Abstinence Axed!

Yay! More evidence of a return to sanity in the Excited States. President Obama will eliminate funding for that 'boondoggle of historic proportions', aka abstinence-only sex ed.

His budget for 2010 will provide at least $164 million for science- and evidence-based sex ed and will ax the $160 million wasted per year on faith-based -- as in 'cross-your-fingers and pray' -- sex ed. He had already cut abstinence-only funding by $56 million and now ALL federal funding will be kaput.

LifeShite quotes Leslee Unruh, president of Abstinence Clearinghouse, a gang of fraudsters who promote this claptrap.

"I believe there will be a political backlash for those who oppose these life saving abstinence programs. The enemies of sexual integrity programs will feel the heat from the army of youth who have seen the light through these programs as they approach voting age," she added.

Huh? Heat? Light? Army? Enemy?

What's going on here?

Oh. Right. Munnee.

There's a blog attached to the Abstinence Clearinghouse site. It SHRIEEEKS: You're Gonna Lose Your Job!!!!

And how is this stimulating the economy by putting thousands of people who work for Title V and CBAE programs out of work? Life is easy when it’s other people’s money you’re spending - and it’s fun until it’s gone. What do they call that again?

Oh yeah…socialism.

If I were an American parent, I'd be doing handsprings and cartwheels knowing these lying, ignorant fundy jerks were no longer allowed to tell my children anything, let alone how to conduct their private lives.

May 7/09 SHRIEEEEK Watch

In the US, today is National Day of Prayer. (Who knew?) President Obama is, unlike his fundy-ass-kisser predecessor, not making a big deal out of it.

The Freaks are SHRIEEEEEKING:

For those Americans among us, today is the National Day of Prayer. For the first time since it was proclaimed in 1952, the American president has declined to participate. He has announced through the Mouth of Zero that he will "pray privately as usual, alone."

Please pray publically and with others, if you can, that King Zero, a/k/a the Antichrist, will be converted and repudiate Satan, his pomps and vanities and all his empty promises, and that St. Michael will cast back into hell those satanic forces who have surrounded King Zero since he went up on the mountaintop and fist-bumped with Satan under the delusion that Satan takes partners in his business.

Pray for our country and all who stand with God and for freedom.

In other SHRIEEEEK-Watch news, the fetus fetishists again demonstrate their incredibly short attention span. Every year, Planned Parenthood uses Mothers Day as a hook for fundraising. This year, author Judy Blume wrote the message. And she's taking immense shit for it. If you're feeling like it, visit her guestbook to give her some support.

UPDATE: Via Five of Five and PZ Myers, go poop on Focus on the Family's National Day of Prayer poll.

She Says, He Says.

Do you hear the sound of dueling banjos in the background?

She says: "Regardless of what I did personally, I just think that abstinence is the only way you can effectively, 100% foolproof way you can prevent pregnancy." Asked how she squared her own experiences with her new campaign, she said, "I'm not quite sure, I just want to go out there and promote abstinence and say, this is the safest choice.

He says: "Abstinence is a great idea, but I also think you need to enforce, you know, condoms and birth control and other things like that to have safe sex. I don't just think telling young kids, you can't have sex, it's not going to work. It's not realistic."

Do as I say, not as I did - so that's Bristol's message. Right. One snarky candid media source used this headline: "Bristol Palin favors oral contraception: Just say no." That goes to the truth of the matter; fundamentalists religious rightwing conservatives view sexuality as a battleground in the war between women and men. They uphold the notion that women are in control by withholding sex; yet undercut that by providing men with control over everything else.

The Brantford Walters

This is gonna be fun.

The Phoenix Coyotes have filed for bankruptcy and Jim Balsillie, bazillionaire of RIM fame, wants to buy the team and bring it to southern Ontario.

Gary Bettman really really really doesn't want this to happen.

Balsillie has set up a website to put pressure on the league. Go sign up.

I bet Bettman's head explodes when he sees that, but how's he going to get out of it? If no U.S. buyers turn up, he's got a rich Canadian offering a princely amount for an unprincely team, and a ready-made market of seven million eager hockey fans who could make the team a financial winner on Day One. Bettman's going to say no? He's going to keep carrying the team on the NHL's nickel, just because Balsillie bugs him?

Should be fun to watch. Just to up the ante, Balsillie should offer to give 10% of the Coyotes to Gretzky (who coaches the team), locate the team in his home town of Brantford -- driving distance from Hamilton, Kitchener, Waterloo and west-end Toronto -- and name the arena after Walter. Then watch Bettman squirm.

I think the team should be named after Walter. The Brantford Walters.

MORE: Scott Morrison with more details.

Pregnant for Charity

An article on Globe's Facts and Arguments page, My teenage daughter's pregnancy, has generated some heat in the 146 comments it has generated.

Bare bones of story: Dad learns that 19-year-old Daughter is pregnant. Dad hasn't spoken with Daughter about it but gets his chance when he's called to pick Daughter up. He figures he's got 10 minutes.

I waited until we were on the highway and travelling too fast for her to safely jump out before broaching the subject. "I know you are pregnant," I said, and she let out a long sigh. "I want you to know that I will support whatever decision you make. I just want to make sure that you know you have a choice."

I thought it was a pretty good opening salvo. It let her know that I'm liberal, open-minded and, above all, pro-keeping all the options open.

"Well I'm not going to keep it," she said, defensively.

"That's good," I said. "I wouldn't want you to have a baby right now. But there are other options."

She gave me a guarded, quizzical look and I knew my window of opportunity was closing. In about seven minutes we'd be hitting the driveway and our conversation would be over. I plowed ahead, telling her about how I had been faced with the same situation at her age, only — being the male in the equation — with a lot less decision-making power. My girlfriend and I had discussed our fragile relationship and material poverty, and decided to put the child up for adoption.

"It would be a huge sacrifice on your part," I said, "but it would be nothing compared to the joy you would bring to the lives of a couple unable to have a child of their own."

So, Daughter has some objections that Dad satisfies. Daughter wonders how she would find parents for the child. Dad tells her of several couples he knows desperate for a child, including a couple that Daughter knows well.

I pulled into the driveway and put the car in park. "Yeah. They're dying to have a child."

"Wow," she said, jumping out of the car. She grabbed her bag out of the back seat and flashed me a grin before disappearing into the house. I followed a few seconds later and found her in the kitchen chatting with my wife, her face now as radiant as I'd seen in a long time. "Okay," she said. "I'll do it. I'll give my baby to our friends."

Presto! In a few moments, Daughter has decided to carry on with pregnancy as a gift. But, alas, there is a 'spontaneous' miscarriage a little while later, so we don't get to find out how this went. Also, that childless couple who was going to get the gift are -- happy-happy -- preggers!

So, what do you think? Not very veiled anti-abortion story? Projection of recent film Juno? Weird-ass father manipulating 'child'? Total BS?

The commentors bring up a lot of good points. Like, where was the boyfriend? Like, adoption isn't always such a piece of cake. Like, WTF is Dad up to 'outing' his daughter's pregnancy?

This one is closest to my take on it:

Keile Keile from Toronto, Canada writes: Your daughter knows how to party!

A kid at 19 AND she's giving it to charity?

Like a birthday present, right?

She's 'giving it a better life'. I'm sure that's what she'll tell it when she realizes, a few years from now, she may not ever get to see her biological offspring.

Wow. Just Wow.

This is simply thrilling. I had to watch the clip about five times to catch Mine That Bird in the pack and then to follow his stunning break through. He starts out dead last, at one point trailing by more than 15 lengths. Watch closely as the horses make the final turn.



Here's some background and reaction. And there's a Canadian connection.

What's hate and/or love got to do with torture?

To absolutely nobody's surprise, a US survey reveals that:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey. More than half of people who attend services at least once a week - 54 percent - said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified.

Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it.

People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

Don't conservative and/or fundamentalist and/or evangelical christians also believe that corporal punishment is required when raising children? "Spare the rod / spoil the child," is the rote maxim, is it not?

There are a range of methods that they recommend for disciplining children. 'Hot saucing' is one form of 'creative correction' that is seemingly supported by Focus on the Family. Michael and Debi Pearl advocate a form of parenting akin to old-fashioned animal training; they live comfortably on the profits generated by the sale of their books and their speaking engagements.

"To Train Up a Child," [was] written in 1994 by Tennessee pastor Michael Pearl with his wife, Debi, who claim to have raised five "whineless" children. At the book's core is the notion that when parents "train" a child to obey early on, even before he or she is able to make conscious, or conscience-based, decisions, home will be a place of peace and harmony. Here, the term "train" is a reference to Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

Neither Pearl has advanced training in child development or a related field. "These truths," the tall, white-beaded Michael Pearl, 60, writes in his book, "are not new, deep insights from the professional world of research, [but] rather, the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules, the same technique God uses to train his children."

The connection between acceptance of torture as legitimate technique for securing information and the use of physical punishment to discipline children is the need for control and authoritarianism. But torturers rarely tell their victims that they are inflicting physical pain for "their own good" or because they love them.

More information regarding spanking and the corporal punishment of children can be found at Religious Tolerance.

Life, Choice, Options

As we reported back here, the name 'crisis pregnancy center/centre', aka fake pregnancy clinic, has acquired such a stink that anti-choicers eschewed the name in favour of the more forthright 'anti-abortion clinic'.

This caught my eye today: Mike Huckabee doing some fundraising for the fundies.

Huckabee was the featured speaker for the $50-a-plate fundraiser for Life Centers, formerly the Central Indiana Crisis Pregnancy Center, a group that provided free counseling, pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and other services to 21,889 pregnant women last year.

So I googled 'crisis pregnancy center formerly' and got a ton of hits. Rebranding among the fetus fetishists is running amok.

Many, like that Indiana gang, are going for 'Life Center' (ya know, as opposed to Kulture of Death Center): here, here and here.

Variants on the 'life' theme include
New Life Solutions (note lying plural -- there is only one solution to fetus fetishists), and LifeCare Pregnancy Center (care for life? Yeah, right.)

More care is offered by Care Net Pregnancy Center.

Then, of course, there's the otherwise anathema 'choice'. We've got LifeChoices in Colorado and Real Choices (ooooh, choices made by REAL women?) in Saskatoon.

'Crisis Pregnancy Centers' as a term is toast. 'Choice' is being usurped pretty thoroughly. (Think of last year's Canadian Blog Awards, Feminist Category.)

I predict that the next word to go down the road to Damascus will be 'options'. Planned Parenthood uses it.

Did we mention the persecution complex disorder?

Shrieeekkk!!! Police brutality harassment attention!!!

As JJ described it here, there was a non-event of MASSIVE portentousness that unfolded outside the Governor General's residence last Tuesday morning. The predictable and perfunctory scrutiny - to which all formal and non-formal gatherings of people for the purpose of contacting the GG are subjected - was ominous and threatening, as reported by Lifesite.

MacDonald, said, however, that the event took an odd turning at several points. Proulx, he said, informed the group while receiving the petitions that they did not have permission to take photos. But as they were on a public sidewalk, and what appeared to be a news camera was present, photos were taken. It was later discovered that the news camera was a camera-man sent by the Governor General's office to record the event, although it was unclear for what purpose.

I believe that the non-event was documented and recorded because zygote zealots and abortion-criminalizers have a history of accusing those who are neutral (or not undies-wetting supportive) of exhibiting hostility towards them. Thus, if David MacDonald (sperm donor), Frances Wilkenson (a woman holding up a sign reading 'I regret my abortion'), Faytene Kryskow (self-styled christian charismatic youth leader) or any member of the delegation claimed that the two members of the G-G's office who accepted the petition sneered at them, there would be proof that this in fact was not the case.

Is it an exaggeration to surmise that fetus fetishists are collectively or individually paranoid, hyper-reactive or suffering from persecution complex disorders? Judge for yourself - if you're in possession of a steady stomach or able to scrub down your keyboard/monitor set-up in the aftermath of an chucked-up lunch, go read SoCon Or Bust's impressions of the non-event.

I’m not sure what kind of thuggery the RCMP was engaging in, but I trust David’s account completely. ... And as for the Governor General’s big brother approach with the professional camera, I find that very eerie. ... There was no reason at all for the rough treatment these peaceful pro-lifers received from the RCMP.

"big brother" ... "rough treatment" ... There was nothing unusual about the actions that the GG's communications or security staff took. Photographic recordings, closed-circuit video equipement and verbal questioning have become the standard operating mode. This reported "odd turn" is quite disingenuous since the ideological glue that bonds abortion-criminalizers of all religious and political stripes seemingly justifies the actions of convicted terrorists and murderers.