issue was first raised in 2004 when a parent sued the school board after it issued a memo before its [...]
Bill Siksay, the NDP MP for Burnaby-Douglas (the riding once held by his former boss, Svend Robinson, the (in)famous gay activist MP), has picked up where his mentor left off, introducing C-389 last May, a private member’s bill that would add protection for self-identified transgendered individuals by adding vague concepts such as “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the Canadian [...]
At MercatorNet, Michael Cook writes about St. Nicholas. Here's how the tradition began: [H]e was once regarded as the patron of unmarriageable girls. A nobleman in the town of Patara had three daughters. He had been reduced to such poverty that he could not provide them with dowries for their weddings and decided to sell them into prostitution to keep them from [...]
The Interim's December editorial, "The Festival of Forgiveness," is now online. It is not easy to come up with an editorial every December that says something new about Christmas and pro-life, but I think this month's may be our best Christmas-themed editorial in years. An excerpt: Emboldened, then, by the echo of angelsong, we find the courage at Christmas to change our [...]
There are no accidents in popular culture. Trends and fads might crest with seeming randomness, but do not be fooled – every hit movie, TV show or book and the copycats in its wake are meant to scratch some cultural itch. The motivations might be obscure at the time, but hindsight reveals all, so I cannot help but anticipate just what led [...]
Our coverage (stories and lots of photos) of the Building a Global Culture of Life international conference held in Ottawa October 28-30 is now online.
From our December edition: "Media got story wrong about Pope Benedict and condoms." An excerpt: The Toronto Star dutifully quoted liberal Catholics and African homosexuals applauding the seeming shift in the Church’s moral teaching. Christian Weisner of the dissident We Are Church in Germany said, “one can be happy about the pope’s ability to learn.” David Kamau of the Kenya Treatment Access [...]
International conference features wide array of speakers More than 325 people from Canada and abroad participated in the international pro-life conference, Building a Global Culture of Life, in Ottawa Oct. 29-31 and organizers are pleased with the results. John Smeaton, executive director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children in the United Kingdom, had to deliver the welcoming remarks when [...]
According to the laws of ancient Israel, in addition to the Sabbath observed every seventh year, the people of the Lord were to celebrate a Sabbath of Sabbaths, a Jubilee year: “You shall thus consecrate the fiftieth year… It shall be a jubilee for you, and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to [...]