"The worst government is the most moral ..."

… when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."

The late columnist HL Mencken coined many epigraphs that apply to Stevie Spiteful's five-year rule and his chokehold on Parliament.

The above may seem incongruous, given the debates centered upon Minister Oda's declared admission that she did know about the addition of *NOT* to a legal document after it had been signed. But from the the HarperCon perspective denying funding to KAIROS was an opportune and judicious action and therefore, moral. Read Catherine Porter's excellent analysis as to why that is, here.

Consider the "moral sins" - rightfully or not attributed to ReformaTory MPs who had to leave Harper's Cabinet.

Maxime Bernier, Helena Guergis: in spite of many administrative and blunders, what ultimately did each of them in was the taint suggested by news reports that featured words like *biker chick* and *busty hookers*.

And remember, Diane Ablonczy is still not a full-fledged minister; observers suspect her past support for the funding of Toronto's Gay Pride events is the reason.

So, to recap: any implied support for non-marital and non-heterosexual sex appears to be grounds for being dismissed from Cabinet. Unless you're Vic Toews, of course.

We suspected Jason Kenney was still a virgin but who knew John Baird was a monk?

"No one has ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the masses." HL Mencken

Grand merci to Politics and its Discontents.

Shrieeekkk! Religious groups denied standing for court challenge.

Fundamentalist christian neocon groups persevere in their belief that they have the right to butt in whenever they want in order to expound their own brand of gynophobic ideology. But they're wrong to assume that their religious rightwing arguments should be allowed to run roughshod wherever they want to stick their oar.

An Ontario judge has turned down a request from two religious groups and a conservative women's group to take part in a constitutional challenge of the country's prostitution laws.

Mr. Justice Ted Matlow of the Ontario Superior Court said that the groups would be liable to turn the trial into a soapbox for spiritual views, which would be out of place in a strictly legal proceeding. Judge Matlow said that the groups struck him as being unaware that the challenge "does not provide a political platform where interested persons are permitted to speak in order to advance their personal views, beliefs, policies and interests at large."

The ruling came as a blow to the Christian Legal Fellowship, REAL Women of Canada and Catholic Civil Rights League ...

CUPE has produced a thoughtful and respectful background paper on the labour rights of sex workers.

The first step is decriminalization; the activists who launched the legal challenge want to strike down the laws that prohibit sollicitation, in essence any form of communication

... for the purposes of prostitution, living off the avails of prostitution and keeping a common bawdy house. The challenge will focus on whether prostitution laws violate a constitutional guarantee to life, liberty and security of the person by exposing sex workers to danger.

From the CUPE document:

This is why sex workers’ rights advocates call for the decriminalization of all aspects of sex work. Decriminalization means the repeal and/or the reform of laws that differentiate sex workers from other workers and that regulate the sex lives of consenting adults.

Decriminalization is not the same as legalization. Legalization means the creation of a new set of laws regulating how sex workers live and work. In legalized systems, some workers are issued licenses that permit them to work and the police mandate is “prostitution control.” Laws enforced by the police and social service agencies that prescribe health checks and the registration of health status, and determine where sex workers can and cannot live and work, violate sex workers’ Charter and labour rights and should be opposed.

The comments that follow the G&M article offer the usual range of rational observations, relevant information and moralizing rightwing crotch-sniffing busy-body opinion.

Wake up Maggie

... I think I got something to say to you
It's late September and I really should be back at school.
I know I keep you amused
but I feel I'm being used ...

Margaret Somerville - a cougar? Unlikely, though stranger things have happened. No, I suspect Maggie is a latex - errr, latent and likely self-suppressed dominatrix though that orientation breaks out when she launches in one of her predictable and tedious public floggings of public morality.

Dr Dawg, who can run epistemological circles around Somerville, nails her sanctimonious hide to the wall. Metaphorically, of course.

...while on the subject of public intellectuals, the Citizen graces us today with another incompetent column by Margaret Somerville, the popular self-anointed authority on bioethics from McGill who is fond of telling us how to live and what to think under the guise of ethical discussion. There is, in fact little real discussion in Somerville's writings: it's all moral claims and assertions.

This time she's on about stem cell research and the sacredness of the embryo. ... "We are all ex-embryos," she says, in her sloppy way. We are, of course, all pre-corpses, too. ... Somerville makes much of the potential of an embryo, its "becoming," and summons up that phantasm, "moral intuition," which she has referred to, in other columns, as the "yuck factor." But the same abstract argument of potential could be used about contraception, since sperm and ova are, at least potentially, joined. In fact one could trace a chain of potential back to the origins of life. A protozoan has the potential of evolving into a human being. Morally speaking, must the chain never be broken? How can it be avoided?

Frances Kissling has a much better understanding of these issues, in addition to being more rigorous and honest in her intellectual analysis.

Surely I'm not the only one scratching my head at Somerville's never-ending perorations and wondering what deep, dark private secrets she knows about selected gros fromages. It's certainly not her MASSIVE moral authority or intellect that keeps McGill officials in her thrall.

Moralizers' Two-Fer

Woo-hoo! Moralizers' delight! Smoking and pregnancy.

If you're a smoker and planning to get pregnant, there's good news and bad news.

First the good news: Australian researchers say women who stop smoking before 15 weeks of pregnancy cut their risk of giving birth prematurely and having small babies to the same level as non-smokers.

Now the bad: Women who don't quit by 15 weeks are three times as likely to give birth prematurely and twice as likely to have small babies, compared to women who stopped smoking.

Seems like a good research topic. Many pregnancies are not planned but welcome nonetheless. So, for smokers, this is some encouraging motivation to quit ASAP.

But have a look at some of the comments.

From RallyBoy:

I think it is a crime to smoke while pregnant and when you have kids. A person is knowingly endangering the life of a little baby and setting it up for a life-time of complications. This should be legal? When the health risk is FACT then a person should most definitely be held accountable. No different than driving without a seat belt or proper car seat for your child. It is a crime to hold a child captive in the womb while a person sits and pumps toxins into their body knowing bloody well what it is doing. If they don't know what it is doing then I'd say they don't have the mental capacity to have a child in the first place. I think the other points made in the comment above asking if we should dictate what a mother eats, etc. is just being silly. There is an obvious difference between those other points and smoking and drinking while pregnant. I'd like to think the poster is intelligent enough that I really don't need to sit here and list the major differences between smoking and drinking vs. exercise, eating and staying up late. Smoking and or drinking should be a crime while pregnant.

And Alley1800 agrees:

I completely agree!!! I think that smoking while pregnant or smoking around your kids at home or in the car should be considered a form of child abuse. Second hand smoke is just as toxic (if not more) as the smoke inhaled by the smoker. Women who smoke during pregnancy are just in denial or they just don't care enough about their child, and therefore should not be having a child in the first place!
I grew up in a smoke-filled household until I was about 13. It was just AWFUL. To this day I despise smokers and I actually have much less respect for them as people. I don't know how people can go around smelling like that 24/7. I know most of you smokers don't think that you smell because smoke is simply the air that you breathe and you are used to it, but just so you know, YOU REEK! And I know that it's none of my business what people are doing to their own health, but they are not only doing it to themselves, they are doing it to everyone around them. And just FYI for any smokers, when you smoke outside waiting for the bus or just outside a building at work, your smoke does NOT just disappear into the wind. It lingers around you and is very bothersome to the non-smokers around you.

Much more at the link.

Bonus: One of my favorite posts from Birth Pangs by Sleeping Sun who was pregnant at the time, 'Why Stop at Alcohol?'

Does Kay remember the fear of getting pustules on his willy?

There doesn't really seem to be any other rational explanation for Jonathan's bizarre foray into self-righteous moralizing.

Did he suffer great personal trauma in high school when his phys. ed. teacher showed the boys a slide show of photographs of male genitalia that displayed symptoms of advanced sexually transmitted diseases? Did it permanently affect his sex life? Is he now bitter and therefore advocating for a similar approach as a way to justify and enforce female abstinence?

One of the lamentable results of the culture wars is that women have been taught to regard abortion -- a medically profound event that either kills, or pre-empts, a unique, genetically determinate human being -- as if it were merely an act of feminist self-empowerment. Showing a mother an image of her "soon-to-be-dead fetus" will disabuse her of that myth."

uh-oh. It sounds like Jonathan was fed anti-feminist ideology in his mama's milk. That might be the explanation for his holier-than-thou, punitive approach to controlling women's access to medical services.

Be thankful that Kay is only a pissant opinion columnist.