Paul Kengor has a very good piece on the American Civil Liberties Union and its communist/atheist roots. No wonder they are in perpetual war against Christmas. Kengor on ALCU founder Roger Baldwin: Baldwin was an atheist. He was also a onetime communist, who, among other ignoble gestures, wrote a horrible 1928 book called Liberty Under the Soviets. Notably, he was smart enough [...]
New condom ads compare the cost of the prophylactic to costs associated for a bobo upbringing (elite daycares, fancy strollers, etc...). Reducing children to dollars and sense is always classy. But it is hard to class up a condom advertisement.
Rory Leishman's December Interim column is about immigration not being a panacea for Canada's falling fertility rates. First, as the C.D. Howe Institute has noted -- in two studies, "Faster, Younger, Richer? The Fond Hope and Sobering Reality of Immigration's Impact on Canada's Demographic," (2009) and "No Elixir of Youth: Immigration Cannot Keep Canada Young" (2006) -- it only slightly slows the aging 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
One of the arguments that advocates of legalizing prostitution make is that eliminating restrictions on the sex trade -- prohibitions on communicating for the purpose of prostitution, living off the avails of prostitution, and running a bawdy house -- will make life safer for prostitutes. Legalization of prostitution means the state can regulate it and regulation will make it safer. But Marina [...]
Robert Latimer has been granted full parole. I am not surprised by the decision, just ticked off. It sends a terrible signal to society that the life of a person with a disability is less valuable than the life of an able-bodied person. That is sick and perverse and dehumanizing. Canada is better than that. As the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition's Alex Schadenberg says, "The EPC has always [...]
Writing in the Globe and Mail, "L. Allen" relates her feelings of pain over having two abortions. No doubt many women have the mixed feelings the author describes: the relief from responsibility for a child that abortion makes possible with the sense of some sort of loss of the child that was killed by abortion. There is no delving by Allen into why a mother would [...]