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Columnists -- with bite! We feature conservative-friendly writers from Canada and the U.S. who help clarify the difference between liberals and conservatives. All have personally agreed to be a part of our team here at PTBC.

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2010
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The bourgeois tyranny of the fully-abled

It was revealed by The Wall Street Journal in late January that at a private strategy session in August, Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, blasted the internally divisive political ploy proposed by some aggressively left-wing Democrats as “f——-g retarded.”

An intense brouhaha, with disability advocacy groups, Special Olympics spokespeople and even Sarah Palin piling on, confirmed that the word “retarded”—though still a bona fide medical term—has almost achieved the same social radioactivity as “the N-word.”

Objectively there’s no viable comparison between the two.

The N-word is an odious racial slur targeting an identifiable group of humans endowed with immutable genetic characteristics. From its inception, the N-word has been identified with real immiseration of blacks by real racists.

By contrast, “retarded” is merely descriptive of an objective condition, and applicable to culturally disparate individuals. The term may even be said to be a euphemism: “delayed,” after all, suggests more hopefulness than is usually warranted for these unfortunates.

But, like its predecessors, “idiot,” “moron” and “feebleminded,” the once-benign “retard” has lost dignity through constant association with juvenile humour, as well as coarsely-couched impatience with normally intelligent people acting stupidly, Emanuel’s peccadillo. Medical and support groups now prefer “intellectually disabled.” (Strangely, the same fate has not befallen “gay,” despite its parallel downward trajectory in popular usage.)

To be fair, although never enslaved or maligned as a group, the disabled, until relatively recently, were overlooked at best, and often shamed, depersonalized and marginalized in all societies. But again to be fair, the West can be proud of its progress on the disability file. Over the centuries our perceptions of the deformed, the diseased and the disabled as ritually unclean or loathsome have evolved into attitudes of compassion, inclusion and frank admiration.

The Paralympics, beginning this Friday, are a testimony to the sensible modern understanding of disability as a modifier, but not a disqualifier, for participation in athletic competition—a far cry from the original Olympics where the slightest physical imperfection (even circumcision) disqualified candidates for inclusion.

None of this happened by magic. Activism amongst the disabled and their sympathizers followed the well-trodden path traversed by blacks, women and homosexuals in their legitimate, rights-claiming phases. Slowly but surely curbs became sloped, elevators were installed and wheelchair-friendly transportation was made available. Much remains to be done, but the principle of equal accessibility to public resources has been firmly established, a principle roundly supported by liberals and conservatives alike.

Until political activism morphed into a field of academic study. Then—as with women’s, queer and African-American studies—disability studies fell prey to the post-modern anti-intellectual credo amongst intellectuals that “studies” means the advancement of “theory” and political activism rather than disinterested free inquiry. Many liberals may like what they see on campus, most conservatives not so much.

On its face, the relatively nascent phenomenon of disability studies is an attractive concept. Disability in literature (fairy tales, mythology, Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare), in the plastic and visual arts, in family dynamics, in sports, in politics: All of these make lush intellectual pickings for real scholarship.

Instead the field has been colonized by leftist ideologues. You’ll find in its academic literature all the buzz words you see in race and gender studies: “progressive,” “oppression,” “bourgeois,” “empowerment.” Riffle through a few conference papers and it’s the same old, same old: “At the heart of disability studies is a recognition that disability is a cultural construction; that is, that ‘disability’ has no inherent meaning”; and “The exciting thing about disability studies is that it is both an academic field of inquiry and an area of political activity ...”; and “Social justice is at the heart of disability theory and changing morality in the Western world.”

In other words, disability studies’ academic stakeholders have co-opted the disabled—for the most part apolitical individuals seeking nothing more than a physical levelling of the playing field in order to pursue their unique personal goals—as eternal Marxist victims of “ableist” oppressors. (The University of Toronto disabilities studies department claims it “aims to examine and deconstruct ableism.”)

That’s where the animus against “retarded” comes from. The word suggests there is a normative IQ against which the -er -“cognitively different” can, and should, be measured. Like feminists who won’t hear of discrepancies between male and female faculties in maths and sciences, disability activists rebel against the bourgeois tyranny of the fully abled. The same denial of reality prevails.

(The deaf “culture” or “linguistic community” who resist integration through lip-reading is the most egregious example of the syndrome. Extreme disability correctness led two deaf lesbians to seek a congenitally deaf sperm donor to ensure a deaf child.)

Disabled individuals are owed all the help society can reasonably provide to live as normal a life as possible. Colour me ableist: I said it -the other N-word-“normal.” For “normal” is what any reasonable disabled person wants to be. If disability studies academics resist this reality, they may be cognitively abled, but they are ethically ... delayed.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, March 03, 2010
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On Sunday, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney praised a Federal Court ruling denying citizenship to Syrian immigrant Nasoh Raslan. At trial, it was revealed that Mr. Raslan’s Ontario “home” phone number was common to 62 other citizenship applicants, and his mailing address to 126 others.

Mr. Raslan reacted to events with a mixture of repentance and perplexity: “I now know that I definitely did not do the right thing,” he averred in an affidavit, “but at the time, I thought that [applying through another address] was simply a common and small stretch to the rules.”

Mr. Raslan has a right to be confused. Far greater stretches to the immigration rules—if under “rules” we include moral precepts of transparency and integrity—are made all the time, as any candid immigration judge will confirm.

Where do immigrants get the idea that stretching rules is “common” here? Partly from mercenary Canadians such as the “ghost” immigration consultants advertising their expertise on the perfectly legal website quickvisacanada.com.  If the boasts put forward therein are even approximately accurate, Nasoh Raslan and his fake address represent the least of Canada’s immigration problems. The first thing you see on the website’s professional-looking home page is the statement: “A cheap, quick and effective way to come to Canada.”

Intrigued? I certainly would be if I were a credulous would-be immigrant eager to avoid a lot of red tape.

The website lays out the steps for coming to Canada “quickly and easily,” including this one: “The next step is to help you find a motive in order to claim refugee in Canada. We will provide you with a listing of different motives so that you can choose the one that best suits you” (emphasis mine—though I will leave in all the various spelling and grammatical mistakes).

Leaving nothing to chance, the company provides motives that have worked for other people: “For example many of our clients choose the type of motives in which they claim that there were part of an organization (anti-abortion, human rights, gay or lesbian movement, etc., etc.) back in their home country and that some people were against that movement. This is just a simple example. Our services are so complete that we will brief you before your departure so that your motive is well documented and well verbalized. We guarantee you that the immigration official will not return you to your country.”

In case the encouragement to be creative with the truth didn’t sink in the first time, it’s repeated again under the Frequently Asked Questions: “When you retain our services we help you find an effective and valid motive. Do not worry. We are experts in this matter.”

To the FAQ question, “I am 75 years old. Can I go to Canada?” they answer: “Of course you can. If you apply for a Skilled Worker visa you will probably be denied du to the age factor but when you claim refugee in Canada, the important point is your motive ... We will make sure that you have a valid motive.”

Another FAQ raises the question of what to do if one’s “motive” is rejected. The answer: “We will guide you with a lot of information so that your refugee claim is gives the impression of being realistic and convincing. You will not have any problem. We have helped more than 1,200 people in the past eight years to claim refugee in Canada and every single person was able to claim refugee without being detained. ... We never leave anyone stranded. That is why we are so famous and that is why so many people hire us to come to Canada.”

You will not find the endorsing logo of the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants (CSIC) on quickvisacanada.com or other sites like it, but how is an immigrant to know that he should look for such a stamp of approval? In any case, there’s no downside to the client using ghost consultants (if they have the US$2,250 to pay up front) because claimants are not at present even asked if they have been coached by immigration consultants, let alone whether those consultants are legitimate or not.

Quebec, the only province controlling its own immigration policies, is moving to regulate immigration consultancy and close this loophole, a sensible initiative applauded by the CSIC. The federal government must also become ghost consultant-busters. Then Mr. Kenney may more credibly boast, as he did regarding the Raslan court decision, that his government is working hard “to protect the integrity of Canadian citizenship, particularly from those who would obtain it through fraud.”

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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I was walking my four-year-old granddaughter home from her (parochial) junior kindergarten a few weeks ago, a frequent pleasure, when she announced, “You can’t see God, because He is inside you.”

I agreed that was the case. But how, she wanted to know, could you be sure He was there. Simplicity my watchword, I replied that when people do good things, God is the happiness in their hearts, and when they do bad things, God is the sadness in their hearts. Summoning up the history of her parents’ strictures around good and bad behaviour and consulting her own emerging conscience, she nodded with grave approval: God as the ultimate parent suited her vision of what a worship-worthy deity should be.

As we continued chatting about God and His mysterious ways, I noticed that I was occasionally glancing behind me in what I later shamefully identified as a furtive reflex—as though God-talk to the innocent young were something a secularly correct passer-by might consider suspicious.

Within my adult lifetime I have witnessed God and religion decline from supremely important topics all thinking people grappled with -even left-wing academics; God (not to mention Israel) was very welcome on campus in my day—to subjects it is an intellectual act of defiance to take seriously.

Humans gravitate to religion—or, faute de mieux, to ideology—because we are by nature worshipful creatures with an instinct for codifying and institutionalizing belief systems, the better to strengthen civic bonding and rationalize social decency.

Today a vociferous cluster of arrogant intellectuals, circulating spiritually untethered through life like unvaccinated children in a vaccinated populus, and mistaking their unmolested health for a useful global template, would persuade us that is not the case. They insist that if religion disappeared, society would function perfectly well on the basis of reason alone. But no society, religious or godless, ever has, so the burden of proof is on them.

Worshipfulness abhors a vacuum and history shows that in a vacuum, whatever absolutism—communism, multiculturalism, environmentalism—pushes itself forward most aggressively will claim people’s attention and acquiescence.

In our Western case, after many a historical divagation and slough of despond, religion has for the last few centuries put its highest moral and social ideals to the service of democracy and a market economy to produce the freest, happiest, most peaceful, egalitarian, compassionate, productive and prosperous societies in recorded history.

Indeed, so successful have our societies become that our heavy thinkers believe we arrived at this pinnacle of tolerance and sensitivity and equality by sheer intelligence, and that our Western religious tradition is an actual hindrance to even greater social progress. Now we are told to jettison the God and religion that got us where we are (but romanticize the religions that didn’t) and worship society’s beautiful minds.

But this would be a disaster for children. It is a great mistake to think that a child’s mind has the capacity to satisfy his inherent but inchoate yearning for transcendence through reason. The ability to reason one’s way to a world-view emerges too late, when a child’s confidence and friendliness to the world has already been established—or not.

Children are born conservatives. They are not satisfied with chaos theory or moral relativism. They want order, a system, a precise identity (my friend’s grandchild told a schoolmate he was “half Jewish, half Christmas”). They need an infallible “GPS” to navigate their way through “mean” playmates, unfair or insensitive teaching, the troubling deaths of pets and family members, rumours of war and natural disasters.

In their evolved character, our heritage religions coexist in perfect harmony with the ideal of a pluralist society. Properly transmitted by parents and dedicated educators, instruction in God and religion has nothing to do with indoctrination, a political strategem that seeks to enslave, not ennoble, young minds, proclaiming all other paths to righteousness as thought crimes or worse.

(A perfect example of indoctrination is Quebec’s universal school Ethics and Religious Culture program, where the state is co-opting vulnerable minds to implant the relativist canard that all religions, cults, (state-approved) ideologies and pagan legends are morally, intellectually and spiritually equivalent.)

Until recently most atheists grew up with God and religion. Their reasoning skills were not impaired. On the contrary, once intellectually autonomous, they were far better equipped for self-interrogation than those raised with no beliefs at all. There is nothing to be lost in gifting children with God and religion, but much to be gained—for them as individuals and for society as a whole.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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In their choice of divorce lawyers as in all else, royals Charles and Diana went their separate ways: Charles to experienced establishment divorce-law solicitor Fiona Shackleton, Diana to Anthony Julius, a trusted advisor, but a libel-law specialist.

A Telegraph article praised Charles’s sensible choice. But as for Diana’s: “[Julius] is a Jewish intellectual and ... less likely to feel constrained by the considerations of fair play. ‘I’d be very worried if I were the Royal family,’ says a Cambridge don who taught him. ‘He’ll get lots of money out of them.’ “

The Telegraph was forced to apologize for promoting this stereotype of the Jew as pushy outsider. The impulse behind it reflects enduring national prejudices: that Jews are unusually clever, especially about money, but won’t “play the game” as gentlemen do. (The words “Jewish gentleman” are never irony-free in England.)

Yet the Telegraph’s slur was in fact the only time in his life that Anthony Julius personally had experienced overt anti-Semitism, he informs us in the introduction to his sumptuously informative new book, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England.

An unfamiliar name here, Julius is a public figure in England, as well-known for literary criticism as for his legal activism against anti-Semitism. He wrote this exhaustively researched tome (600 pages of text, 200 pages of footnotes) to better understand both anti-Semitism and himself: “The English Jew is what he is in part because of English anti-Semitism.”

Julius posits several versions of English anti-Semitism. The first type, medieval Jew-hatred, was “vast, abysmal and intense,” descending from defamation to expropriation and murder, culminating, in 1290, in a 400-year exile.

Upon the Jews’ return, for mixed cultural, political and religious reasons amplified in the book, England shifted to a second type, the milder “quotidian” genre of modern, old-boy anti-Semitism exhibited by The Telegraph, an anti-Semitism “of insult and rebuff, not of expulsion and murder.”

It is a commonplace that violence against Jews always begins with words. But Julius shows us that anti-Semitic discourse—plentiful, ubiquitous, often vicious—never led to organized violence or official betrayal of Jews in modern England as it did in Germany, Russia and France. (As George Orwell put it, English anti-Semitism existed, but “no one wants actually to do anything to the Jews.”)

Julius ascribes the absence of organized hostility to a lack of preoccupation with Jews amongst English intellectuals (unlike France’s, who were obsessed by them), but also to national character, to the Englishman’s sense of gentlemanly behaviour, and his (then) cultural confidence. (A late-19th century Spectator article said: “[The Jews] are clever and vigorous no doubt, but only a decadent race need be afraid of them ... The nation that cannot tolerate the Jews, and becomes deeply inspired by the anti-Semitic terror, is not the nation that will win.”)

A third type, which we live with today in all Western nations (especially on our campuses), attends the alliance between Islamism and Leftist anti-Zionism—which is based, in part, on the ancient blood libel that depicts Jews as predators who seek to kill innocent gentiles.

As it turns out, the best-known works of the three most revered writers in the English literary canon are predicated on this blood libel: Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale, in which a harmless child unknowingly offends Jews, who cut his throat, after which he becomes a martyr; Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (written during the Jewish exile), which introduced “pound-of-flesh” Shylock to the world; and Dickens’s Oliver Twist, featuring Fagin, a repellent child predator of boundless wi c k e d n e s s . In each case, the blood of a Christian child or a childlike innocent is ritually shed or lusted after by rapacious, self-serving Jews.

Contemporary anti-Zionism has re-invigorated this libel in its most virulent form. The evil Jews are now Israelis, the Christian innocent is the Palestinian child, ruthlessly shot (the Muhammad al-Durrah myth) or his organs harvested (a particularly obscene variation of the blood/ matzo myth). Its latest cultural incarnation is Caryl Churchill’s 2009 blood-libel play, Seven Jewish Children—a Play for Gaza.

Writing Trials of the Diaspora was for this most erudite and highly civilized of English gentlemen the intellectual equivalent of trawling through muck ( “Anti-Semitism is a sewer”). Worse, he knows it won’t change a single anti-Semite’s mind.

For those free of such bigotry, however, Trials of the Diaspora, the study of muck, is scholarly gold.

• Anthony Julius is speaking at York University in Toronto on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. For information, contact Bridget Newson at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010
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A feminist icon, “thealogist” Mary Daly died Jan. 3 at the age of 81. Almost unknown outside the academy, Daly was a militant influence on feminist approaches to religion.

If her name is faintly familiar, you’re likely recalling a brief late-‘90s media surge around a lawsuit against Jesuit-run Boston College, Daly’s longtime academic home, initiated by a male student barred from Daly’s women-only classes. Effectively fired as a result, Daly “retired” from academic life in 2001.

Daly’s academic ascendancy coincided with the rise of dissident Catholic theology in the 1960s and ‘70s after the Second Vatican Council, when radicalized Catholics worked vociferously (and unsuccessfully) to liberalize normative Catholicism’s approaches to contraception, homosexuality and abortion.

In 1968 Daly published The Church and the Second Sex, her seminal “j’accuse” work indicting the Catholic Church for its humiliation of women by a patriarchal hierarchy. This was followed in 1973 by an even more inflammatory anti-male book, Beyond God the Father.

Daly found her true calling as an ayatollah figure for a ludicrous religion she helped to invent. “Goddess spirituality” is based on an anticipatory Garden of Eden myth cut from whole imaginary cloth. Initially a strictly ivory-tower phenomenon, Goddess spirituality was later vulgarized through two hugely popular books, The Chalice and the Blade (1989) by Riane Eisler and The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown.

In Daly’s utopian narrative, the first human cultures worshipped a Great Mother Goddess and lived as peacefully, collaboratively and ecologically responsibly as the movie Avatar’s blue-skinned aliens, the Na’vi, who worship a goddess Daly would have loved, and whose creation she may have inspired.

Humans inhabited this paleo-Eden under the benevolent spiritual tutelage of the Goddess. She nurtured allegedly female values of peace and harmony and environmental sensitivity. From 40,000-5000 BCE all was harmony; men and women rejoiced in their benign collaboration for the common good.

Then barbarian male hordes marauded their way across the pacifist Goddess’s domains. These “phallocratic” savages introduced the evils of racism, social hierarchies, war-mongering and eco-rape. Subsequent human history is the tragic tale of a violent, controlling patriarchy, aligned with ruthless capitalism, environmental despoliation and unrelieved misogyny.

According to Professor Katherine Young and researcher Paul Nathanson of McGill University’s religious studies department, and fully elaborated in their just-published book on Goddess spirituality, Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess ideology and the fall of man, it’s all nonsense: ideology gussied up as religious myth. Their methodical exposure of Goddess spirituality’s perversion of Christian tropes reveals the misandric obsession at its core. Taking Daly’s scapegoating revisionism as a reliable clue, they site Goddess spirituality—and for other persuasive reasons feminism in general—under the rubric of conspiracy theorism.

Exploiting to the hilt the exceptionalism with regard to group intolerance Women’s Studies takes for granted within the academy, Mary Daly got away with shocking gratuitous sexism. Her lesbianism doesn’t explain her hatred of men, but may account for her belief that in the messianic return to the pre-lapsarian golden age of female hegemony Goddess spirituality subscribes to, men will be superfluous.

Interestingly, in their respectful obituaries the mainstream media scanted Daly’s extreme misandry. Typically, the New York Times discretely allowed that her work “explored [men’s] misogyny in religion in general.” Which is the academic equivalent of saying the 9/11 jihadis “explored” anti-Westernism in their actions.

None cut to the chase on this horrible woman: her exterminationist loathing for men, as evidenced in statements like: “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accomplished by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males [by 90%]. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.”

There’s a reason we don’t “say that kind of stuff anymore.” It’s hate speech. Call for a “drastic reduction” of any other identifiable group in society and see if your books get published or appear on your department’s recommended reading list.

Lest you assume Daly was perceived by peers as a nutbar akin to a Raëlian or a Scientologist, the Encyclopedia of World Biography pronounced her “the foremost feminist theoretician and philosopher in the United States.” She was feted at the mainstream 1998 American Academy of Religion conference, where an adoring throng chanted her name in mantra-like perseveration, and one representative sycophant, Carter Heyword, the first female Anglican priest, burbled: “[Clerics] like myself [...] because of you, Mary, knew very early in our professional sojournings that God the Father was a necrophilic overseer of nothing but lies.”

Feminism’s media spinmeisters insist feminism is not misandric. But Daly’s toxic works cannot be “spun.” If a hate-based dualism of female sanctitude and male original sin is acceptable to Women’s Studies, then Women’s Studies should not be acceptable to us.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, December 30, 2009
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Something odd occurred in the two days following the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre earlier this month. Commentaries by both Margaret Wente of The Globe and Mail and Jonathan Kay of the Post were sharply critical of the emotive and irrational linkage of the Massacre with the phenomenon of domestic violence against women. Neither pundit is known to be anti-feminist in general, but both columns recommended we desacralize the Polytechnique killings, accept them for the freak tragedy they were and stop guilt-tripping all men for Marc Lepine’s unique paranoiac fixations.

Ranting about the unwholesome social ends to which the Massacre has been put used to be my lonely job every Dec. 6. Finding myself in such good company was a happy surprise and, I think, an iconoclastic cultural moment: Let us recognize that female victimhood is not intrinsically more tragic than male victimhood, these columns seemed to say.

Commonsensical Canadians are losing patience with the angry, blame-all-males school of feminism. It’s no accident that the feminist Toronto Women’s Bookstore, for years a bustling cynosure of the cultural zeitgeist, is in danger of closing down. Or that once overflowing women’s studies classes are emptying out, or morphing into “gender studies” to attract more students (a trap, really: Gender studies are also gynocentric, offering a more subtle version of heterosexual male-bashing than women’s studies).

Rob Kenedy, an assistant professor in the sociology department of York University with a specialty in the men’s rights movement, was unique amongst sociologues in teaching a course in the 1990s about men and their particular tribulations and needs. In a telephone interview he recalled his surprise when more young women signed up than men: “Women are far more interested in learning about men and masculinity than men are.”

Because the numbers in universities are so skewed to the distaff—in a current obligatory sociology course, his own tutorial is comprised of 25 women and two men—Kenedy predicts sociology departments will have to open up (positive)masculinity courses to satisfy the burgeoning curiosity of women about what makes men tick.

Kenedy is convinced, as I am, that we are exiting the gender wars. Feminism is increasingly “out of fashion” and recent years have seen “a crumbling of the [feminist] foundation.” Culturally sanctioned misandry is beginning to cause discomfort. Women today, he says, want equality without stridency, a return to feminism’s first principles.

Positive acknowledgment of masculinity began with the public honour paid to courageous fallen firefighters of 9/11. For Canadians it is more linked to public mourning around the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan. From the outset of her tenure in 1999, governor general Adrienne Clarkson embraced her patronage of the military—integrated, but still the last cultural bastion of indisputably masculine virtues—with inspirational acts of solidarity with our troops, and Michaelle Jean has continued the tradition with enthusiasm.

In the past decade, we have started noticing that boys exist as something other than future violent men in need of preemptive anger management (the main thrust of the White Ribbon Campaign in schools). We have been made aware—uncomfortably, graphically—that boys also suffer sexual and physical abuse from both men and women. Continuing revelations of boys’ victimization in church-run residential schools and highly publicized pedophilia amongst some priests, sports coaches and parents cannot be ignored.

The recent publication of commissioner G. Normand Glaude’s statement on the long-running Cornwall Public Inquiry into pedophile rings contains a litany of shameful deficits in our legal and social institutions that have facilitated ongoing abuse of boys because they are not equipped—and for ideological reasons have lacked interest in equipping themselves—to deal with boys’ and men’s psychological responses to abuse. That will change.

My predictions—call them hopes if you prefer—for the next decade:

-We will see the return of the traditional family unit as a phenomenon worthy of concern and respect. The needs of children will come first;

-Equal parenting will become the default custody arrangement as the optimal situation for children; the resultant decline in adversarial legal battles will diminish false allegations of abuse by women and punitive support-withholding by men, both of which punish children more than parents;

-The specific needs of boys and men will be accorded the same pedagogical, social and legal rights and respect as girls: We will see funding for shelters for abused men and children, or ungendered family shelters for whoever needs it;

-Domestic violence will be acknowledged as a serious but bilateral problem that is unacceptable, whether perpetrated by men or women. But we will also acknowledge that systemic misogyny of the kind made manifest in honour crimes against women is a culturally-derived phenomenon that is alien to Canadian values, and that it is wrong to assign collective guilt for such crimes to Canadian men.

If the pendulum in the gender wars really is swinging back to the middle, it should become received wisdom that men and women are genetically hard-wired for different strengths, weaknesses and psychological needs.

So, having agreed that intact families are by far the greatest predictors of success for children than anything else, we will jettison the power struggle paradigm feminism has been pushing for decades. We will move toward a collaborative model in which men and women are equal in value but, guided by nature and common sense, separate in their parental roles and influence. The result will be a happier, more productive generation of Canadian children.

As a good-faith start to this paradigm shift—and this really will restore some dignity to gender relations—let’s retire the Montreal Massacre from public life and return mourning rituals for the Polytechnique victims to the families of the victims. As a logical extension, the systemically sexist White Ribbon Campaign should be mothballed and replaced by a gender-neutral educational program against all forms of violence, informed by evidence-based, non-ideological studies.

Am I dreaming in technicolour? Let me know in 2020. Happy New Year to all my readers.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Thursday, December 17, 2009
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In September 2008, after years of pre-planning by elites without public consultation, Quebec’s Ministry of Education established a province-wide, compulsory pedagogical program called Ethique et Culture Religieuse (ECR).

All Quebec students—public, private, even the homeschooled—must take ECR (with the exception of one secondary school year) from age six through high school.

On its sunny face, the ECR program introduces students to the rich variety of religious beliefs and rituals in today’s “intercultural” Quebec, where all citizens “live together in the bosom of a Quebec [that is] democratic and open to the world.”

But a newly landed bombshell amongst Quebec’s chattering classes, a study produced by Ethnic Studies PhD candidate Joelle Querin for the Institut de Recherche sur le Quebec, persuasively argues that the ideology behind the course is anything but benign, reinforcing concerns about this troubling program I expressed in these pages last December.

Following a close analysis of the course’s stated objectives, content, teachers’ roles and suggested activities, Querin pulls no punches in her conclusion: “I wanted to verify if the course gives knowledge to children or if it indoctrinates them. I observed that it was the second alternative that prevailed.”

Two values dominate the program’s objectives: learning to “vivre ensemble” (live together) and arriving at the “bien commun” (the common good). How does ECR produce social harmony? By constant “dialogue” and “recognition” of other cultures, which can only be accomplished, in the words of ECR mandarin Georges Leroux, by inculcating in children “absolute respect for every religious position.”

But according to ECR, “every religious position” includes pagan animism, witchcraft (Wiccans “are women like any other in daily life”), and the nutbar Raelian Movement ( “technologically, [the Raelians] are 25,000 years in advance of us”). To bundle superstitions and cults together with authentic religions, then demand deference to all, is to discourage actual respect for any but the state religion of “normative pluralism,” the real aim of the program.

In its indifference to objective knowledge, in its crusade to hallow cultural relativism and a strictly Charter-of-rights based identity, ECR stimulates heritage students’ detachment from their own cultural touchstones, and chills critical thinking in all students.

Guerin cites, for example, one instance where students were invited to redesign the Quebec flag, replacing the cross with a more “inclusive” symbol, and another, an activity called “Youpi! Ma religion a moi!” (my own religion!) in which religions actually invented by students are accorded the same esteem as real ones. Such subversive pedagogical impulses dismissively mock Quebec’s unique culture, based, like all others, in a shared language, religion and collective values formed over time.

In the ECR scheme, teachers do not actually convey knowledge, but rather “plan, organize activities, advise, accompany, encourage, support ...make suggestions, but never impose.”

But they must and do “impose” sometimes. The program harps relentlessly on “dialogue” as the principal vehicle for learning to “vivre ensemble.” But if, according to an editing team spokesman, the dialogue does not follow a politically correct script—that is, if students of independent mind or critical point of view diverge in behaviour or words from the prescribed “recognition” mantra: all cultural traditions are equal; all beliefs are good—“The teacher must intervene immediately to stop it on the spot. Any attack in class on the dignity of the person or the common good must be immediately denounced, because it is not tolerated in our society. In that [respect], the program of Ethical and Religious Culture is not neutral.”

Thus Guerin darkly warns: “After having followed the ECR course for 10 years, the students won’t have a great knowledge of religions, but one thing is sure: no [cultural] accommodation will seem unreasonable to them.”

A May 2009 Leger marketing poll on ECR found that 76% of Quebecois prefer a choice in religious education; they think their elites have shown contempt for the population. Many parents are demanding ECR exemptions, if not outright abolition of the program. Grassroots resistance movements—strange bedfellows of anti-clericalists, practicing Catholics and nationalists, each with their own support network—are pushing back through political activism, the media and the courts .

As well they should. ECR is a creepy state foray into social engineering. Disguised as multicultural feel-goodism, the program is in reality the utopian Quebec Left’s strategic plan for societal transformation. Their tactics: the appropriation of parents’ natural and rightful authority over their children’s religious upbringing; the willful erosion of children’s pride in their Quebec patrimony; and the slow suffocation of students’ inherent curiosity and intellectual autonomy.

If Quebec does not wish to end up in the sick ward of Western cultures, ECR must be excised in the operating theatre of popular resistance.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, December 02, 2009
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In the process of conveying a general idea or a cue to an emotional response, we often seek instinctive recourse in a linguistic device called antonomasia. We’ll substitute an antonomastic placeholder like “Solomon” for a wise person or “Hitler” for an evil one, “Pearl Harbor” for an ineluctable casus belli, and so forth.

The words “Barbie doll” used to elicit the image of a ditzy blonde bimbo. No longer. Since Nov. 20, the 50th anniversary of this iconic doll and beloved plaything of little girls everywhere, 500 Barbies—including various Barbies wearing chadors and full burkas—have been on show at the Salone del Cinquecento in Florence, Italy.

The exhibition is sponsored by toy company Mattel, Barbie’s owner. Dolls wearing “traditional Islamic dress”—the burkas and chadors—were chosen to be auctioned off by Sotheby’s as a fundraiser for the Italian branch of Save the Children.

A Barbie collector attending the exhibition from England opined: “Bring it on, Burka Barbie ... I think this is really important for girls. Wherever they are from, they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.”

I have seen some pretty tawdry advertising campaigns in my time, but I must say this one takes the cake for insensitivity. What’s next in dolls that are “important for girls” to play with? “Illiterate Barbie”? “Forced-Marriage Barbie”?

One has to wonder what was going through the heads of these people. Mattel is a gigantic company with, one would presume, the cream of the advertising world’s crop at its beck and call. Save the Children has for many decades been in the business of rescuing children from poverty, despair and injustice. And yet neither the world’s biggest advertising brains nor the world’s most child-sensitive hearts saw the impropriety of “clothing” the world’s most instantly recognizable toy in the world’s most instantly recognizable symbol of oppression.

The dolls make a mockery of disempowered women who have been stripped of all human dignity, women with no means of challenging their forced depersonalization. There can be no parallel between these travesties of multiculturalism and other “diversity” Barbies—brown Barbies, native-dress Barbies, pilot Barbies—avatars that reflect the natural appearance and truly traditional garb and career choices of free women.

For starters, burkas are not “traditional Islamic dress,” because they are not “dress” at all. Burkas are not a sartorial multicultural counterpoint to Dallas Cheerleader Barbie. Thrown over clothes, they are, in the words of an Afghanistan woman to a visiting Canadian journalist, “walking coffins.”

The teeth of burka clad women fall out because their faces never get any Vitamin-D-rich sunlight. Is this a suitable object of play?

Neither are burkas “traditional.” They were invented quite recently by fanatically misogynistic fundamentalists who make a habit of beating or killing or disfiguring any woman insufficiently self-extinguished by this suffocating tent. These women and girls are wearing chadors and niqabs and in many circumstances hijabs for reasons that have nothing to do with their own wishes or choices. Some even die for a failure to meet the draconian standards of the “modesty” police, as 15 Saudi girls did when forced back into a burning school because their hair was uncovered in flight. Having fun yet?

Many moms won’t let their little girls play with any dolls. Many won’t let their little boys play with guns. Their stance represents an extreme, but not illogical, extension of Western cultural ideals. In the eyes of the majority who do consider both dolls and guns natural objects of play, however, there should be no moral distinction between Burka Barbie and a putative G.I. Joe figure in a suicide vest for essentially they both represent a medieval Islamist worldview that flies in the face of the West’s most cherished values: equality of men and women and respect for human life, including one’s own.

Antonomastically speaking, there’s a loss in this story. As a symbol of obliterated femalehood, Barbie has shed her cultural innocence.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009
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National Addictions Awareness Week begins today (Nov. 18-24). Everybody—informed or otherwise—has an opinion on addiction and how to treat it, so the subject never fails to generate animated public debate.

The literature on addiction is voluminous. Any amateur researcher trying to get a handle on the constant outpouring of medical, governmental and ideologically-tuned advocacy literature (both for and against legalization of drugs) will find it a daunting and confusing business. I have tried, so I know.

In the end it’s pretty simple. Everyone agrees addiction takes a terrible human and societal toll. It’s what to do about it that polarizes us. Opinion invariably drifts toward one of two basic camps, depending on one’s view of human nature.

According to the Tough Love (TL) school, human beings are endowed with moral agency and can control their choices. In this view, however painful the circumstances driving the flight into the oblivion drugs provide, nobody is beyond redemption if he chooses—and even if he doesn’t choose, but is forced into -long-term community-based rehabilitative therapy.

According to the Romantic school, summed up in the philosophy of Harm Reduction (HR), addiction is a chronic disease, like rheumatoid arthritis, that befalls victims. The best we can hope to do, from this perspective, is palliate the misery and mitigate the spread of disease and crime, while enabling the addiction’s perpetuation more hygenically.

For the ultimate Romantic approach, read Gabor Mate’s 2008 book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Dr. Mate, a sainted icon of the drug legalization movement, ministers full time to hard-core substance abusers. An admittedly neurotic personality with multiple manias and a hunger for both celebrity and vicarious suffering, the spiritually restless doctor found his bliss in his identification with the inhabitants of the Portland hotel, home to Vancouver’s most unregenerate human wreckage ( “I saw the cockroaches and fell in love”).

Mate sees all of humanity as more or less addicted to something. For himself it is classical CDs; Conrad Black is “addicted to status”; and perhaps you are addicted to chocolate cake. Oh yes, and that emaciated parody of a human being lying spaced out in his own vomit is addicted to a “substance.” It’s all one, you see. And therefore: “Addiction can never be understood if looked at through the lens of moralism and judgment.”

After wading through Mate’s hagiography of junkiedom, you may, as I did, yearn for nothing so much as a heavy dose of moralism and judgment, not to mention assurance you are not an addict, even if, like me, you tend to buy a lot of books you may never read. You will find compelling abundance of both moralism and judgment in the Emmy-award winning TV series about addiction, Intervention. I have no use for reality shows in general, but this one I’m addic—er, I really like.

At the end of every Intervention segment, the addict—of alcohol, cocaine, heroin, gambling, oxycontin, you name it—is surprised with an intervention by his loved ones, facilitated by one of three plain-spoken ex-addicts.

You would not believe the tears that flow on this show, or the outpouring of love—real, passionately felt, unconditional—the parents and siblings and friends feel for the addict, love the addict accepts as an entitlement or shrugs off with indifference.

Unlike the co-suffering, romanticizing Mate, the ex-addict facilitators are pragmatic, cool, been-there-done-that realists. They are unmoved by the addict’s narcissism, self-pity and grievance-collecting.

The format of the intervention capping the addict’s documented downward spiral is invariable: The addict is seated in the midst of those whose lives he or she is ruining. Up to now they have been enabling the addict out of helplessly protective love.

The intervention begins with family members reading their own texts, enumerating the enabling behaviours they will no longer endorse (money, free accommodation, etc.), all ending with, “Will you accept this gift [of 90-day community rehabilitation therapy]?”

Usually the addict breaks down, as each of the addict’s victims makes clear the devastating scope of addiction’s consequences on others, especially children. They accept the rehabilitation, with varying degrees of gratitude or reluctance. Some succeed at it; some don’t.

The dramatic televised difference between the addicts in the grip of their grotesque enslavement and their mature acceptance of responsibility for their lives 60 days later is remarkable and inspiring.

In a nutshell: HR thinks shaming and blaming addicts is cruel and unfair. TL thinks shaming and blaming addicts is the only way to open their eyes wide enough to their own selfishness and degradation to push them into recovery. Read the “compassionate” Mate book, then see the “tough” Intervention, and then tell me: Which would you choose for someone you love?

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009
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Last week the Post published excerpts from the new guidebook issued by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship. I was asked by a radio talk show host what difference the guidebook would make in terms of my own writing on issues the new text raised, especially the section on gender relations, one of my niche topics. I replied that I would still be saying exactly what I have always said, but now that the government’s official position is the same as mine, I won’t have to feel defensive anymore. I was thinking specifically of the passage in the section “The Equality of Women and Men” (note the word order) where the guidebook says: “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,’... or other gender-based violence.”

Barbaric? Barbaric? That’s a judgment — a negative judgment — of other people’s cultural practices. We may have arrived at a watershed moment in the history of multiculturalism. Indeed, this may be our official policy of multiculturalism’s “tear-down-this-wall” moment. It may even soon be possible to say that multiculturalism has failed as a national policy without being labelled a racist.

Good on Jason Kenney for pointing out this particular naked emperor. For too long violence in the West directed against girls and women from honour/shame societies by their male relatives, often with the complicity of their female relatives, has been reflexively lumped in with all domestic violence (DV). The refusal to distinguish between the two types of violence is championed by gender ideologues who can’t bear the idea that some forms of violence against women are a culturally imposed pathology and not, as they would prefer, a tragic but predictable example of the inherently misogynistic and controlling instincts of all men.

Ideologues are abetted in this wilful sabotage of common sense by ethnic associations who at best ignore the abuse and at worst deflect criticism from their cultural “values” by insisting such abuse is normative.

When 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was allegedly murdered by her father in Mississauga, Ont., reportedly in part for not wearing a hijab, Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress brushed off the tragedy with a stunningly cynical dumbing-down of its horror: “I don’t want the public to think that this is an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue. It is a teenager issue.”

But Elmasry is right about one thing: Honour killing is largely (about 90%), but not solely, a practice of Muslim societies. Amandeep Atwal, 17, of British Columbia, was stabbed 11 times by her father, Rajinder Singh Atwal, for refusing to end a relationship with a non-Sikh boyfriend. Hindus and even Christians coming from South Asian cultures kill girls and women for reasons of family or community “honour.” It’s difficult to ascertain numbers: Many honour killings are passed off by the victims’ families to authorities as suicide or accidents.

While honour killings are a minority of all domestic killings, they are also a distinct phenomenon. Lenore Walker, author of The Battered Woman Syndrome (2000), notes the difference between the victim-perpetrator in honour killings and those in Western society: “In ordinary domestic violence involving Westerners, it is rare for brothers to kill sisters or for male cousins to kill female cousins. And while child abuse occurs in which fathers may kill infants and children, it is very rare for Western fathers to kill teenage daughters.”

In the West it is far more typical for fathers who disapprove of their daughters’ lifestyle or behaviour to shun them or disassociate from them. There are a whole slew of differences besides these between honour killing and normative domestic violence. Honour killings target mostly daughters; normative DV is bilateral between intimate adult partners. Honour killings are carefully planned; DV is spontaneous. Honour killings involve complicity with other family members; DV is a private affair. Honour killing is motivated by perceived family humiliation; DV is not about honour: DV springs from personal psychological problems. Honour killings are perpetrated with extreme ferocity (rape, burning, stoning, hacking, even burying alive); DV is simply and hastily executed — usually by gun, knife or blunt object. Most important of all: Honour killings elicit approval in their communities; DV elicits disgust.

Perhaps now that the government has “outed” the obvious fact that systemic, socially approved male violence against women is not a genetic but a cultural pathology, we can begin to address it seriously and help the thousands of immigrant women who are kept in ignorance of their rights and the thousands of immigrant men who are oblivious of their culpability.

But we must do more than educate them. Because even when these brainwashed women become aware they have rights, they are usually too frightened of retribution for their perceived rebelliousness — and justifiably so — to challenge the collective dogmas of their kinship groups.

This guidebook is a great first step. The next step should be to extend meaningful outreach and protection to women inside these communities. I would hope that feminists would applaud Jason Kenney’s courage in admitting an unpleasant truth, and support him loudly and clearly. If they don’t, they can hardly call themselves feminists.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, November 04, 2009
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They don’t call it the scary-sounding “Hemlock Society” any more. The new name is “Compassion and Choices.” Under this cuddly rubric, bespoke death is now endorsed by respected society matrons and politicians as euthanasia’s version of Planned Parenthood. The once-reviled euthanasia obsessional — and criminal — Dr. Kevorkian, is raking in $50,000 a pop on the lecture circuit. The cultural wind is in euthanasia’s sails and the most unlikely people are heeding its siren call.

In his Monday op-ed, “Make life the first choice,” MP Steven Fletcher provides what looks like a persuasive explanation for why he will abstain on private member’s bill C-384, which seeks to make euthanasia legal in certain circumstances.

Because Mr. Fletcher is a C4 quadriplegic, paralyzed completely from the neck down as a result of a car crash in early manhood, his words will carry special moral weight on this thorny issue. And that’s unfortunate.

Having passed through the valley of death and excruciating pain, Mr. Fletcher understands like few others how death can present as a blessed release from apparent hopelessness. Indeed, in the early days of his ordeal, he says, he did wish to die, but “in my case, my own wish to be euthanized in the time after my accident … changed as I began to receive more support.”

The obvious irony Mr. Fletcher does not address in this crucial piece of testimony is that if euthanasia had been legal at the time of his accident, his wish for death would have been expeditiously respected. He would not be here to demonstrate that even the most profound despair can be converted to hopefulness and appreciation for a straitened, but still meaningful life. He would not be here to prove to other severely disabled people that even the most extreme physical constraints are no barrier to high achievement.

In short, Mr. Fletcher is living proof that a dedicated support circle and wholehearted commitment to healing within the medical community can lead to a life worth living, even for someone lacking control of his body or bodily functions.

“Bodily functions” is code for a bright line in EuthanasiaSpeak: Control equals “dignity”; no control equals no dignity. The complex caregiving and machinery that sustains Mr. Fletcher’s approximate workaday parity with his peers was designed with the understanding that no life is without value, which is why the attention he received was unconflictedly focused on recovery, however partial.

But through a social lens that sees a hierarchy of value in human life, such single-mindedness is impossible. Although they are too polite to say so out loud, many euthanasia militants, however admiring of Mr. Fletcher’s contribution to society, quietly assess the resources involved in meeting his physical needs and eye his unique mobility apparatus with calculating, even resentful speculation as to how many of their tax dollars are earmarked for someone who is, after all, not living with “dignity.”

Nobody with the most rudimentary knowledge of human nature, fleshed out in the alarmingly escalating number of euthanasia cases in jurisdictions where it is legal, can find reassurance in Mr. Fletcher’s idealistic assumption that two conflicting existential beliefs — all life has value, not all life has value — can co-exist in social harmony.

Sadly, his op-ed will do nothing to help those opposed to C-384, but it will be exploited to great advantage by proponents of legal euthanasia. They will make good use of Mr. Fletcher’s sympathy for those unrepresentative few in our population who are “forced to live in pain that truly is intolerable.”

Truly intolerable pain that cannot be managed and/or never abates is rare and becoming rarer with advances in the science of pain relief. In any case, in countries where euthanasia is legal, the option was first offered to those in “truly” intolerable pain; next it was offered to those in “intolerable” pain; now it is offered to those in “pain”  — and even, increasingly, given, not offered, to those assumed to be in pain.

If Mr. Fletcher does in fact believe that Canada should be “providing the level of support required to make living the first choice,” then he should vote against Bill C-384. In the psycho-social value system legal euthanasia entrains, high-maintenance sufferers who choose life are perceived as selfish, while high-maintenance individuals who choose death are perceived as public benefactors. Thus, paradoxically, those like Mr. Fletcher who are necessarily a financial burden to the state — a burden euthanasia opponents cheerfully embrace as the mark of a civilized society — can only be unequivocally encouraged to make life “the first choice” if it remains the only choice.

Mr. Fletcher is alive and productive today because at the time of his crisis those charged with his care were not empowered to consider other morally equivalent “options.” If he abstains on C-384, therefore, one might be forgiven for interpreting his surrender to the cultural zeitgeist to mean après moi, le déluge.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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English poet Philip Larkin, informed that heaven would restore him to a state of childish innocence, abjured the supposed gift, preferring “money, keys, wallets, letters, books, long-playing records, dinner, the opposite sex and other solaces of adulthood.” I know what he meant. In the Thirties, Larkin’s era, as for my generation that followed, life still had a defined beginning, a middle and an end. The interesting and meaningful stuff happened in stage two, adulthood. Adulthood was the romantic crossroads where responsible independence and cultural growth joined with deferred sexual freedom to nudge the maturation process forward.

I stepped across the threshold into adulthood—early marriage right out of university—just when it ceased to exist in society at large as a stage of life entirely distinct from youth. By the time I was 30, everyone who followed me was told not to trust anyone over 30.

Cultural observer Joseph Epstein pinpoints the transition from adulthood to adolescence as American culture’s default “moral condition” in the decade following the 1951 publication of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In his 2004 essay, The Perpetual Adolescent, Epstein notes: “Salinger’s novel exalts the purity of youth and locates the enemy… in those who committed the sin of growing older, [Holden Caulfield’s] parents, his brother ... and just about everyone who has passed beyond adolescence and had the rather poor taste to remain alive.”

Adolescence as the new adulthood is a widespread but thankfully not a universal phenomenon. A smart and savvy subsection of the middle class—my own children and most of their peers, for example—present as counterweights to the extreme solipsism that Christina Rosen wrote about in [the pages of the National Post] yesterday.

Today’s young adults who are consciously choosing to step over the threshold from adolescence to adulthood grew up in social enclaves where maturity and other traditional bourgeois values remained longer in force than in the general population. They have more egalitarian gender roles than my generation did and married a bit later, but in other essentials, they are following our example. They have embraced connubial domesticity with enthusiasm; make personal sacrifices and curtail selfish desires without complaint; limit their material and recreational pleasures to provide tomorrow’s security and cheerfully endure great swathes of tedium bringing up children in the belief that transcendence of the self—and for the common run of humanity that means children—is nature’s plan for optimal self-realization.

Maturity as a general virtue, however, declined in the Sixties when indiscriminate sexual liberty, detached from responsibility and emotional engagement, became a human right from puberty forward. With no need to defer the gratification of appetite, there was no further need for patience, maturity’s hallmark.

And yet what stage of life could be worse for indefinite prolongation? Adolescence is a period marked by extreme intellectual callowness, thrall to raging hormones, obsession with appearance and social caste, contempt for authority, fascination with the transgression of rules, immoderate self-righteousness and intense sensitivity to perceived offence.

For the negative physical consequences of adolescence as a cultural norm, consider the body-sculpting, porn and plastic surgery industries. Our culture’s obsession with youthful appearance and limitless, Dionysiac sexuality is pandemic.

For the more pernicious negative intellectual and political consequences, consider the universities. In academia one finds a ruling cadre of grey-haired, jeans-clad university teachers pickled in Woodstock-nostalgic revolutionary amber, still rebelling against their parents’ conformity and hypocrisy, still contemptuous of their parents’ institutions and values, even those that stabilized family life and nourished communitarianism.

The political correctness these ideologues embody, Epstein shrewdly notes, is a peculiarly adolescent phenomenon: “Political correctness…—from academic feminism to cultural studies to queer theory—could only be perpetrated on adolescent minds: ...Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses [and] the possibility of slights, real and imagined.”

You’ll want examples of culturally influential individuals representing the adult and adolescent camps.

OK. In this corner we have the recently deceased Irving Kristol (1922-2009), father of neo-conservatism, a trim, sartorially conformist man of socially conservative and politically constructive ideas. He was a hugely influential thinker with no personal vanity. He was a loved mentor to young acolytes and a feminist avant la lettre (Kristol and fellow intellectual Gertrude Himmelfarb enjoyed a long, famously collaborative marriage). He produced a brilliant intellectual successor in son Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, America’s most lively conservative weekly. That’s adulthood.

In the other corner we have the celebrated filmmaker Michael Moore, a schlubby boy-man of blinding egoism—wearing children’s play clothes, an Arafat beard and a permanently ensconced baseball hat—whose objective is to bring down America and its institutions. He does not seem interested in mentoring or succession. That’s adolescence.

Kristol is quietly revered by hundreds, perhaps thousands of fans. Moore is noisily revered by millions. What a topsy-turvy world we’ve made for ourselves.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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The debate over the Obama drive to universalize heath care along Canadian Medicare lines has polarized opinion. If you read a certain set of data, you come away convinced that the Canadian system is God’s gift to mankind. Read another set and you’d vote for anything but our system. No wonder the American public are balking at Obama’s smooth-talking promotion of a Canadian-style health system. They’re confused.

The most persuasive argument I’ve yet seen includes data that has me tilting toward the American status quo with a few tweakings (definitely tort reform and insurance across state lines), and they can be found in an article by Fred Barnes, executive editor of the popular conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard. The September 21 edition article, entitled “An Unnecessary Operation: Obamacare threatens what’s right with American health care,” cuts a derisive swath through the America-bashing jeremiads of proponents of a state-run system.

Barnes begins bullishly: He states that 89% of Americans in a June 2009 ABC/USA Today Kaiser Family Foundation survey declared themselves satisfied with their health care (which obviously includes many of the oft-cited 40% of Americans without health insurance). Other polls, Barnes says, find the same numbers. He notes that It isn’t every country that can attract 400,000 foreign patients a year for medical care, but America does because you can get timely access, the full gamut of cutting-edge drugs and the most innovative diagnostic and surgical technology in the world there, not to mention the world’s top medical specialists.

You want an MRI or a CT? The U.S. has 27 MRIs per million Americans; Canada and Britain have 6 per million citizens. The U.S. has 34 CT scanners against Canada’s 12 and Britain’s 8 per million. U.S. insurance policies provide wider coverage than most government plans, which is why American patients are out of pocket only 12.6 percent of total national health spending, one of the lowest of the world’s advanced nations: lower than Germany, Japan, Canada and most European countries with government-run systems, according to Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute.

Let’s talk cancer, everyone’s greatest fear. Two major studies published in the September 2007 Lancet compared five-year survival rates for American and European cancer patients. Their findings: For all cancers, 66.3% of American men and 63.9% of women survived, as against 47.3% of European men and 55.8% of European women. Not a trivial disparity. Looking at the most common cancers, more than 99% of U.S. men with prostate cancer survived more than five years, as compared to 77.5% of European men. The U.S. colon cancer success rate for five years is 65.5% and 56.2% in Europe. Breast cancer: 90.1% for Americans, 79% for europeans. The bottom line is that you will live longer in America with these diseases than elsewhere. According to Dr Scott Atlas, chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School, “Breast cancer mortality is 52% higher in Germany than in the United States and 88% higher in the the United Kingdom”  “Prostate cancer mortality is 604% higher in the U.K. and 457% higher in Norway. The mortality rte for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40% higher.” Gulp.

Dr Atlas flings a dart Canada’s way as well: “Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9% higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184% higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.” Feeling peaky yet? A study by Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho of the University of Pennsylvania found that “death rates from breast and prostate cancer declined during the past 20 years by much more in the U.S. than in 15 comparison countries of Europe and Japan…These results suggest that the U.S. health care system does deliver better control over serious diseases than systems in other advanced countries.” Success is attributed to the U.S. hegemony in early detection and treatment with cutting-edge drugs. American insurance covers virtually all prevention-targeting tests, such as mammograms (9 out of 10 American women get them) and Pap smears (96% of American women get them). While PSA tests for men are only now coming under Medicare in certain areas, in the U.S. 54% of men have had the test, which doubtless accounts for the spectacular American success in treatment of that most common male disease.

On to heart disease! David Brown of the Washington Post characterizes the transformation of heart disease treatment as “wildly successful.” He says that “Today, someone having a heart attack [in America] who gets to a hospital in time is likely to get cardiac catheterization, angioplasty, the placement of a medicatd stent, therapy with four anti-coagulant drugs and, on discharge, a handful of lifetime prescriptions,” all innovations of the last 50 years. “In the 1960s, the chance of dying in the days immediately after a heart attack was 30 to 40%. In 1975, it was 27%. In 1984, it was 19%. In 1994, it was about 10%. Today, it’s about 6%.” Hey, where do I get my green card?

Wait, according to Brown, it gets better: “In 1970, the death rate from coronary heart disease was 448 per 100,000 people. In 1980, it was 345. In 1990, it was 250. In 2000, it was 187. In 2006, it was 135.” Americans also have better access to cholesterol-reducing statins: “Some 56% of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs…are taking them,” according to Dr Atlas. “By comparison…only 36% of the Dutch, 29% of the Swiss, 26% of Germans, 23% of Britons, and 17% of Italians receive them.”

It is true that the U.S. spends 17% of GDP on health care, but since more lives are being saved, well, do the math. Moreover, Barnes warns us not to trust the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics on everything. For example, on infant mortality, the U.S. received a ranking from the WHO of 29th in the world, based on government reports - that is, not WHO numbers. But while all babies that show signs of life at birth in the U.S. are counted as live births, even if they die within hours, some countries don’t count babies who die within 24 hours, or those under a certain weight are counted as stillborn .

As for life expectancy statistics (the U.S. average is 78 years), that’s largely a factor of social phenomena such as diet, lifestyle and crime rates, rather than a health care issue. The fact is that if you reach 80 in America, your chances of reaching 90 “are at least as good and probably better than anyone else’s in the world.” Over to you,  state single-system provider boosters.

Editor’s note:  Please also see the closely related column by Ann Coulter today, called “A Statistical Analysis of Maritime Unemployment Rates, 1946-1948. Just Kidding, More Liberal Lies About National Healthcare!”

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Bio/Email | Barbara Kay Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

Here’s a first for me: a citation from the Koran in support of an historically unhappy truth about my people. Surah 59:14 says of the Jews: “There is much hostility between them: Their hearts are divided.”

Nothing has the power to divide Jewish hearts like Israel, daily proof of which appears in the news. On the extreme end of anti-Israel agitation we find Canada’s most famously faithless Jew, Naomi Klein, rarely out of the headlines between tearful photo-ops in Ramalla and attempted film-festival smears in Toronto. And then there’s the slightly more demented Diana Ralph, stalwart of the Israel-hating fringe group Independent Jewish Voices, recently outed as a tinfoil-hatted anti-Zionist, anti-American conspiracy theorist.

As candidly hopeful Israel executioners, they are but a melodramatic tip of an underlying iceberg. Klein and company won’t administer the coup de grace to the Jewish people. That will come from more seemingly trustworthy, influential elites, nominal Jews who don’t realize that they have abandoned Judaism for another religion, one presently antithetical to Judaism’s existential portion.

During the High Holidays of my youth, when it was permissible—laudatory—to love Israel out loud, rabbis would profit from the annually crowded pews to encourage the purchase of Israel bonds, or to urge solidarity with Soviet Jews in their campaign to leave Russia for Israel.

How times have changed.

In the course of an Aug. 19 conference call with 1,000 or so American rabbis, Barack Obama urged them to use their High Holiday sermons to “tell the stories of health-care dilemmas to illustrate what is at stake.” Rather creepily, he added—imagine if it were George Bush intoning these words to 1,000 evangelical ministers—“we are God’s partners in matters of life and death.”

(The call was meant to be off the record, but at least three rabbis happened to be Twittering as they listened.)

A symbolic moment and potent words. With all due respect to Medicare, a universal health system is not a “matter of life and death” to the Jewish people. Defending Israel is. What were these rabbis thinking, taking their holy day sermon orders from the state?

It’s almost as if these rabbis no longer make any distinction between their religious vocation and their political leanings. It’s almost as if Obama were a religious colleague rather than a political figure. It’s almost as if they could no longer distinguish between Judaism and the Democratic party.

In fact, there’s no almost-as-if about any of these conditions. Liberalism is today the de facto religion of most American Jews, a stunning 78% of whom voted for Obama, no particular friend to Israel, to say the least. It would seem that Jewish voters are more concerned about women’s right to unconstrained abortion than Israel’s survival.

Ahavat Yisrael, the (not uncritical, but steadfast) love of Israel is the heart and soul of Judaism, like it or not. In his new book, Why are Jews Liberal?, Norman Podhoretz, elder intellectual statesman of American Jewish neo-conservatives, explains liberal Jews’ rejection of Israelcentred peoplehood as the post-Enlightenment price they willingly paid for acceptance and equality in the Diaspora. But rather than adopt a purely secular philosophy, he says their abandonment of Judaism “had the feel and the force ... of a conversion from Judaism to another kind of religion.”

When the left abandoned Israel in 1967, leftist Jews abandoned Judaism, but in galling displays of self-love (please don’t call them self-hating Jews; they adore themselves), they refuse to hand in their Jewish passports. Our publicly anti-Zionist Jews flay their fellow Jews, but flaunt their Jewishness to clothe their non-Jewish anti-Zionist colleagues with respectability. They insist, even as they scream for boycotts of Israeli academics or films, even as they denounce Israel as an “apartheid” state, that they are the true standard-bearers for Jewish values like “social justice,” that catch-all shibboleth for the ennoblement of myth-driven anti-Semitic Arab revanchism.

A perfect example of this irrational tic was on display in an op-ed in these pages last week by professional leftist Judy Rebick, purportedly a defence of Naomi Klein’s attempted attack on the Toronto film festival. With no rational argument at hand, Rebick cynically opted to play the shmaltz card in a kitschy homage to the warmth and liveliness of her grandparents’ oh-so-Jewish home, stating her grandmother “would have been so proud of Naomi Klein,” a revisionist canard of a peculiarly chutzpadik order, as Rebick’s pogrom-surviving grandmother would doubtless have been appalled by a smug Jew consumed by Israel-hatred.

The Jews have been expelled from 94 countries. There is but one, our homeland since time immemorial, from which Jews can be blown to smithereens, but not expelled. Israel is today in mortal danger from Hitler’s myriad godchildren. Never mind the overt, spotlight-seeking Jewish anti-Semites. That in such parlous times 1,000 establishment Jewish spiritual leaders think pleasing the Obamessiah is more important than encouraging their flocks’ ahavat Yisrael on Judaism’s most sacred days is a measure of the religion of Judaism’s decline and the religion of liberal-ism’s ascendancy in America.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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Barbara Kay

  posted on Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Bio/Email | Barbara Kay Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

Lately, we have witnessed a pernicious cultural trend toward the rebranding of legalized euthanasia as a gift rather than a menace to society’s most vulnerable citizens.

I doubt that Bloc Quebecois’ Francine Lalonde’s Bill C-384 bill seeking to decriminalize euthanasia (her third attempt since 2005!) will find many takers. At present, there’s no political gain here for any national party. But soon enough there may be. Polls show growing sympathy for the notion. Doctor-provided euthanasia would indeed benefit the truly suicidal few, but only by introducing a new “treatment option” to the many: those dilatorily dying, handicapped and depressed patients upon whom the onus would fall to justify their right to a natural life span they formerly took for granted.

Disquietingly for ethical Quebec doctors, the College des Medecins du Quebec (CMQ) recently made public the recommendations of a committee struck to study euthanasia. Without consulting Quebec’s physicians, the committee concluded that the medical profession is “in denial about euthanasia and death.” They urge situational euthanasia by medical practitioners, and there are clear indications the CMQ is receptive to their perspective.

I’m alarmed by this in a personal way. Hence the following letter:

My dear family,

As I write to you in September 2009, I am still physically healthy. But since I expect to die in Netherlands-wannabee Quebec, let me be perfectly clear about my wishes in the event that euthanasia has been decriminalized by the time I am suffering a terminal illness, or am languishing in what appears to be intractable chronic pain.

I do not want to be bumped off. I can’t state the case more unequivocally than that. I don’t care if I am a “burden” to you (you were once to me, that’s how life works); I don’t care how long it takes me to die, and how inconvenient that is to the medical system; and I don’t care how selfless an example other parents are setting in graciously exiting the world for their dependents’ sake before nature intended.

In particular, do not succumb to the now odiously-debased “dignity” argument you’ll doubtless hear from euthanasia advocates. I daresay serial rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo’s purposeless, parasitical lifetime imprisonment is not very “dignified,” and to many Canadians a life “not worth living.” But if the death penalty was not offered him as a “treatment option” for his incurable moral degeneracy out of respect for the sanctity of even sociopathic human life, the rest of us deserve no less for our innocent physical decrepitude.

So make it easy on yourselves by insisting I be attended by a doctor adamantly opposed on principle to such an “option.” (I have a few names.)

My deathbed physician should be familiar with a 2002 John Hopkins University study indicating that although 45% of terminally ill cancer subjects voiced a wish to die (i. e., subjects meeting the standards of Bill C-384), the wish turned out to be transient in all but 8% of the cases. If all 45% had been euthanized, we wouldn’t know that. So even if I say I want to die, take that as a cry for comfort, reassurance or pain relief, which it almost certainly will be.

My preferred physician would be one disgusted in any case by the notion of doctor-driven euthanasia, but especially so because it is a slippery slope.

He or she would be aware that in the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2000, there is no explicit request for it from the patient—as the law intended—in fully 40% of euthanasia cases. He or she would also be aware that although Dutch law prohibits euthanasia in children under 12, the Groningen Protocol has nevertheless normalized the euthanasia of certain kinds of handicapped newborns.

Do not fall for any claptrap about what “your mother would have wanted.” Read my lips: Your mother does not want to be made to feel it is her duty to die before nature decrees, so that others may be freed from care and responsibility, a subtle shift that inevitably follows upon an established “right.”

Mind, your mother is no martyr. If it’s hopeless, no heroic measures, please. Oh yes, and she wants to die as painlessly as possible. If this means raiding the entire arsenal of available analgesics and even sedatives whose side effect is to facilitate an easier death, so be it.

Intention is all. I want an unequivocal healer-patient dynamic with my doctor. His or her intention should be to kill my pain, not me. Finally, my doctor should be well versed in palliative care techniques, improving all the time.

I feel much better now, and hope, my dear ones, that you do too. You just got a very nice gift: certainty about my dying wishes. And I just gave myself two gifts: peace of mind—and several hundred thousand National Post-reading witnesses.

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©2005-09 - Barbara Kay is a columnist at Canada’s National Post newspaper.  Her column appears here at ProudToBeCanadian.ca weekly, with Barbara Kay’s express permission. 

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