"If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all"

.

Anti-choice "expertise"

Meet Susan Martinuk, a right-wing Canadian syndicated columnist. Native people? They're "cashing in on victimhood." Supervised safe-injection sites? "State-sponsored addiction." Unions? Forget it. Same-sex marriage? Well, what do you think her position might be? Do you really need to follow this link?

So it's hardly a surprise that she's weighed in on the Morgentaler Order of Canada award.

All too typical of far-right ideologues, she begins with character assassination. "Dr. (I use this term loosely) Morgentaler" -- that sort of thing. And this:

His great healthcare legacy is a chain of private abortion clinics where doctors can make great wads of cash outside of the medical/ethical oversight of hospital committees and other doctors.

This is what my mother used to call lying by implication. The impression is given of big profits made outside the official health care system. In fact most of Morgentaler's clinics are non-profit, because they receive funding from the provinces and are licensed by provincial health departments. Doctors and other health professionals who work in these clinics are subject to the same rules of practice as they would be working anywhere else, rules that are enforced by provincial licensing bodies.

What Martinuk is referring to here is the discredited Therapeutic Abortion Committee system, overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada two decades ago. This was a system under which women had to plead their cases before a three-doctor panel, some of which never approved a single request. And TACs were only set up in about one-fifth of Canada's hospitals at the time.

She claims--this time lying directly--that Morgentaler was found guilty of medical negligence in 1998 by the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. He wasn't even a respondent in the case. And she makes reference to an earlier (1976) charge by the "Quebec College of Physicians" (sic) that he had failed to take a patient's history, and run some routine tests. In fact, the Disciplinary Committee of the Professional Corporation of Physicians of Quebec suspended Morgentaler's licence for one year because he had just been convicted of performing illegal abortions.

(That conviction, as everyone knows, was overturned. A jury had found him innocent of wrong-doing and a higher court had reversed the verdict and found him guilty. Morgentaler was acquitted by juries once in Ontario and three times in Quebec. Parliament passed the so-called "Morgentaler amendment" to the Criminal Code in 1975 to prevent the substitution of guilty verdicts by higher courts. But the persecution continued. Only the victory of Rene Levesque's Parti Quebecois in 1976 stopped the abuse of judicial process in the latter province. And his trial in Ontario resulted in the overturning of the restrictive abortion law in effect at the time, Section 251 of the Criminal Code, by a 5-2 decision in 1988.)

But it's when Martinuk delves into the alleged dire medical sequelae of abortion that she truly outdoes herself. She is described, disingenuously, as "a former medical researcher who conducted PhD studies in the field of infertility and reproductive technologies." The implication is that she is an Authority, with the expertise to comment. Except that she isn't any such thing.

Back in the early '90s, as a PhD student, she co-authored a few publications on human and animal ovulation. But she abandoned her PhD. Since then, she writes newspaper columns for a living. She is no more an expert on the abortion issue than I am, so I offer this point-by-point rebuttal of what must appear to the uninitiated to be an impressive array of sources and authorities that claim that abortion is dangerous for both mother and any babies she might have subsequently.

• Abortion causes subsequent prematurity and low birth weight.
  
  Studies of this alleged connection have, until recently, been inconclusive and contradictory. But Martinuk fails to cite the most recent study, by Tilahun Adera et al, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (December 2007), which surprises me a little, because it concludes, on the basis of a massive data-set, that having a miscarriage or induced abortion is indeed linked to prematurity and low birth weight. However, that data-set, as the authors themselves admit, is problematic for several reasons.
  
  The data was collected from the period 1959-1967, when abortion was still illegal (and hence likely to be underreported, skewing the statistics). Abortion techniques more than forty years ago were not nearly so refined as they are today--coathangers versus vacuum aspiration in antiseptic conditions. Spontaneous abortions (miscarriages, which occur in about 25% of all pregnancies) and induced abortions are not distinguished in the data. Indeed, Adera himself concedes that the public health implications of his study might be more applicable to "developing countries."
  
  Martinuk is not only not up-to-date, but the source she seems to prefer is the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (formerly the Medical Sentinel) which, despite its academic-sounding title, has a politically far-right axe to grind. JPANDS has, in the past, published commentaries and articles that have claimed, inter alia, that evolution and global warming are bunk (the latter article co-authored by our old friend Arthur B. Robinson), that the Food and Drug Administration is unconstitutional, and that the HIV virus doesn't cause AIDS. JPANDS has duly found its way onto Quackwatch's list of "fundamentally flawed" journals.
  
  
• Abortion causes breast cancer.
  
  I'm amazed that this old canard still has legs, but once again our reliable JPANDS is cited--twice! The US National Cancer Institute isn't buying it; neither is the American Cancer Society. As the ACS puts it, " the public is not well-served by false alarms and at the present time, the scientific evidence does not support a causal association between induced abortion and breast cancer."
  
  
• Abortion causes psychological and physical harm.
  
  Martinuk had me going for a while on this one. It wouldn't surprise me that many women are uneasy, ambivalent and stressed about the abortion decision, living in North America, where "pro-life" propaganda is prevalent and Church, mosque and synagogue call abortion murder. That could well cause emotional problems of one kind or another. So I had a look at the most recent study that she cites but doesn't source: Coleman, P.K., et al., “State-Funded Abortions Versus Deliveries: A Comparison of Outpatient Mental Health Claims Over 4 Years” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 2002, Vol. 72, No. 1, 141–152. It's an oddly-written study, with a suspicious amount of moralizing in it, but the evidence, based on a survey of women in California, looked pretty conclusive to me: women are more likely to seek medical attention for mental disorders following an abortion than following a live birth.
  
  Then I checked into the authors of the study. Phyllis Coleman. Jesse Cougle. David Reardon. Vincent Rue. They co-authored another study on the same subject with Martha Shuping and Philip Ney. As it happens, I once ran into Ney on Parliament Hill: he's a veteran anti-choice crusader from Vancouver. That made me curious. I soon discovered that Shuping and Reardon are "Physicians for Life." Reardon and Ney claim that women who have abortions abuse their children. (That one's been so utterly debunked that it no longer seems to be part of the anti-choicers' armamentarium.) Rue is what might be called a professional anti-abortionist, and Cougle and Coleman, associates of Reardon, are not exactly above the fray either.
  
  Now, lest I be accused of crude ad hominem here, let me simply note that none of the authors of these scary studies is dispassionate on the issue of abortion. Just as I'm a little wary of global warming denial funded by Exxon, or other less-than-disinterested research, I am entitled, I think, to a healthy scepticism when authors of scientific studies on the evils of abortion turn out to be raving pro-life lobbyists.
  
  Next I turned to the unsourced 2001 study by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. That would be "Health Services Utilization After Induced Abortions in Ontario: A Comparison Between Community Clinics and Hospitals," Ostbye, T., et al., American Journal of Medical Quality, Vol. 16, No. 3, 99-106 (2001). Now, what is the comparison that Martinuk is using when she talks about women having higher rates of this and that when they have abortions?
  
  The comparison is between the relative safety of hospital abortions and clinic abortions. [Not solely: see UPDATE below--DD] Clinics appear to be safer than hospitals. What point did Martinuk think she was making here?*
  
  It gets worse (for her). I quote the conclusion of this study in full:
  
  Overall, the rates of postabortion health services utilization and hospitalizations are low, which emphasizes the relative safety of abortion services in Ontario regardless of location of service. The rates of postabortion health services utilization including hospitalizations were lower in patients undergoing abortions in community clinics than in hospital. This may be partially attributed to higher surgical volumes, which are associated with better outcomes and mandated clinical quality assessments. The findings are also partially attributable to the referral from clinics to the hospitals those patinets considered to be at high risk in a clinic setting during an induced abortion. The referral structure allows the community clinics and hospitals to work together to ensure that the safest alternative is provided to women seeking abortion services.
  
  Administrative data can be used to derive patient outcome information that is of value to service providers. However, it is not possible to fully control for systemic differences between patient groups (eg, gestational age or procedure used) using such administrative data.
  
  Then we go to the claim that women who have abortions are five times more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. That's "Abortion and Subsequent Substance Abuse," David C. Reardon and Philip G. Ney, The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Volume 26, Issue 1 (2000), 61-75. Some old familiar faces! It's starting to feel like Anti-Choice Homecoming Week here.
  
  And then (for the sake of completeness) there is the rather dated reference to the alleged suicide/abortion connection: "Suicides after pregnancy in Finland, 1987-94: register linkage study," Mika Gissler, et al., British Medical Journal, Volume 313: (7 December, 1996), 1431-1434. The first thing to note here is that suicide as a cause of death of women in Finland is approximately four times higher than in Canada. (I have taken 1996, the year the study was published, as the year for comparison purposes.) About 4% of all deaths of Finnish women were as a result of suicide. In Canada, 848 women committed suicide in 1996;101,107 women died that year, so that suicide accounted for less than 1% of all deaths. The suicide rate (per hundred thousand population) is 10.7 for Finnish women, and 5.7 for Canadian women.The number of confounding variables, and the generalization of the results of this study, are highly problematic. Indeed, on the latter, the authors themselves conclude:
  
  Abortion might mean a selection of women at higher risk for suicide because of reasons like depression. Another explanation for the higher suicide rate after an abortion could be low social class, low social support, and previous life events or that abortion is chosen by women who are at higher risk for suicide because of other reasons. Increased risk for a suicide after an induced abortion can, besides indicating common risk factors for both,result from a negative effect of induced abortion on mental wellbeing. With our data, however, it was not possible to study the causality more carefully. (Emphasis mine-DD)
  

There is no gentle way to put this: Martinuk quotes several sources, some dubious, and others that do not say what she claims that they say, in order to buttress her anti-Morgentaler polemic. This is sloppiness at best, dishonesty at worst. Her credentials as a "former medical researcher" speak for themselves. And so, quite frankly, do her credentials as a journalist.

UPDATE: Eamon Knight pointed me to a comprehensive fisking of JPANDS' abortion/breast cancer "study" here.

*UPDATE: (July 6) Whoops. Although the authors of the study outline a number of confounding variables (e.g., previous hospitalization for psychiatric problems is significantly higher among patients who subsequently seek abortion), Martinuk is correct on her figures, although these apply to the hospitals: the clinics have a better record. The study measured the relative safety of clinics v. hospitals re abortion patients, but a control group was also used, and post-abortion patients did not fare as well as either the general clinic or hospital population.

The authors' conclusion stands, however: the rates of post-abortion complications are low in Ontario. Hence Martinuk's figures apply to a fairly small percentage of patients overall. Even so, I mischaracterized both the extent of the study and the figures that she provided.

Mea culpa, and I'm just glad that no one had to point my errors out to me. I'm indebted to reader "plum grenville" at my joint for prompting me go back and look at the study again. That will teach me to be overly snotty.

Nostradamus ain't got nuthin' on these guys

Who? How about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck?

In 1997, a full three years before George W. Bush was appointed president of the United States, a full five years before Bush invaded Iraq based on manufactured intelligence, almost 10 years before the treatment of wounded veterans became a national scandal, a full 10 years before oil prices skyrocketed and the US economy started a flat spin downward, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two relative newcomers to big-screen Hollywood, wrote an Academy Award winning script for the movie, Good Will Hunting.

This is a monologue by Matt Damon in his character, Will Hunting:



From the script:

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.

Perhaps, instead of CFRA radio in Ottawa sucking up every word of US ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, like a Loach in a scummy fish-tank, they should see if they can get an interview with Damon and Affleck.

Who knows? Perhaps they can give us a glimpse of the next 10 years. They certainly nailed the last eight.

Skippy, try to enjoy the barbecue and don't let the fires get you down.

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver

As DFAIT crawls out of two years of darkness

Elmer and Gilles obviously shorted their respective progeny in the gene department. And the department that was acutely aware of that problem was Foreign Affairs.

David Emerson may be a political opportunist and one of the worst kinds of turncoats, but no one can fault him for his skills and organizational leadership ability.

"I think people are happy we have Emerson as a boss," said one Canadian diplomat. "He's a very seasoned individual." Another Canadian diplomat expressed relief that the department has finally gotten a capable minister after a string impressively underqualified ones. "There was nowhere to go but up," said the relieved DFAIT official. "This is a guy who, unlike any of his immediate predecessors, has experience as a leader, experience as the manager of a large organization and in making decisions in complex operating environments. "With his credentials, his background and his skill set, he's certainly looking better than anyone since [former Liberal foreign affairs minister Pierre] Pettigrew."

And to underscore just how bad Emerson's predecessors actually were ...

"This place has been so beat up that just a steady hand on the tiller will be welcomed," said one.

So, Harper, having made two astoundingly bad decisions and having treated one of the most important departments in government as little more than feet-on-the-desk plum-posting reward and a game of political optics, finally had to go into his largely incompetent caucus and pull out the only person with enough leadership, management and organizational ability to clean up the mess - a lapsed Liberal. (And one whose loyalty might well depend on how freely he can run his department without the PMO interfering.)

As Impolitical says:

Gotta say, it's just sad to read such commentary. The Foreign Affairs department deserves much better than Harper's given them to date.

Indeed. Imagine how different things might have been if Harper had chosen his Foreign Affairs minister on the basis of skill, knowledge and ability in the first place.

Too bad that he placed his own political fortunes ahead the requirements of the nation.

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver

The best description of Fox News... evah!!

Seriously.

H/T Crooks and Liars.

Good grief

Words fail me.

In other news, PM Harper is suing the Liberals for "misappropriation of personality." His, apparently. Why the hell would anyone want it?

UPDATE: Mark Francis asks, "wouldn't that just be petty theft?" (H/t deBeauxOs.)

Belive him, it's torture

So says Christopher Hitchens. That's right, Christopher Hitchens.

The same guy who argued that waterboarding was "extreme interrogation" but not "outright torture" has changed his mind.

Why?

He took up the challenge offered by those opposed to his views and allowed himself to be waterboarded. Hitchens has now changed his view.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

And he found out something else. Once the actual torture has ended, the memory of it lingers.

Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass.

Hopefully.

Hitchens has a considerably different view now.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture. [...]

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

The video is here and it is worth reading the whole of Hitchens' story in Vanity Fair.

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver.

Pa! Git the scatter gun! Bobby-Jo ain't a virgin no more.

Heh! Gary Law adds something scary to chew on after Kathryn Jean Lopez gets all sentimental as she pines for the days when girls were virgins and fathers were, well, knee-capping hillbillies.

Where’s Dad? Not the “fathers” of these unfortunate pre-borns, but the fathers of these pregnant girls. Where, in other words, is the shotgun? Back in the day when birth control and abortion weren’t readily available to high-school kids, fathers were pretty good deterrents to pregnancy. Boys knew they’d have kneecap problems if they got daddy’s little girl pregnant. If they were lucky, they’d be married by the morning after. Girls, meanwhile, were less likely to risk pregnancy because alternatives to motherhood were few, adoption being the most likely. It wasn’t a foolproof system, clearly, but the specter of lifelong consequences, combined with societal and parental disapproval, helped keep the illegitimate birthrate down. Today, using the term “illegitimate” is more likely to spark disapproval than the activities contributing to the plague of unwed pregnancies. For sure there are far fewer fathers around to give young males The Eye.

The Eye? Or, more to K-Lo's liking, the baseball bat.

What got K-Lo going? Well, the pregnancy pact of 17 girls in the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. More of K-Lo:

It is a fair guess, though not possible to confirm at this point, that at least some of Gloucester’s pregnant daughters are from fatherless homes.

Yoiks! She doesn't know, so she makes it up.

Today’s girls and boys daily marinate in a culture that offers little instruction in responsibility and self-control — or the importance of marriage as antecedent to procreation — but celebrates single motherhood and encourages sex without strings.

Shorter K-Lo: Pre-marital sex is the result of the current culture. They're not being taught to repress their sexual urges the way their grandparents and parents did when they were adolescents. Why, look at the movies they see!

Uh oh.... what's this?

“Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003,” by Lawrence B. Finer, published in the January/February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports.

That would be like, you know, a scientific study. I-wonder-what-it-says? (drum roll)

“This is reality-check research. Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades,” says study author Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12–29-year-olds. It would be more effective to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active—which nearly everyone eventually will.”

Yup. Even some of the student body at Dominican Academy were probably... ahem... experimenting.

But not K-Lo! Nosiree! She didn't stray down the sinful path seeking pleasures of the flesh. Oh, I'm sure she had her schoolgirl crushes, but what's the harm in that?

Uh oh.... what's this? (h/t Sadly, No!)

Boris Yeltsin's death on affected me in a way that was surely unique: He was my high-school crush.

Yes, I am serious. If you opened my locker at Dominican Academy in New York City, you would have found a picture of Yeltsin torn from Time magazine, as if it were a Tiger Beat cover featuring Kirk Cameron.

And if Boris Yeltsin, a man old enough to be my grandfather, had suddenly appeared at Dominican Academy, well... it's too painful to visualize. But it's very healthy... no?

But I digress... sort of.

K-Lo apparently hasn't bothered looking at the results of those "married by the morning after" shotgun weddings. Between 1960 and 1980 the US divorce rate tripled. At least 23 couples per thousand weren't terribly happy in their relationships and surprisingly, a lot of those couples were in longer term marriages. (Should we count the "premature births" that occurred among that number?)

Another thing she missed, (You can do that when you're rubbing a picture of Boris on your chest), was the data accumulated by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Oh, would you look at that! Since 1981 the teen pregnancy rate was actually declining in the US... until K-Lo's other hero expanded abstinence only sex education. By 2006 a sudden and sharp increase in teen pregnancy set back a steady 14 year decline.

And as to K-Lo's assertion that in the Leave It To Beaver days "Daddy's got a gun; we can't have no fun" resulted in fewer teen pregnancies, there is this real-live, honest-to-goodness analysis which says.... BS!

Unmarried Childbearing. The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000 (see chart). Birthrates fell steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s; they were fairly steady in the early 1980s and then rose sharply between 1988 and 1991 before declining
throughout the 1990s.

I know. Another conservative myth busted. But then, life isn't a Warner Bros cartoon. K-Lo on the other hand, is.

And just because....

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver

More speech-warrior hypocrisy

...all tied together in one dismal package. Free Mark Steyn! Free speech at Carleton University! Free speech at Walmart! Er, not so fast.

H/t Unrepentant Old Hippie. How could I have missed this?

NDP premier opposes Morgentaler honour

Gary Doer. There's a history there. The usual suspects love him.

OK, let's hear from Jack Layton. I'd hate to have to tear up my party card.

UPDATE: (July 3) Good on ya, Jack.

Primitive African culture

...another colonial myth.

H/t American Red Tory

Ken Epp's mask slips

The sponsor of Bill C-484 says his "Unborn Victims of Crime Act" has nothing to do with abortion. Nope. Nothing at all. No, siree. Inserting the notion of the personhood of the unborn into a piece of criminal law won't affect abortion rights. C-484 is a legislative island, entire of itself.

Uh-huh.

And here is Ken Epp on yesterday's long-overdue honouring of Dr. Henry Morgentaler:

...Tory MP Ken Epp (Edmonton-Sherwood Park) said the pro-choice supporters have "gone too far."

"As far as I'm concerned it is indeed controversial," said Epp, who has a private member's bill before the House of Commons that would allow criminal charges to be laid in the death or injury of an unborn child when the child's mother is the victim of a crime.

Epp also questioned the objectivity of Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin as head of the Order of Canada advisory council. "Is she now totally out of impartiality because of the fact she has weighed into this? I am concerned about all of those things," he said.

I enjoy the melodious sound of right-wing teeth-gnashing as much as anyone, and there's quite a symphony going on today. Rock on! But if anyone still thinks that Epp's Bill has nothing to do with abortion, guess again. And if you guess wrong, I have a wonderful old bridge to sell you.

Hamlet and Lear are homosexual

If my favourite poet of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats, had had his poem "Lapis Lazuli" run through the fundamentalist American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site:

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always homosexual,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are homosexual;

--

All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are homosexual.

A big h/t to Red Tory for this, although he owes me a new keyboard.

UPDATE: Slap Upside The Head imagines Christmas with the AFA.

IT'S OFFICIAL!

Way to go, Henry Morgentaler!

Reason number eleven. A Canada Day to remember.

The OOC never makes controversial appointments? Never?!

I was going to join Dr. Dawg and just give this a pass but it's difficult to do when "national" publications seem so bent on making a point with such dull pencils.

Outrage brews as Ottawa set to honour Morgentaler

Really. And then the question is raised, how did that information find its way out of the Honours Secretariat before the recipient was informed? The honours list is sealed after selections have been made and not made public until the head of state releases it. Leaks such as this are done with a purpose and in this case it looks like the Prime Minister's Office is the culprit.

The Conservatives sent out talking points to MPs on Friday that did not name Dr. Morgentaler, but were clearly in preparation for a controversial appointment. They emphasized that Order of Canada recipients are not chosen by the cabinet, but rather a panel whose nine members include only two government appointees.

And then the pack of howling Hyenas started.

Maurice Vellacott, a Conservative MP from Saskatchewan who has been a long-time opponent of abortion, said the honour normally goes to someone who is the unanimous choice of the advisory council. Mr. Vellacott said he has heard this was not the case with the selection of Dr. Morgentaler.

Now there's someone to lead a Conservative charge. If the so-con religious authoritarians ever wanted their highly tenuous position diminished further than it already is, pick an embarrassing, public nuisance like Vellacott to be their voice. And what Vellacott heard can be taken with a grain of the proverbial salt since he's not beyond spewing out imaginary words and scenarios as fact.

Then we get some other voices stacking up. (Emphasis mine)

But Joanne McGarry, executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, said that if Dr. Morgentaler is named to the order, "it would be a most unfortunate choice."

"As Canadians we would like to see the Order of Canada given to people whose contributions to such initiatives as charity, education, culture, the environment, things of that kind that are uniformly viewed as positive and tend to unite people," she said. "With this choice, the one thing that everybody really agrees on about Morgentaler is that he is a very divisive figure."

Really, Joanne? We'll keep those attributes in mind as we move along here.

Liberal MP Dan McTeague said Dr. Morgentaler is a very controversial person and if he is admitted to the order, it will polarize Canadians. The Governor-General and the committee advising on appointments to the Order of Canada have always been careful in the past not to choose people who were controversial or who would not be unanimously celebrated by all Canadians, Mr. McTeague said.

Really, Dan? Have they always been that careful? All Order of Canada inductees are unanimously celebrated by all Canadians?

So, Maurice, Joanne and Dan, if an Order of Canada appointment requires unanimous approval of the advisory board;
and the criteria for such an appointment, (as viewed by the Catholic Civil Rights League), is contributions to charity, education, culture, the environment and things that are uniformly viewed as positive and unite people;
and the advisory board has been careful not to choose people who would not be unanimously celebrated by all Canadians...

explain this.

(Cross-posted from The Galloping Beaver)