The March of the Catholic Schoolchildren

May 4 - 9  2014 is Catholic Education Week in Canada - the details of which you could read about here if you were allowed to, which apparently you aren't. 

The program agenda entails several pages of Ontario Catholic schools and their projects for the week under the theme "Serving in the Love of Christ". 

Yesterday, Thursday, was "Serve with Justice" Day which evidently entailed bussing hundreds of their students to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to attend Campaign Life Coalition's March For Life anti-abortion rally ... in what JJ in comments over at Dammit Janet! calls "The March of the Catholic Schoolchildren". 
Ha! An Unrepentant Old Hippie sighting!

Catholic school boards paid for students to attend anti-abortion rally

For critics, public funds being used to transport students to a rally against abortion — a right guaranteed by the Supreme Court of Canada — is controversial.
The annual March For Life rally, organized by national pro-life group Campaign Life Coalition, is now in its 17th year. The group aims to defund abortion services in Canada and ultimately eliminate the practice. They also take issue with gay marriage, gay-straight alliances in schools, transgender identities, comprehensive sex education and stem-cell research.

A variety of reactions from the faithful on the podium greets two streaking prochoice protesters :

The unperturbed speaker at the mike, according to this guy who rattled off the names of dozens of attending cardinals and bishops, is Cardinal Gerald Cyprien Lacroix, archbishop of Quebec, delivering a special message from the Pope :

"His Holiness Pope Francis is pleased to greet everyone taking part in the 17th National March For Life in Ottawa and he assures them of his spiritual closeness as they give witness to the God-given dignity, beauty and value of human life. He prays that this event foster greater respect for the inviable right to life of each person from conception to natural death and supports the efforts of all who labour to ensure that this fundamental right receives adequate legal protection."

His Holiness is evidently not a fan of "My body, my rules" as an integral part of the "dignity, beauty and value of human life" that requires "adequate legal protection".

Chronic abortion bill pez dispenser and Con MP Stephen Woodworth was saddened to hear that all NDP MPs are pro-choice and Justin Trudeau will not be allowing any more anti-choice candidates into the Liberal Party :

"I feel very sad for my colleagues in the Liberal Party that democratic procedures and diversity of opinion is giving way to kind of this top-down ideological approach," Woodworth told CBC News 

and on twitter :  "When did LPC become merely a tool for the leader's personal ideology?"

Irony sighs and wonders if it's too late to get a job doing vaudeville instead.

.

Stop Motion 312

Sign the petition. Better yet - download it and get 25 sigs on it for parliament.
Read up at : Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. Support Radical Handmaids

Do something! It's 2012 and we're defending women's right to choose all over again from anti-choice pez dispensers like Woodworth.

Woodie and the ProgBlogModSquad

.

OPPOSE MOTION 312 
.
In their own words :

DAMMIT JANET! where it all began

Dave : Checkmate  and Changing formation and Perceptive failure at Progressive Bloggers

Dawg : Progressive Bloggers vs progressive bloggers and Blogroll follies

RossK : Please accept my resignation

Rev. Paperboy : Shooting down another trial balloon

Unrepentant Ole JJ : BALLS

Rusty Idols : Not Open for Debate 

Feminist Christian Socialist : My line in the sand

Orwell's Bastard : Hey, 'Progressive Bloggers': Are you giant wankers or just trying to look like it? and
On reproductive freedom, there is nothing to fucking 'debate'.

Harebell : Why should people have to justify the right to own their own body?

A Creative Revolution : So reasonable and open minded their brains fell out

The Ryan Painter Show : So Long Prog Blog or A Fundamental Stand in Defence of Womens Rights

Sabina Becker@News of the Restless : It's shit like this ...

Queer Thoughts : Many of my Friends are gone

Sister Sage's Musings : I Really Don't Have Much More To Add
.

One more time : OPPOSE MOTION 312 because currently there are no limits on "choice".
Let's keep it that way.
.

Woodie's wombattlefield

Steve, one year ago : "I'm not opening this debate (on abortion). I don't want it opened. I have not wanted it opened. I haven't opened it as Prime Minister. I'm not going to open it. The public doesn't want to open it. This is not the priority of the Canadian public or this government and it will not be."


Yet here's Con MP Stephen Woodworth, happily debating abortion with Choice Joyce at HuffPo yesterday. 
Why?
Because the House Procedures committee, which coincidentally boasts four openly anti-choice MP guys - Scott Reid, Harold Albrecht, Laurie Hawn, and Tom Lukiwski (and do see yesterday's post for their particular shenanigans over robocon) - the PROC Committee has granted Woodie the right to debate his don't-mention-abortion-I-did-once-but-I-think-I-got-away-with-it abortion Motion 312 in the House on April 26. 


Woodie believes a human life begins at conception and he's not about to allow us sluts to fuck that up for the state any longer. All he asks is for a committee of 12 MPs - 7 Cons, 4 Dippers, and 1 Lib with a Con chair all appointed by that selfsame PROC committee - to figure it out for us and let us know the answer to the question : Why doesn't the state have legal custody over the breeding vessels any more? AKA Whatever happened to a trip to England for the rich; coathangers for the poor? 


Woodie wants it all done "scientifically" : "If we accept one law that says some human beings are not human, who's next?" 
From there he makes the jump from what is human - which is not in dispute as fetuses are obviously human tissue - to what is a person, which is a legal argument. He's pretty sure some kind of equitable agreement can be worked out that will allow two or more legal persons to inhabit one body which will be fair to both and so help me he likens it to freeing the slaves : "the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1859 that blacks were not persons under U.S. law. Wouldn't you and I have objected if we had been there?"

I'm really tired of the whole gamut of this cloying fetish for fetuses - those ethereal imaginary pets of terminally controlling god freaks - from their bunfests on the Hill to pix of their pets plastered in all their gory glory like substitute suffering jesuses on the sides of trucks parked outside schools for the shock value.

It's disgusting. Get help. Stop bothering us.

.

Emma the Embryo and the RoboCon

Emma the Embryo channels Fern Hill and DeBeauxOs at DAMMIT JANET! :

"Emma is the potential everyhuman being.

She is prochoice because gestation is a procreative process.
She's a pragmatist because pregnancy is not *motherhood*.
She believes that every child should be wanted and welcomed, and every mother willing and supported."

Choice Joyce on Motion 312 , coming up for HoC debate in April :

"Attention supporters! We need to help out Stephen Woodworth because the poor guy lacks imagination. He couldn't even think of a title for his motion! Let's help him out by naming his motion for him. Please email your clever, funny, or subversive titles to info@arcc-cdac.ca. We'll pick the best one and go public with it!"

Joyce Arthur

Executive Director, 

Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) 

joycearthur@shaw.ca    www.arcc-cdac.ca

Hmmm ... Woodie's Zygote and Pony Show ? 

Or Emma's fave : The 'If a Fetus is a Person Then a Woman Isn't' Motion

.

#TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything

Stephen Woodworth, MP
House of Commons

Dear Sir :

Thank you for your recent expression of interest in my uterus.
Unfortunately we have no openings at this time commensurate with your job skills. However we would be pleased to keep your application on file and review it at a future date in the event the world falls into a fucking time warp and we wind up back in the '50s.

Sincerely,
Alison@Creekside

PS We are delighted to discover #TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything, a twitter and FB account dedicated to keeping you apprised of all the latest details of ladybits. Please accept the following submission :

Dear Woody et al
I'm going through a bit of a dry spell at the moment if you know what I mean and I know you do!
But rather than using that disgusting estrogen replacement gunk, I find a little dab of vanilla ice cream from time to time works just as well, and everybody just loves it!
Yours in uteriety,
Alison
.

Ari, abortion, and alternate universes

Seems former White House Bush spokesy, sometime Steve fluffer, and anti-Planned Parenthood campaigner Ari Fleischer was involved in vetting job applicants for the Susan G Komen For the Cure foundation, which then dropped their funding for Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening last week after its anti-choice leadership reverse-engineered its funding rules to align with anti-choice groups opposed to abortion, contraception, and stem cell research. 

Dr. Dawg has already done a takedown on their subsequent non-apology apology, made in the wake of considerable public backlash, and Fleischer is insisting he had nothing to with any Komen policy changes about Planned Parenthood.


This reminded me that as recently as three years ago Ari Fleischer was still plumping for an alternate universe in which Saddam Hussein was the guy behind 9/11.   15 second clip above; full Hardball show here.


Eighteen days after that March 11, 2009 TV appearance, Ari, acting in his capacity as Steve's US media fluffer, arranged the now infamous Fox News luncheon attended by Steve, Steve's director of communications Kory Teneycke, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, and Fox News president Roger Ailes. Four months later, Teneycke left Steve's employ to pursue his dream of creating a Fox News North for Canada and voilà - the alternate universe of Sun TV where they just make shit up was born. 


The night before the Foxy lunch, Ari had also arranged for Steve to have dinner in Washington with  "Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, William Kristol, and conservative syndicated talk-radio host Laura Ingraham."
Good grief but those little applets never seem to fall too far from the RepubliCon family tree, do they?

In 2004 Ron Suskind related the following conversation with a Bush aide :

"The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' 

I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' 

Meanwhile, Con MP and Fetus Festivus alumnus Stephen Woodworth will hold a public press conference tomorrow in Ottawa to ponder the question "When is a human being a human being?"
According to Section 223 of the Criminal Code of Canada, in this universe a human being obtains upon having "completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother."
Hope this helps.

Ok, I think we're done here.

.