Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey I remember finding it so ironic seeing a Planned Parenthood poster in Rory Gilmore’s dorm room, given that there would be no Rory Gilmore—and no Gilmore Girls television show for me to watch—had Rory’s mom gone to Planned Parenthood when she got pregnant at 15. There is no story to tell when you’re dead. [...]
Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey I completely understand why “pro-choicers” use rape as their trump card. If the preborn are simply clumps of cells lacking moral status or the mother’s bodily autonomy takes precedence regardless, then how much more justified is abortion when her bodily autonomy has already been grossly violated, when there’s a thing inside her as a [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few” (Matthew 9:37). Therefore, the labourers often get asked to do more labour than that for which they have time. In June, I was asked to delegate to the Dufferin Peel Catholic District School Board to request that they cease to fly the Gay [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Imagine that you’re mentally ill, convinced that you’re worthless, and waging an internal war with yourself over whether you ought to keep on living or not. You weigh the pros and cons. You consider who might be sad over your death, and so you attempt to keep lists of things to look [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey There’s a quotation I really like from author and left-wing activist Andrew Boyd: “You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” When you use abortion victim photography in activism, as I have for almost a decade now, [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey The death of Roe v. Wade was a death for women and progress, but you can’t say it didn’t birth some amazing comedy—from Andrew Schulz, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, and others. Louis C.K. recently mused about a law which keeps abortion “available,” but “limits it”—maybe turns down the enthusiasm a notch. He [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey It’s perversely fitting that an act that renders so many speechless (literally and figuratively) lacks any appropriate descriptors in speech. “MAiD” or “medical assistance/aid in dying,” as it’s most commonly referred to now, is the latest inception of a long evolution of palatability-tested phrases. “Medically-assisted death” was discarded, presumably because the unfortunately [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey My anonymous Twitter troll has seemingly finally moved onto bigger and better things (knock on wood), but in the past, (presumably) he would repeatedly demand I educate myself on the history of the pride flag – originally the gay pride flag. I recently declined to attend an alumni event at my alma [...]
Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Josie Luetke: Included in the LGBTQ community’s ever-expanding lexicon for their fantasy world is the phrase “trans erasure.” In an Everyday Feminism article, “non-binary” writer Ayesha Sharma claims, “Trans and gender variant people’s existences are overlooked, invalidated, and erased every single day.” Of course, it is the height of gaslighting, of deceit, to attempt [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey I regularly do activism with abortion victim photography (AVP)—“Choice” Chains, through which we show what “choice” looks like. I’m convinced of the merit of this action, reassured that regardless of whether or not I have productive conversations, passersby likely will feel more negatively towards abortion, and—at minimum—can no longer claim ignorance. I [...]
Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Josie Luetke: I find it helpful to make sense of the world through various dichotomies—good versus evil, light versus darkness, life versus death, existence versus non-existence, something versus nothing. In the movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, tasked with implanting an idea in a sleeping target’s subconscious. To accomplish “inception,” he needs “the simplest [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist, academic, and author, has largely evaded the abortion issue. On one rare occasion when he was publicly asked for comment, he claimed that discussions about the legality and morality of abortion are “nested inside a larger discussion about the proper place of sexuality in human behaviour and, to [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Determining right and wrong for themselves, the godless have become their own gods – an aphorism with which I have been long acquainted. Another godly attribute which they seem to have bizarrely assumed: infallibility. Consider: Abortion and euthanasia are matters of life and death. Sex changes, while not quite as fatal, [...]
Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey They say you should never read the comments, but we all do anyway. I was interviewed on CBC’s Power and Politics on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I came home that day to a bunch of notifications on Twitter – not that many, really, but more than I usually have. Your consummate CBC [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey A few months ago, CLC Youth’s virtual pro-life club watched a bunch of clips from television and film intending to normalize abortion. Despite this agenda, the somber nature of abortion couldn’t quite be obscured, almost as if the scriptwriters, directors, and actors knew they couldn’t depart too far from reality if they [...]