Canada
If there is one reason why Justin Trudeau and his Liberal cohorts should be turfed from government, it is abortion. Not only does one have to be pro-abortion to run as a Liberal candidate, but abortion seems to ooze from the very pores of this Liberal government. Recently, Mike Pence, Vice President of the United States, was in Ottawa meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau. Trudeau took the opportunity to scold America for its pro-life stance – including informing the media that he privately raised the issue with Pence, hence making the complaint public. Pence graciously told Trudeau that yes, American states were passing pro-life laws and the Trump administration would continue to push measures to affirm the rights of the unborn. About the same time, the international 2019 Women Deliver conference with 8,000 delegates was held in Vancouver. Women Deliver’s mandate is to advocate for “sexual and reproductive health of women, i.e. abortion. (We note the irony of the conference’s name play indicating that women deliver while promoting explicitly anti-natal policies.) In 2017, Canada, through Global Affairs, gave this organization $15.6 million. At the 2019 conference in Vancouver, Trudeau announced that Canada would be increasing its global funding for “sexual, maternal, newborn and child health” from $650 million over three years to $1.4 billion annually, of which half ($700 million) would go directly to abortion. It is important to remember these when discussing the Liberal agenda for the 2019 election with friends, neighbours, and your local Liberal candidate and his/her volunteers.
In Ontario, a six-year-old girl is healthy and her parents say that she is loved. She has three siblings, all girls: 7-year-old twins and a 12-year-old. The perfect family, right? Maybe not. Her mother arranged to be sterilized after the twins were born: this was to be their perfect family. However, due to some miscommunication among the medical staff at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto the procedure seems to have not been carried out, she became pregnant again, and gave birth to her fourth daughter. To a certain mindset, this was miracle, but not for this family. The parents considered abortion but decided against it, and the mother gave birth. Shortly after, they began litigation against the hospital for the mistake. As she and her husband contend: “It’s not that we don’t love her, not that we’re not happy, not that she’s not an important part of our family. She is everything and more, it but still doesn’t mitigate the fact that there are pragmatic costs to raising a child.” The couple has been interviewed on CTV, with their surname omitted, and the interview has gone viral. So much for anonymity and protecting the privacy of their fourth daughter. The case is expected to go to court next spring. Traditionally, wrongful pregnancy lawsuits go against the parents, contending that having a child is a blessing whether planned or not. However, we are in changing times, so $800,000 should fix the mistake. Ottawa professor Bruce Feldthusen represents current thinking: “This discrimination …is perpetrated by judges who refuse to accept and protect a woman’s right to reproductive freedom. These mothers are under-compensated.”
Snapchat is a multimedia messaging app used globally and one one of its principal features is that pictures and messages can be made available only for a short time before they become inaccessible to the audience before disappearing. Snapchat describes its product as a camera that is connected to your friends. “Over 180 million people use it daily to talk, play, learn, and take … pictures. You can swap faces with a friend, swipe to add artwork, use a ‘Bitmoji’ for every mood, and a ‘Friendmoji’ for every friendship. You can give your co-worker a chipmunk voice, or create stickers out of your friends. You’ve got a lot of tools in your toolbox.” However, there are concerns about child safety and privacy of which parents need to be aware. (See May 7 article, “The dark side of Snapchat,” at Verywellfamily.com.) There is another side of Snapchat which parents need to be educated about. Keean Bexte of Rebel Media has produced an excellent five-minute video on Youtube, about how the CBC uses Snapchat to promote socially liberal causes and he provides tips to help parents navigate around the subject. Here is some of what he has found: 90 per cent of Snapchat users are from age 13-24; roughly 70 per cent of Snapchat users are female; roughly 63 per cent of Snapchat users access the platform daily; those under the age of 24 use Snapchat for an average of 40 minutes daily; 30 per cent of millennials in the U.S. use Snapchat regularly. Bexte reports that it is much more than a photo-sharing tool. The CBC, the state broadcaster, is “using Snapchat to speak directly to kids like a predator would if he was in the kid’s home with the parents not there – uncensored, raw degeneracy.” Bexte reported on the sort of images/words that kids can click on. One photo shows two girls in a suggestive pose with the words “True or False: people who get high have more sex?!” Another asks: “Living with your partner’s lover. Why some people are leaving monogamy behind.” It is a breakdown of how to live “ethically” in a non-monogamous lifestyle. Another: “It’s not for everyone, but people in polyamorous relationships say it has opened them up to a different way of dating.” So, CBC is using a platform used by kids and youth to normalize degeneracy among Canadian youth. Bexte’s video shows how parents can disconnect their kids from the CBC platform. Parents and grandparents need to be aware of what their children are viewing and sharing on social media.
Jason, who goes by the name Suzan Bee Anthony, will be featured on a CBC documentary about young drag queens.
Speaking of CBC activism, on July 25, the state broadcaster will air Drag Kids, a show following four young drag queens as they prepare to compete in an all-ages vogue ball in Montreal. CBC’s website promoting the show states: “As an art form, drag has always been about breaking down barriers, exploring new territory and daring to do the unexpected. And now, a new type of queen is emerging on the scene: she’s fierce, she’s living in a time of unprecedented access to queer culture and she’s younger than ever before. She’s a drag kid.” The show will feature Stephan, Nemis, Bracken, and Jason, “very different kids living in very different parts of the world, but they’re united by a deep love of drag.” The four will participate in an all-ages vogue ball in Montreal. Stephan is a nine-year-old British expat. Jason, 11, lives in the American Bible Belt. Breckon, also 11, comes from Vancouver where the “hyper queen” seeks acceptance in drag shows for adults. Montreal-native Nemis, is nine and goes by the name Queen Lactatia; he admits to loving pushing boundaries and “selling his merch at a local fetish store.”
United States
In 2016, Mike Pence, then-governor of Indiana, signed into law an act to prohibit abortions, at any time during a pregnancy, if the mother wanted the abortion because of the child’s race, sex, or disability. Also included in the legislation were restrictions on how the remains of the unborn child could be disposed of — i.e. they had to be either cremated or buried. The law was blocked by the lower courts and the case made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States in May 2019. The court ruled on disposing the remains: women were allowed to dispose as they see fit, but abortionists must cremate or bury the remains. Justice Clarence Thomas weighed in with a lengthy opinion that pro-life laws “promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from modern-day eugenics …the foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early twentieth-century birth control movement which developed alongside the American eugenics movement.” Thomas further shot out a warning: “Although the Court declines to wade into these issues today, we cannot avoid them forever. Having created the constitutional right to abortion, this Court is duty bound to address its scope.”
Gallup released a report on June 27, “Americans still greatly overestimate U.S. gay population.” The respected pollster asked Americans in 2011, 2015 and 2019, “just your best guess, what per cent of Americans today would you say are gay or lesbian?” The average estimate in each poll was greater than 20 per cent. In 2011, the average estimate was 24.6 per cent, while in 2015 it was 23.2 per cent and this year it was 23.6 per cent. In every year, at least one in three respondents say that more than a quarter of the population is gay. In a thorough poll conducted in 2017, Gallup determined that 4.7 per cent of Americans self-identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. This year, just nine per cent of respondents guessed under five per cent self-identify as LGBT. As Gallup noted, “Americans’ estimates of the proportion of gay people in the U.S. is more than five times” the actual number as determined by the pollster. Gallup said “overestimations of the nation’s gay population my in part be due to the group’s outsized visibility,” noting that according the gay advocacy group GLAAD’s annual report on the depiction of LGBT characters on television, 8.8 per cent of regular television characters are LGBT – about twice the number of actual among the population. While every demographic over-estimated the number of LGBT in society, women, youth, and Democrats were more likely to over-estimate the actual percentage.
International
A British court ordered a woman to have an abortion. In a decision rendered June 21, a British abortion-activist judge, Justice Nathalie Lieven, of the Court of Protection, decided in a case before her that an abortion was “in the woman’s best interests.” A young pregnant woman, with learning difficulties, wanted to give birth to her child. Her mother, a Catholic Nigerian and former midwife, told the court that she was willing to raise the child, and she and her daughter were supported by the woman’s social worker. However, Lieven decided that it was better for the baby to be killed. Feminists who prattle about choice were silent over an apparently mentally challenged woman being forced to have an abortion. Cooler judicial heads prevailed as this gross violation of the human rights of a mother and her unborn child was quickly overruled by the Court of Appeals. As the U.K.’s Catholic Herald writer David Alton wrote on June 27,”the truly chilling decision to end the life of a child …would have been a coercive abortion worthy of the brutality of the People’s Republic of China where forced abortions are a regular practice.”
On May 24, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex “marriage.” In May 2017, the Constitutional Court ruled that homosexuals were denied equal rights by the country’s definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Executive Yuan (the government) introduced a bill that extended all the rights of married couples under the Civil Code, except adoption of non-genetically related children, to same-sex couples. The bill was fast-tracked and passed in a week.
