Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff made the following statement on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day:
"100 years ago tomorrow, the first International Women's Day was established in 1911 to campaign for women's rights to work, vote, hold public office and end gender discrimination.
"Today, International Women’s Day celebrates the economic, political and social achievements of women across the globe..."
Now, let me see, if I were 22 years old, with seven or eight kids to feed and clothe, with miles to walk every morning to just get water with which to wash clothes and cook some rice, the last thing my exhausted body and fragile family would need is another pregnancy -- or a dose of HIV.
I've hit on this topic before, here, here, here, etc., about PM Stephen
Harper's announcement two months ago on supporting maternal health at the
coming G8 summit, and how he and his handmaiden
international cooperation minister Bev Oda refuse to connect maternal
health to family planning, access to contraception and condoms -- which
means freedom from dying in childbirth, freedom from AIDS, which means, uh, maternal health. (Read this, if you have a sec.)
But they don't make those connections in TheoConWorld.
In the Commons on Wednesday, International Co-operation Minister Bev
Oda pointedly left birth control off the list of aid projects the
government intended to support, saying that “saving lives” was more
important than family planning.
“We have chosen to focus the
world’s lenses on saving the lives of mothers and children,” Oda said.
“When we know what we can do by providing clean water, vaccinations,
better nutrition, as well as the most effective way is the training of
health care workers and improving access for those women, that is what
we are going to do.”
And on Tuesday, during a Commons committee
hearing, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon made clear that the
maternal-health priority “does not deal in any way, shape or form with
family planning.”
Liberals and New Democrats are incredulous,
saying that this is a direct copy of the foreign aid policies of former
U.S. president George W. Bush, who banned any support for aid
organizations that supported abortion in developing countries for the
eight years he was in office. Barack Obama reversed that ban within
days of taking power last year.
Liberal MP Keith Martin, also a doctor, said without providing
access to a “full array” of family planning options, women and men
can’t protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted
pregnancies.
“As a result, you have higher abortion rates, more disease, more maternal deaths and more maternal injuries,” Martin said.
He
said he was “shocked” that the government took family planning off the
table and accused the Conservatives of being hypocritical.
“They
can’t say on the one hand they want to save lives . . . yet on the
other, deprive people of having the tools to be able to reduce the
death rate,” he said.
“The government is slaughtering good
medical practice on the altar of ideology,” he said, adding that the
government’s medical plan “defies science.
“In fact, it violates the ethics of good medical practice,” said Martin (Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca).
But, with this government, it's not about good medical practice. It's about making women be fruitful and multiply, even if multiplying kills them and their children.
Status of women mannequin minister Helena Guergis is not standing up for real maternal health either, judging from this message track exchange with NDP MP Irene Mathyssen at Monday's committee meeting.
Ms. Irene Mathyssen: What role will
you play in the Prime Minister's G8 maternal and child health initiative, if any,
and are you at all concerned by the fact that money for women and children in
this country has not appreciably increased in regard to maternal health and
child health?
Hon. Helena Guergis: I will play
whatever role it is that the Prime Minister is defining for me in this process,
happily, and I'm very proud and honoured to be a part of that process.
Memo to the HarperCons: Read a book, maybe a science book, or a medical text.
Let's begin in the Sunshine state of Florida where Southern Baptist theologian, father of eight and Republican rep Charles E. Van Zant proposes all citizens, especially of the wombanly persuasion, share his upright way of thinking.
Here's his way of thinking though: Rather than punish the maternal units, go after the doctors who perform the evil abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.
An expansive measure to make most abortions illegal in Florida has been filed for the 2010 Legislative session, challenging federal protections in place for more than 40 years.
Both anti-abortion advocates and abortion rights supporters agree the 53-page proposal is an attempt to directly challenge the 40-year-old Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortions in the United States in 1973.
“The Legislature finds that there have been 50 million abortions in the United States since the Roe decision,” the bill reads. “ The Legislature further finds that every life lost to abortion was sacred and of the highest value.”
Sponsored by Rep. Charles Van Zant, R-Palatka, HB 1097 would criminalize most abortions now allowed under state and federal law, increase penalties for physicians who perform such services and require pregnant women to receive more information on adoption. The bill was filed Wednesday, the same day that right to life groups made the trek to Tallahassee to meet lawmakers and rally support.
Except in cases where a woman’s life is considered in danger, doctors who perform abortions would face first degree felonies punishable by up to life in prison and civil fines.
Now, it's doubtful this bill will get very far. But you can bet Van Zant will have back-up in the House. And, if they don't succeed this time, they'll try another way to crack this.
By the way: You'll find the comments over at Feministing rather amusing.
On Friday an Oklahoma judge declared a controversial law
unconstitutional that would have enacted a host of new abortion
regulations, including one mandating that detailed demographic and
personal information about women seeking abortions be posted online.
Though pro-choice activists are applauding the decision, it was not
indicative of a dismissal of the regulations themselves. Instead, the
judge knocked down the law due to the fact that it violated Oklahoma’s
"single-subject" rule, which states that each law can only cover one
subject.
The law, which was initially scheduled to go
into effect on Nov. 1, 2009, would have required a woman seeking an
abortion to fill out a 10-page questionnaire asking everything from her
age and marital status to the date of the abortion to the county in
which it took place. That information would then be posted on the
state’s Department of Health website. Proponents of the law say that
names would not have accompanied the statistics. But opponents say the
law was a scare tactic that infringed on women’s privacy, and that
people in small towns in Oklahoma could easily draw conclusions about
identities from even seemingly anonymous information.
Undaunted, the forced birthers are back at the drawing board, drafting, count 'em, four new laws that will get around the technicality.
In other action, the panel passed
four separate abortion measures that previously had been declared
unconstitutional because they had been combined in one bill.
Bills must deal with only one subject.
The panel passed HB 3290 by Rep. Skye McNiel, R-Bristow. It would
require a doctor to be in the room when the abortion pill RU486 is
administered.
The panel also passed HB 2780 by Rep.
Lisa Billy, R-Lindsay, which would require women who seek an abortion
to have an ultrasound and have its contents explained to them.
Rep. Ryan Kiesel, D-Seminole, said the
Legislature should focus on preventing unintended pregnancies rather
than bringing further disgrace and shame to women facing the most
difficult decision of their lives.
Billy responded: “This bill is about
choice for women. It is an opportunity for her to understand what is
growing inside of her and the consequences.”
The panel passed HB 3110 by Rep. Pam
Peterson, R-Tulsa, which would allow health-care providers who object
to abortion not to participate in the procedure.
Peterson’s other abortion bill, HB 3284, also passed.
It would require women who seek abortions to provide a host of information about themselves to be posted on a public Web site.
As if there aren't bigger things to worry about in Oklahoma -- like how one in five actual children live in poverty.
A bill passed by the Utah House and Senate this
week
and waiting for the governor's signature, will make it a crime for a
woman to have a miscarriage, and make induced abortion a crime in some
instances.
According Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of National
Advocates for Pregnant Women, what makes Utah's proposed law unique is
that it
is specifically designed to be punitive toward pregnant women, not
those who might assist or cause an illegal abortion or unintended
miscarriage.
The bill passed by legislators amends Utah's criminal
statute to allow the state to charge a woman with criminal homicide for
inducing a miscarriage or obtaining an illegal abortion. The
basis for the law was a recent case in which a 17-year-old girl, who
was seven
months pregnant, paid a man
$150 to beat her in an attempt to cause a miscarriage. Although the girl
gave birth to a baby later given up for adoption, she was
initially charged with attempted murder. However the charges were dropped because,
at the time, under Utah state law a woman could not be prosecuted for
attempting to arrange an abortion, lawful or unlawful.
The bill passed by the Utah legislature would change that. While
the bill does not affect legally obtained abortions, it criminalizes any actions
taken by women to induce a miscarriage or abortion outside of a doctor's care,
with penalties including up to life in prison.
In addition to criminalizing an intentional attempt to
induce a miscarriage or abortion, the bill also creates a standard that could
make women legally responsible for miscarriages caused by "reckless" behavior.
Using the legal standard of "reckless behavior" all a district
attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to
cause miscarriage, even if she didn't intend to lose the pregnancy. Drink too
much alcohol and have a miscarriage? Under the new law such actions could be cause for prosecution.
"This creates a law that makes any pregnant woman who has a
miscarriage potentially criminally liable for murder," says Missy Bird,
executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Utah. Bird says there are
no exemptions in the bill for victims of domestic violence or for those who are
substance abusers. The standard is so broad, Bird says, "there nothing in the
bill to exempt a woman for not wearing her seatbelt who got into a car
accident."
Such a standard could even make falling down stairs a
prosecutable event, such as the recent case in Iowa where a pregnant woman who
fell down the stairs at her home was arrested under the suspicion she was trying to terminate
her pregnancy.
Because, Lady, when you're preggers your body is nationalized by the state.
Take Kenya. For 20 years, Kenyans have been working fitfully to
revise their constitution and are now mere weeks away from possibly finalizing
the document. But this milestone in the nation's slow move towards real
democracy may be marred by another human rights calamity. If the constitution
is approved in its current form by the Kenyan Parliament sometime this year,
Kenya will join the inglorious ranks of three nations -- Northern Mariana
Islands, Uganda, and Zambia -- that have prohibited abortion within their
constitution.
The most recent draft of the constitution had solid human rights
protections for women. However, a review by a parliamentary commission resulted
in the evisceration of many of the core democratic constitutional provisions.
This included amending Article 25, which in its original language guaranteed
that "Every individual has the
right to life" (emphasis added).
The wording choice for Article 25 is hardly revolutionary. In
fact, it reflects the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
is consistent with the majority of national constitutions in the world. But
conservative religious groups are not partial to international legal precedence
and many lobbied Kenyan parliamentarians to amend Article 25. Which they did,
and then some.
Article 25 still protects life, but life is now defined as
beginning at conception. Moreover, Article 25 also outlaws abortion. Phrases in
the draft guaranteeing the right to healthcare, including reproductive health
care, and that no one may be refused emergency medical treatment (say, for an
unsafe abortion) were also eliminated from the draft text.
A pregnant 27-year old Nicaraguan woman, "Amelia," with metastatic
cancer has been denied medical treatment on the grounds that it might
harm her baby.
Nicaragua passed a draconian anti-abortion law in 2008 which
criminalizes abortion even in the case of rape or incest or when the
mother's life is in danger. Nicaraguan doctors are prohibited from
treating pregnant women with cancer, HIV/AIDS, malaria and cardiac
diseases, and threatened with prison sentences for providing health
services or information related to abortion.
Amelia has effectively been handed a death sentence by her
government. Each day she is denied treatment, she edges closer to
death; in a tragic irony, she will most likely die before the baby is
even born. Her 10-year old daughter will be left without a mother,
since the Nicaraguan government values the life of an unborn fetus over
that of a mother.
And doesn't that just put the ''life'' in ''pro-life?'' (And if you want to do something to help, please go here.)
... it's not just the preventable deaths of these women,
but the bloody suffering they go through. And their families. And their
soon-to-be-orphaned children.
Yet this is the kind of no-family-planning, no-contraception, no-abortion, misogynist healthcare Steve is promoting.
It's unconscionable.
Indeed.
And, finally, something completely different. Angie the Anti-Theist is having an abortion -- and is documenting it. (Follow the Twitter debate here.)
Prior to conceiving my son five years ago, I was told I would never carry a child to term because of sexual abuse that happened when I was 7- and 8-years-old — and I barely did. I didn’t find out I was pregnant with him until the 21st week, roughly halfway through my pregnancy. When I did find out, I was underweight for the duration of the pregnancy, and I had several other high risk indicators. I did my best to gain weight (it helped that my ex-husband worked at a pizza store).
Even still, I made several trips to the emergency room throughout my last two trimesters. During my eighth month of pregnancy, I actually lost ten pounds due to a pretty horrible stomach virus. It was as if I had no immune system at all while pregnant. I went from having never received IV fluids in my life, to being intimately familiar with the feeling of cold fluids dumping into my veins. And let’s not even get into the other causes of dehydration.
When my son was born, I decided I didn’t want any more kids, in part because I’d learned during my pregnancy that I was a carrier for Cystic Fibrosis, a fatal and painful disease (of which my son was fortunately spared). I don’t regret that decision. My son is happiest when he’s getting one-on-one attention from an adult — he has even manipulated the system at school so that he gets to hang out with his teacher while she eats lunch and the other kids nap! I honestly don’t believe siblings are always a blessing, always friends, or always best for a family.
I know that I can be a damn good mom to the one special needs child I have — he had many health problems when he was younger and he is speech delayed and has a short attention span now — but I don’t know if I could be a good mom to two kids, one or both of whom would have special needs. I know my mom had more children than she could afford or care for, and I don’t want to make the same mistake.
Now, considering all that, I think Angie is entitled to make her own decisions about her own health and well-being, as well as those of her son. But you can be sure that there are millions of people who believe that they have the right to colonize her body.
The welfare of women continues to dominate the political agenda through the suspension of Parliament.
And so, a few items of note.
Over at Rabble.ca, Murray Dobbin nicely sums up how the Harper government has run "roughshod'' over women.
Nothing new there as regular Broadsides readers know. If I had the time, I would add in a lot more starting with the threats to our reproductive choices and the pending elimination of the long-gun registry.
By coincidence, Regina Mom today documented the dollar value of some of the cuts to programs that helped women achieve equal rights and economic parity.
Finally, NDP leader Jack Layton took advantage of the current political climate to issue a news release challenging party leaders to put Canadian women and children first.
Mr. Layton invited Mr. Harper, as well as Liberal leader Michael
Ignatieff and Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, to cooperate in 2010 to
improve the lives of Canadian women and children. He outlined a series
of concrete New Democrat proposals that, if embraced by the other
parties, would mean real progress for women and children. Those
proposals include:
Employment Insurance rules that deny eligibility to six in ten women;
adopting key recommendations of the 2004 Pay Equity Task Force;
increasing support for women’s groups working to prevent violence;
launching an inquiry into 520 missing or murdered Aboriginal women;
launching a federal initiative to ensure every child has daily access to healthy food;
boosting the Guaranteed Income Supplement to end poverty among seniors (overwhelmingly women).
It's stunning to me that, in this country, in this century, kids and seniors go hungry.
Who was it who said that, if you want to know the true measure of a man, watch how he treats old people, children and animals?
UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Layton had an op-ed in today's National Post.
Canada is among the wealthiest nations in the world, yet 70% of Inuit preschool-age children live in homes where there is not always enough food. There are many mothers in Canada who live in unsafe places, who are going without food, electricity or heat because of persistent, deep poverty. These deprivations have a devastating effect on Canada's very youngest, evidenced by the fact that infant mortality rates in low-income neighbourhoods are almost double those in richer ones.
Mr. Harper acknowledges that the solutions to maternal and child health problems are "not intrinsically expensive." This holds true for Canadian women and children as well: Providing safe drinking water on reserves, addressing the affordable housing crisis, and funding organizations that support women and children are all relatively inexpensive compared to the health and social costs of poverty in Canada, which are estimated at more than $20-billion per year.
<SNIP>
To put the full consequences of (Harper's) indifference into perspective, imagine a city the size of Winnipeg full of children: That is the number of our kids who live in poverty in Canada today.
As a country, we have the ability to take decisive action to end this cycle of marginalization, and Mr. Harper has shown that he knows that investing in women and children will get the job done in the developing world. It will be pure hypocrisy if he refuses to make similar investments here at home.
I have mentioned the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism only a couple of times, and always in passing, mostly because I really don't see it as part of my mandate, despite the fact that my beat is, officially, ''social issues and cultural trends.''
A quick summary of what the Coalition is about:
The CPCCA (Canadian Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism) was formed in March of 2009 and brings together 22 Parliamentarians from all parties in the House of Commons for the stated purpose of confronting and combating antisemitism in Canada today. The group is broken into two committees: the Inquiry Panel (chaired by MP Mario Silva) and the Steering Committee (chaired by MP Scott Reid).
The Inquiry was launched on June 2nd, with an open call for written submissions by the Canadian public. After receiving nearly 200 written submissions, the committee will begin its public hearings starting on the 2nd of November. At the conclusion of the hearings, the committee will produce a report to the Government of Canada, and anticipates that the Government will respond to this report no later than the fall of 2010.
The CPCCA is not affiliated with the Government of Canada, any NGO, or any advocacy group. It is associated with the Inter-parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, the international steering committee which organized the conference in London in 2009.
One could make the case that redefining antisemitism to include criticism of Israel -- which appears to be what the CPCCA's intent is, at least judging from its website FAQs -- is very much a social issue in that it affects Canadians' freedom of speech. But I'll leave that to my Star colleagues Tom Walkom, Haroon Siddiqui and Linda McQuaig as well as blogger Dr. Dawg -- although I have posted articles about it on my Facebook profile to some interesting and very heated discussions. (Incidentally, the CPCCA has received pitifully little corporate media coverage.)
Today I received a copy of an open letter to Liberal MP Hedy Fry which ties directly into what I see as my beat. Here it is, unedited, with some links added by me:
To: Dr. Hedy Fry, M.P. From: Joanne Naiman Re: Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism Date: Dec. 8, 09
Dear Dr. Fry,
This past Sunday—the twentieth anniversary of the Montreal massacre—I attended the memorial you spoke at in Vancouver. Your speech was moving and touched on the real concerns of women across the country. However, while you spoke, I was seething underneath. You see, I am a retired sociologist, an activist, and a Jew. This summer, I made a submission to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism, of which you are a member. In that submission, I noted that, while anti-Semitism certainly exists in Canada, it is a minor social problem when compared to, say, homelessness, the conditions of indigenous people, or other forms of ethno-racial discrimination. I am ashamed to say that what I didn’t think to compare it to, but should have, is the problems faced by women in this country.
I stood in the cold with you on Sunday thinking to myself that my chances of being harmed—whether with words, low wages, or by a gun—are statistically far greater as a result of my being female than my being Jewish. For example, if I were a young Jewish woman on a university campus in Canada, I would be at much greater risk of experiencing physical assault or abuse because of my gender than because of my religion. On average, 182 females were killed every year in Canada between 1994 and 2003 (www.statcan.gc.ca) and almost half of all women in 1998 reported having been sexually assaulted after leaving high school (Jewish Women International). And if I were a native woman, I would be at least five times more likely than other women in Canada to die as the result of violence.
The obvious question, then, is, why have you agreed to participate in this unprecedented and undemocratic Parliamentary Coalition that is spending a great deal of time and money investigating what must be described as a minor social problem? Instead, why aren’t you and your party calling for a similar entity to resolve even a few of the serious problems faced by untold numbers of women in this country? Imagine if we had a Canadian Parliamentary Coalition on Women’s Issues (CPCWI) that planned to make its report to government in the next few months and—as seems to be the case with the CPCCA –expected “that the Government will respond to it by the spring of 2010 (CPCCA news release, June 2, 2009).” Just imagine if this government were to respond to women’s concerns so quickly and so favourably.
As a Jew, I am proud of our tradition as a caring and compassionate people that has advocated for universalism, that is, the rights and freedoms of all people. It is this tradition that led many Jews to actively support the Black civil rights movement in the United States and the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa. But while the narrow and dangerous terms of reference of this Coalition therefore make me outraged, they also make me afraid. As noted in my submission, this unprecedented Parliamentary Coalition will doubtless convince those already predisposed to believe it that Jews hold undue sway in the political arena, and it will therefore inevitably fan the flames of anti-Semitism in this country. I therefore, lastly, ask you to explain to me why you and your party continue to be part of the CPCCA.
I look forward to your early response in this serious matter.
Sincerely,
Joanne Naiman, M.A., B.Ed. Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology Ryerson University Toronto (now living in Vancouver)
c.c. Joyce Murray, M.P. Carolyn Bennett, M.P. Judy Wasylycia-Leis, M.P. Sid Shniad, Independent Jewish Voices, Vancouver Lynda Lemberg, Educators for Peace and Justice, Toronto
Two things I will add here.
As I marked with an * above, I don't know that anybody has actually asked the CPCCA for the source of its funding and has been refused the information. Also, the website states that the inquiry is ''independent of the Government opf Canada, although the hearings are being held in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill.
And, for the record, one submission to the CPCCA, which is currently holding hearings, actually hints that even questioning the need for an inquiry is antisemitic.
The public incitement of hatred section of the Criminal Code should
be amended to conform to Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, thereby granting protection to girls and women. Currently,
the law only protects those identified by colour, race, religion,
ethnic origin and sexual orientation.
Omitting girls and women
from the list compromises their safety. This gap between the Charter of
Rights and the Criminal Code is a stark piece of unfinished business.
Why is it taking so long to deal with it?
The guys who don't get it: The Blogging Tories, brought to you by the ever-watchful Canadian Cynic who notes that none of the drooling Con fans care a whit about violence against women. Only one (at the time of my posting) has even noted the massacre, but just to knock down any links to the long-gun registry.
Dawg raises a number of points worth further exploration.
First, how, in post 9/11 Canada, so much is being made of the Dec. 6 shooter's paternity.
There's a gaggle of xenophobic yokels who call him Gamil Gharbi these days, as though to score some kind of point. The Montreal Massacre as a narrative about Islam? Perhaps for those whose politics are little more than a slobber of prejudice.
It's almost as if these people, who are harping on the fact that his birth name was Arab/Muslim, are suggesting that his targeting of women students was ''honour killing'' on a massive scale. I won't stoop to providing links to some of the more hateful examples.
Second, and also from Dawg, there continues to be denial that the massacre had anything to do with woman-hatred.
(T)here will be those who argue that the women's movement, too, has long hitched its political wagon to this rotten star. Some certainly made claims of that kind at the time. They insisted that it was "opportunistic" for a movement dedicated to advocating for the rights of women to speak out about the Montreal femicide. I continue to find this very odd. What on earth was the women's movement supposed to do about this horrific condensation of social misogyny? Be silent?
If a man had entered that polytechnic twenty years ago and ordered all the Gentiles to leave, and proceeded to murder fourteen Jews, would anyone seriously criticize the Canadian Jewish Congress for speaking out about anti-Semitism?
Marc Lepine was a MARTYR in the war against feminism.
As Dawg reminds us, members of Canada's Airborne once held a mess dinner to honour the killer. As this moving short film by Ling Chiu recalls, in the aftermath, at least two men treated the massacre like a joke, publicly pranking people into thinking another one was underway. Then, there's this. And this. And this.
Why am I posting links to these woman-haters again? Because some readers of this blog think I exaggerate when I say there is real and frightening misogyny in this world. Just read the hatefest compiled by Ruth.
On a different note, you might want to catch up with Pale, Brebis and, especially, Hysperia's thoughts on this how far women have come, or haven't come, in Steven Harper's Canada.
I, for one, want to make it hurt. I want to keep sorting out the links between these rightwing policies and liberal betrayals and putting them out there. I want to defeat the HarpyCons but I also want to make it dead clear that, as a woman, I can’t find a blessed party that truly represents me and my sisters and others for whom I care. I reject a “headlong retreat into fantasy”. I’ll not sit around waiting for this culture to die. That might all sound a little melodramatic but there it is and it suits me just fine.
On this day, December 6th, 2009, when I want to reflect and grieve the women’s lives lost in Montreal in 1989 and all the women of this country who died before or since as a result of intimate partner violence and public violence against women – all those whose names we don’t know – I’ve actually had to time defending my right to define, with my sisters, the meaning of the event and the meaning of those lives and deaths. When women are murdered because they are women, we still have to fight to say so. We are so far away, still, twenty years later, from doing those things that must be done to begin the end of male violence against women that we still struggle for the definition itself.
I wish no person physical harm. But I do want to make that hurt by defeating this government and any other government that thinks it can lead a country while ignoring the needs of half its population.
At around the same time, a young friend of mine was walking into Tim
Horton’s to buy some doughnuts. There were two men in front of her
carrying a newspaper with a screaming headline about the murdered women
and one of the men said something along the lines of, “way to go,
buddy.”
She interviews Nathalie Provost, who was shot four times and survived, when a gunman burst into that engineering school 20 years ago. (I won't name him because I prefer to remember his victims.) Here's a snip:
"We are not feminists."
A young, incredulous Nathalie
Provost said those words to Marc Lépine 20 years ago Sunday. It was a
bid to save her and her fellow students' lives – the women Lépine had
isolated in a university classroom before opening fire on them with a
semi-automatic hunting rifle.
Provost was one of the lucky
four who survived. "At the time, I thought to be a feminist meant you
had to be militant," says Provost, who today is overworked and feeling
skittish as the anniversary approaches. She was the young woman who,
from her hospital bed a couple days later, urged Canadian girls to not
be frightened by the event and to pursue engineering careers. She was
also my introduction to feminism in life, not just theory. And to the
concept that the personal is political.
"I realized many
years later that in my life and actions, of course I was a feminist. I
was a woman studying engineering and I held my head up."
If you go through the comments section, which seems to have been invaded by the gun nuts and some of the angrier men's rights activists, you'll see:
1. That there's a lot of denial that the long-gun registry, which Parliament is set on eliminating, has anything to do with preventing violence against women.
Can it be a coincidence that, since the registry was established, the number of femicides by rifles -- which the preferred method of shooting one's spouse to death -- has declined drastically? Fact is, having a gun in the home will make somebody more likely to use it.
True, the numbers were already on a downward trend but, research shows, much of that can probably be explained by the fact that, thanks to the feminist movement, women were becoming more economically independent and a network of shelters and other services was being built. Women who have the means to get out will more likely get out -- although, sadly, that's when they are at the most vulnerable to being stalkedandkilled.
''How
many women who are the ultimate victim of violence, were killed by a
gun due to social policies which enslave men to pay the female victim
money, in the form of so called child support, to make the women
independant while making the man destitude?''
Eliminating the gun registry is not only a slap in the face to the Dec. 6 victims and their families, it's also another insult to women by the Conservatives. But they don't get it, as The Star's Susan Delacourt reports today:
The potential demise of Canada's long-gun registry cast a shadow
Friday over any attempts by federal politicians to mark the 20th
anniversary of the massacre of 14 women at Montreal's l'École
Polytechnique.
In the Commons, Bloc Québécois MP Thierry St-Cyr
(Jeanne-Le Ber) said the survivors of the tragedy have been let down by
the "hypocrisy" of a government that helped usher in recent private
member's legislation to wind down the gun registry.
Quoting
Heidi Rathjen, one of those survivors, St-Cyr said: "It is a slap in
the face of the victims of Polytechnique, as well as of all other
victims of firearms."
But Conservative MP Sylvie Boucher,
parliamentary secretary for the status of women, said the Bloc should
be ashamed to be playing political games on the backs of women's
deaths. Conservatives are proud of all the law-and-order measures
they've introduced to combat violence against women and punish those
responsible, noted Boucher.
Oh please. Many men who shoot their wives have no criminal records. You can't preemptively lock them up. But the gun registry allowed the police to take away the rifles of men who did have priors.
Get it?
However, one thing they often do have is personality disorders, such as depression. Well, let me tell you, if a guy does go around acting suicidal and has guns, he won't get to keep those guns if the police hear about it.
Get that?
The gun nuts say that the gun registry was too costly -- although the money has mostly been spent. Throwing out the billions spent is like saying ''Oh, the house cost two billion to build, which is too much, so let's blow it up.''
Operating the gun registry now only accounts for some $8 million a year, chump change for the government, especially considering the cost of domestic violence. How much does it cost to try and incarcerate a killer? How much does it cost to place the children under the care of social services?
What's the worth of a woman?
If the gun registry costs $8 million a year, which is the most oft-cited figure, and 16 women are killed by rifles per year, that's $500,000 per woman. Speaking for myself, I think that a woman's life is worth at least that much.
Do you Keith?
2. That, despite all the evidence, there are still people out there who claim that the Dec. 6 shooter was just a lone madman -- who had a violent father, by the way -- and that the massacre had nothing to do with feminism.
Give me a break.
Not only did he deliberately separate men from women, he also wrote this before he packed up his arsenal and shot up the school. Some excerpts:
Would you note that if I commit suicide today 89-12-06 it is not for economic reasons (for I have waited until I exhausted all my financial means, even refusing jobs) but for political reasons. Because I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker.
<CLIP>
Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.
December 6 is celebrated around the world in English speaking countries as
International Marc Lepine Day
It seem that almost every week some distraught suicidal young man takes a rifle or pistol and shoots people at a school, a shopping mall, or a city. These are called horrible events by our media, and invariably used as reasons to hate men by the feminists, their blue gun thug Gestapo, and their talking head lackeys. The young men are almost always emotionally distraught, driven to desperation by a feminazi society that has tried to trample him into dust.
Every year, every month, every day, every hour, men are driven to suicide by the evil feminazi hate machine...
Marc Lepine tells
women and feminists YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MONTERS ANYMORE. He tells
these thousands of women and feminists who have stolen their partner's
house, their car, their money, he tells those who have stolen their
ex-husband's children, their jobs and drove them to suicide: STOP TO BE
MONSTERS, stop to secretly dream of killing men and planning
gendercide, and we will perhaps begin again to love you some day. This
is a powerful message, A MESSAGE OF LOVE, worthy of a new Christ.
I guess the Dec. 6 shooter was not such a loner, hunh?
One more thing: Here's some mealy-mouthed memorializing on the part of Helena Guergis, the Minister of State for the Status of Women, in today's National Post. It's almost all about what those foreigners do. Nothing about what good old boy Canadians with their guns do.
I am writing this from Montreal where I am attending a colloquium
to examine the massacre twenty years later. Journalist Francine
Pelletier, who was one of the women on the hit list found in his
suicide note, told the hundreds of women attending that she now
believes this was a political act, an anti-feminist act, different than
the every day incidents of violence against women. “If he had wanted
to target women, he would have gone to a nursing school,’ she said. “He
was targeting women who had the audacity to want to do a man’s
job.” Dominique Payette of Laval University agreed calling it a
classical act of terrorism designed to strike fear in the hearts of
women not so different than the Taliban throwing acid in the faces of
little girls who want to go school.
I think it was both an act of terrorism and an extreme form of the
violence women face every day. As one participant said in the
discussion, male violence in intimate relationships increases when the
woman tries to become more independent. It is used to keep women in
their place through fear.
Please read the whole thing.
FED UP WOMAN DATE: Sooey makes the point over in Cynic's comments that the killer's suicide note says almost nothing ''men's rights'' activists and even well-known pundits make on a routine basis.
An extract from his suicide note:
"Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts. For why persevere to exist if it is only to please the government. Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men."
Sounds like any number of Feminist-hating pundits these days to me.
Er, except for that Grim Reaper bit, of course. That's pretty out there.
So many gifts you can buy to improve the lives of women and children. Gifts that make a difference. Gifts that empower, enrich, enable. Gifts that can change the world.
In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.
Charities are in desperate straits this holiday season as Canadians struggle to pay the mortgage when so many have lost their jobs.But, for all the talk of what's happening in the automotive and media industries, to name two troubled sectors, we never hear about how the non-profit side of the economy is faring.
Make no mistake, non-profits are not unimportant -- and they employ a lot of women.
Which is why I liked this oped by Jill Wyatt, CEO of Calgary's YWCA, brought to my attention by pal Francesca Dobbyn, executive director of the United Way in Bruce Grey.
One of the sectors in which women dominate is the not-for-profit or
third sector. Almost 75 per cent of the employees in this third sector
are women. But this sector is receiving considerably less media
attention than other sectors during this recession, even as our
community's needs increase.
<SNIP>
Far from not-for-profit, I believe there is great profit from what we do, but our bottom line is different. We save lives. We make a difference by building human capital. And we try to do more with less and less every single day.
<SNIP>
Believe me when I say you would miss us if we disappeared overnight. There are 161,000 charities in Canada with revenues of $112 billion. We employ 1.2 million people representing 7.2 per cent of the paid workforce--we have 11 times more workers than the automotive sector and two-and-a-half times the number of workers in the construction industry. We contribute 8.5 per cent of Canada's GDP, which is more than the retail, mining, and oil and gas industries combined.
Antonia Zerbisias has been a Star columnist since 1989 but has been telling people what she thinks ever since she could open her mouth. Her career ambition as an opinionator dates back to Grade 9 when a cartoon commentary on a teacher resulted in her suspension from high school. The principal sent her home with a note calling her "rude, obstreperous and bold." Her parents were neither amused, nor surprised. Once she was punished for being that way. Now she makes it pay. And, because she can take it as well as dish it out, she wants to hear what you have to say. Fire away!
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