Columnist alarmed by motherhood authors
TORONTO – In the October issue of Chatelaine, Katrina Onstad complained that U.S. author Rebecca Walker is promoting the joys of family life in her new book, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker, author of The Colour Purple, has repudiated her mother’s feminist worldview – for which she was written out of Alice’s will – as well as her previous bisexualism and lesbian lifestyle. In Baby Love, Walker warns women not to wait too long before settling down with a man and having a child. “For me, having a baby has been the most transformational experience of my life,” she writes. Reacting to Walker’s call for women to take planning for children as seriously as they take planning their careers, Onstad said: “I’m sick of it” and the whole “cottage industry” of mommy books, blogs and memoirs. Onstad said, “This motherhood uber-alles enterprise is a threat to birth-control availability and abortion rights.” Onstad adds, “I cannot imagine one day having a heart-to-heart with my daughter in which I urge her to breed.” As the National Post’s Barbara Kay observes, Onstad writes for a magazine that purports to represent Canadian women and seems “furious that young women are rejecting promiscuity and endless … adventures of self-discovery.” Kay criticizes Chatelainecolumnists Onstad and Heather Mallick, both of whom “radiate intolerance of women who deviate from the feminist playbook.”
Gay magazine looks at McMurtry
TORONTO – In a cover story in the homosexualist magazine Xtra!,Gerald Hannon wrote a glowing feature on former Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry, outlining a career that began as the province’s attorney-general (1975-1985) and solicitor-general (1978-1982) during which times he oversaw police raids on Toronto’s gay bathhouses. Hannon, a homosexual journalist and advocate of both anonymous park sex and man-boy sexual relations, noted that “in those years, we burned (McMurtry) in effigy” because he was “the classic, arrogant Tory bastard with his sights set on demolishing the gay community.” As solicitor-general, McMurtry was responsible for the police, which in 1981 conducted raids at four bathhouses. The A-G’s office also prosecuted homosexual publications that contravened the province’s indecency laws. A little more than two decades later, McMurtry is feted at Stop 33, a gay haunt, at an event called Ontario’s LGBT Communities Salute the Honourable Roy McMurtry. As chief justice, McMurtry’s court found that the traditional definition of marriage violated the constitutional rights of homosexuals, opening the door to same-sex “marriage” in Canada.
Charter blamed for Canada’s secularization
NEW YORK – Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the Canadian-born editor of the influential New York religious journal First Things, wrote in his Public Square column that Christianity “has been not only disestablished, but also punished” in “most aspects of public life” in Canada. In an interview with the National Post,Neuhaus linked the naked public square in Canada to the Charter of Rights, which he said “is riddled through and through with the radically individual notion of the unencumbered self and equality enforced by state power.” Neuhaus pointed to the irony of a people who are instinctively un-American being governed and guided by such “a thoroughly American document.”
Too much TV can harm kids
BALTIMORE – In a study published in Pediatrics,researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analyzed data from 2,707 children found that five-and-a-half-year-olds who had television sets in their rooms were more likely to have behaviour problems, disturbed sleep and “less emotional reactivity.” They were also less co-operative and self-controlled than children who did not have TVs. More than four in 10 5-year-olds have a television in their room. The Canadian Pediatric Society recommends limiting television watching to one hour or less per day for preschoolers and two hours or less for school-aged children. The study found that one in five children watched more than two hours of television at both the ages of 2.5 and 5.5. Researchers also found that children who later reduced their television watching were not at risk for behaviour problems when they were older.