Google's doodle today honours Simone de Beauvoir on the feminist's 106th birthday. In 2002, frequent Interim contributor Donald DeMarco wrote about de Beauvoir. He said: A certain mythology surrounds Simone de Beauvoir, one that presents her to the world as an independent thinker, a spokesperson for women and an advocate of freedom. In truth, she is none of these. The core of [...]
The Supreme Court of Canada has struck down the country's prostitution laws. The National Post and CBC both have reports on the decision, and Ryan Heighton of thecourt.ca has a brief legal analysis. It is important to remember that prostitution per se -- exchanging sexual favours for money -- is not illegal, the Criminal Code prohibited brothels, living on the avails of prostitution, [...]
You might be able to imagine the debauchery of the question when the advice columnist non-judgmentally warns "People having a fling can rarely be counted on to behave politely if they last more than a weekend." That's from Miss Lonelyhearts, who replies to a person who isn't interested in balancing his co-worker with benefits and the girlfriend who is returning home for [...]
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Today, apparently, is a day to canonize Nelson Mandela. Even those on the Right are joining in the tributes, but my view is more ambiguous. Mandela should be congratulated for fostering a relatively peaceful transition from apartheid to whatever South Africa has become. It is a little much to say that South Africa is a functioning democracy because it is effectively a [...]
Interim columnist Rory Leishman looks at the meaning of the Rasouli decision and its impact on doctors, patients, and Hassan Rasouli.
Chesterton said that "Journalism largely consists in saying Lord Jones is dead to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive." In that tradition we report that Alison Davis has passed away. If you didn't know that Alison Davis was alive, you should have. She was the founder of the disability rights group, No Less Human, and just two weeks ago she wrote a letter [...]
Guest blogging at JillStanek.com, Dr. Joel Brind notes: “China is on the cusp of a breast cancer epidemic,” acknowledged a prestigious group of American epidemiologists in 2008 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Studiously avoiding the “A-word” the JNCI group blamed the emerging epidemic on “shifting reproductive trends” among “risk factors associated with economic development [that] are largely unavoidable.” That’s [...]
Quote from Thomas Sowell in one of his recent "Random Thoughts" columns: Among the painful signs of our time are TV programs built around paternity tests. Apparently the way these women live, it is anybody's guess who their child's father might be. What is sadder, that the women live such lives or that they lack the shame to not appear on shows [...]
Radio Teopoli has an interview with Alan Yoshioka, a former gay activist and now a member of Courage, and his wife, Theresa Yoshioka. They are co-facilitators of EnCourage Toronto which seeks to meet the spiritual needs of family members and other loved ones of persons with same-sex attraction. Alan's is a beautiful story of the work of Grace in one's life. And [...]
Michael Orsi writes about the crazy expansion of animal rights in The American Spectator. Orsi notes that historically, man* had "a unique status in the order of creation," on top of the status food chain, so to speak. That is changing, with common-sense concern about the environment that houses humanity and our responsibility to be good stewards of the Earth's bounty and to [...]
I have a pro-life friend whose passion for defending human rights is only matched by her love of writing. She recently shared an interesting New York Times column with me, in which essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider laments the tendency for writers to go unpaid. This idea is not completely baseless. Our society teaches us to be dissatisfied, constantly craving the latest [...]
Sally Cohn explains in a column at The Daily Beast, "Why I’m joining a telethon to raise money for abortion services in Texas, land of Wendy Davis and Jane Roe." In the column Cohn has a throwaway line: And lest we forget, Texas is also where the fight for access to abortion arguably originated in America, where a Texas woman filed a [...]
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that China will ease its one-child policy. The media -- legacy and social -- were quick to celebrate the coming end of the one-child policy that is often enforced with coerced abortion. But as Reggie Littlejohn of Women's Rights Without Frontiers says the changes are actually a minor "tweak" because "China will now lift the ban [...]
Interim columnist Rick McGinnis reviewed Helen Smith's Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream -- and Why it Matters in the November edition of The Interim. McGinnis gets a bit autobiographical: In college I’d witnessed the successes of first and second-wave feminism meld with Marxist ideology and solidify into a social orthodoxy that would become known [...]