Talk Turkey Josie Luetke I’m well aware that by the time you read this, the Ontario election may have already passed. If that is the case, then, if you live in Ontario, you have the next four years or so to mull over these words. With the dropping of Tanya Granic Allen as a Progressive Conservative candidate, though, I just [...]
Tanya Granic Allen was dropped as a candidate by PC leader Doug Ford. She has returned as head of Parents as First Educators and vows to hold the Progressive Conservatives accountable on Ford's promise to repeal sex-ed. Before the election writ was drawn, Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford dropped Tanya Granic Allen as a candidate for the party in [...]
Tom Wolfe (Photo Rick McGinnis) Reading the obituaries for writer Tom Wolfe, who died last month, it’s hard not to think of the overused word “enigmatic,” which seems odd for a man who was neither reclusive nor reticent with his opinions. Wolfe flamboyantly embodied a collection of contradictions that only seem unusual now that his sort of public intellectual seems [...]
Philip Roth Novelist Philip Roth passed away May 22 at the age of 85. Roth is certainly in the pantheon of famous and accomplished 20th century American authors. During the 1990s, he won a National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a Pulitzer Prize for literature for three different novels. Roth had a number of early successes with a collection [...]
Trustee Helena Karabela The Halton Catholic District School Board suspended its sanctity of life policy which prohibits student organizations and its 50 schools from fundraising for “any charities or non-profits that publicly support, either directly or indirectly, abortion, contraception, sterilization, euthanasia, or embryonic stem cell research,” following pressure from the Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne and student protests against the [...]
The 21st National March for Life, marking the liberalization of abortion by Pierre Elliott Trudeau on May 14, 1969, took place on May 10. Matt Wojciechowski, spokesman for March organizer Campaign Life Coalition, said that there was “a lot of joy in the air,” even with the ongoing discrimination the Canadian pro-life movement has been enduring. Catherine Glenn Foster, president of Americans [...]
International Australian euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke has created a suicide machine that can be manufactured on so-called 3D printers. The “Sarco” – short for sarcophagus – is a detachable coffin with a nitrogen container and it is designed to “provide people with a death when they wish to die” the euthanasia doctor told the Agence-France Presse. Nitschke said he has provided safeguards [...]
United States The U.S. records almost 45,000 deaths by suicide each year, seven out of ten by white males. This does not include the so-called “slow suicides” from prescription-drug overdose, alcohol-related alcohol liver failure, and road accidents linked to alcohol abuse, again prevalent among American white males. In contrast, Germany, the U.K., France and Sweden show holding steady or declining statistics. Princeton [...]
Canada Wesley Smith, special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney, has reported that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia has rendered an opinion that one can qualify to be killed legally by a doctor by “starving oneself into an irremediable medical condition,” or VSED (voluntary stop eating and drinking). In order to hasten [...]
The Halton Catholic District School Board is maintaining its policy of prohibiting charitable organizations that “directly or indirectly” support abortion, contraception, euthanasia, sterilization, or embryonic stem cell research from receiving funds raised in its schools, despite political and parental opposition to the decision. In January, the HCDSB voted to ban any group whose activities directly or indirectly conflict with Catholic moral teaching [...]
Radio Canada, the French-language arm of the CBC, reported that Canadian government employees who talk directly to users of government services can no longer refer to those citizens as “sir,” “madam,” or any other gender-specific term while doing so, and must eschew terms like mother or father also. The documents also reveal that “father” and “mother” have been removed from the Social [...]
Talk Turkey Josie Luetke On March 20, 2017, famed white supremacist Richard Spencer declared, “We should recognize that the pro-life movement – this is not the alt-right, this has nothing in common with identitarians … Pro-lifers want to be radically dysgenic, egalitarian, multi-racial human rights thumpers – and they’re not us.” In response, I commented on my Facebook wall, “Well, [...]
Maybe it’s some remnant of our tribal past, but it’s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or in the next valley. We might think we’re sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, but this nascent tribalism is never far from the surface, and I saw it re-emerge with a roar during recent [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry in the John Hopkins School of Medicine, relates in Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory and Mind, that he has often put this question to himself and others over the past few decades, having “repeatedly witnessed how faddish misdirections of thought and therapeutic practice sweep across the field to [...]
On March 19, the Liberals and NDP teamed up to defeat a Conservative motion to drop the Canada Summer Jobs attestation – which requires small businesses and charities to attest to their support of abortion and same-sex “marriage” to qualify for subsidies for summer student employment – for organizations that are not involved in political advocacy. It was a bit of political [...]