In promising to enact all of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the federal Liberals have agreed to remove a section of law that allows parents to spank their kids without fear of prosecution.
[…]Kathy Lynn, the chair of a British Columbia-based organization called Corinne’s Quest, which opposes legalized spanking, says her group is “thrilled” with the TRC’s recommendation.
[…][T]eachers fear taking away the law could leave them vulnerable to charges in cases in which they are required to use force – breaking up schoolyard fights, for instance.
Does this ban on spanking make sense, rationally? Let’s look at the evidence and then decide.
A study found that youngsters smacked up to the age of six did better at school and were more optimistic about their lives than those never hit by their parents.
They were also more likely to undertake voluntary work and keener to attend university, experts discovered.
The research, conducted in the United States, is likely to anger children’s rights campaigners who have unsuccessfully fought to ban smacking in Britain.
[…]Those who had been smacked up to the age of six performed better in almost all the positive categories and no worse in the negatives than those never punished physically.
Teenagers who had been hit by their parents from age seven to 11 were also found to be more successful at school than those not smacked but fared less well on some negative measures, such as getting involved in more fights.
However, youngsters who claimed they were still being smacked scored worse than every other group across all the categories.
Prof Gunnoe found little difference in the results between sexes and different racial groups.
By the way, this is not the worst crime against parenting to come out of Canada. Remember the case where the divorced woman got a female lawyer, went before a female judge, in order to get the court to overturn her ex-husband’s grounding of their daughter for sending nude pictures from his computer? Yes. That’s what you get when you live in Canada – a nanny state society run by the left. I remember in a previous story, a female judge actually convicted a man for spanking his child. They went to court, and the man was convicted for spanking an unruly child. Why would any man want to raise kids who could not be punished for misbehaving?
I personally don’t like spanking as a way to discipline, but I can imagine situations where the behavior is so bad that a spanking might be necessary, e.g. – cruelty to pets, insulting their mother, etc. The point is that if I am the one getting up in the morning to go to work to earn the money, it’s my family, and my decision about what I am trying to produce. Public school teachers, judges and politicians work for me – I pay their salaries. They need to butt out of my private life and mind their own business. No man should get involved in a family if all he is going to do is pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce children who lack self-control and responsibility.
The path to responsibility goes through hard work and accepting the consequences for bad behavior. It’s much better to learn it when you are younger rather than older. Nobody likes spanking, but it’s better for a child to learn that stealing is wrong when he is 5 than when he is 25. And maybe that’s why so many boys who are raised fatherless become criminals. It is up to families to decide what punishment is best – not big government.
Canada Election 2015: Socialists in red, Communists in Orange, Conservatives in blue
Here is an article written by a Canadian named Mike Schouten in Life News.
He wrote this prior to the Canadian federal election:
The de facto position of Thomas Mulcair and Stephen Harper is, in principle, no different. When questioned directly by Trudeau last Friday, Harper said the same as he has been saying for years, “My position for 10 years has been I don’t intend to re-open this debate.”
As yet, all three leaders have a realistic shot at making 24 Sussex their home after the October 19 election. And all three continue to treat pre-born children as a political liability.
Messrs. Harper, Mulcair and Trudeau are without excuse. If elected, it is their duty to enact laws for the benefit of all Canadians. Their complete disregard for the human rights of any children in the womb effectually means that they are complicit in the deaths of 100,000 members of the human family every year.
In effect Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau all support sex-selective abortion. They care less about the fact that girls are targeted for abortion much more frequently than boys. Their refusal to act is a sign that they endorse this misogynistic practice in Canada.
All three leaders also support late-term abortion. They show no regard for the reality that every year thousands of babies lose their lives by being aborted in the latter stages of pregnancy, after the stage when children of the same age are born, survive outside of the womb, and live productive lives as Canadian citizens.
Now, I can understand why Schouten is frustrated. But what he is saying above is going to have one of two effects on pro-life voters. Either pro-lifers will stay home and not vote, since there are no differences between the parties on the abortion issue, or they will waste their vote on a third-party candidate who cannot win.
During Harper’s tenure as prime minister, abortion was never expanded, because Harper never made pushing leftward on social issues a priority. In fact, one could argue that his tax credits for married couples encouraged people to marry, which tends to push down the number of abortions. Married couples are better equipped to welcome into the world an unborn child, because there are two people, not just one. But Schouten did not foresee that things could actually get worse under a Liberal or NDP prime minister. He just didn’t understand how radical the pro-abortion left really is compared to the center-right.
Then what happened?
Here is an article from Life Site News explaining what happened when Harper lost to the Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, who also happens to be an extremist on abortion:
Canada’s new health minister promises to “equalize” access to abortion, especially for women living in rural areas, but won’t give specifics. However, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada has supplied LifeSiteNews a long shopping list for addressing the “problem.”
The ARCC wants more surgical time for abortions in rural hospitals, elimination of conscientious objection by pro-life doctors, screening out of pro-life ob-gyns at medical school, full funding for pharmaceutical abortion through so-called “emergency contraceptives,” and withholding of federal funding to New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island if these provinces don’t remove remaining restrictions on abortions.
Canada’s new health minister, Jane Philpott, made her comments in a written response to a query from the CBC, stating, “We know that abortion services remain patchy in parts of the country, and that rural women in particular face barriers to access. Our government will examine ways to better equalize access for all Canadian women.”
Responded the WeNeedALaw organization: “We could translate Minister Philpott’s statement like this: ‘It is completely unacceptable that pre-born children are killed with greater ease in Canada’s urban centres than in rural communities.’”
“Seriously? Of all the problems an aging demographic poses for our top-notch health care system the first thing the Liberals want to do is make it easier for pre-born babies to be dismembered, decapitated and disembowelled?” they asked.
The CBC identified the what they deemed the most obvious culprit in limiting access: successive Prince Edward Island governments who have tried to balance pro-life and pro-abortion interests by funding abortions while sending the women out-of-province to have them.
But P.E.I. pro-lifer Randy Anchikoski also told LifeSiteNews the abortion issue is a distraction from the province’s real problems. “We have a big debt and aging population with all sorts of medical problems they face such as heart ailments and cancer. We have fewer women of childbearing age every year. From which part of our health budget is the money for an abortion clinic supposed to come?”
New Brunswick also restricts abortions, still insisting that they be done in hospitals, but it dropped a second regulation that they be approved by two doctors as medically necessary late last year.
Joyce Arthur, the executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, has put the two recalcitrant provinces at the top of her list of measures to “equalize” abortion access across Canada, calling on the federal government to, “arbitrate to resolve access/funding issues, and if the provinces still don’t comply, withhold federal transfer payments.”
As far as the problems allegedly facing rural women wanting abortions, pro-life leaders say this a familiar theme the pro-abortion forces use to push for measures such as pharmaceutical abortions and so-called “web cam” abortions.
[…]As well, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada wants medical schools to “screen out anti-choice medical students before they enter the Family Planning program or Obstetrics/Gynecology specialty” because their “inability to fulfill job requirements should make them ineligible.”
[…]Arthur’s wish list also includes a bonus system to attract abortion-doing doctors to rural areas, and the elimination of conscientious objection by pro-life doctors and nurses, requiring doctors at least to refer patients requiring abortions.
You might remember that I blogged about a Canadian pro-lifer a month ago who predicted that ALL of this was going to happen if Trudeau won. I told her how her predictions had come true, and in response she told me about the words of an American pro-lifer who we often feature on this blog who says this about Schouten’s problem:
Let me state it plainly: If you are pro-life and intend on casting a “conscience vote” for a third party candidate, you might as well be voting for the “pro-choice party.” It will have the same ultimate impact on the safety of the unborn. Voting pro-life principles isn’t always voting for a pro-life candidate; a principled vote might mean voting for the viable option that will either advance the pro-life cause better or hurt it the least.
If you sleep more comfortably at night because you’ve voted your principles, then I believe your conscience is well-intended, though misinformed. You’ve chosen to make a moral statement instead of choosing to have a moral impact.
As one pundit put it, it’s better to have a second class fireman than a first class arsonist. There is no victory or honor in voting for the first-class fireman who had no chance of winning when, in the end, your “conscience vote” actually allowed the arsonist get elected.
American pro-lifers know that Democrats are always looking to overturn the many state-level restrictions on abortion… there is always a reason to keep the left out of power, even if the right drags their feet on social issues. The left can always make things worse than they are. It’s never a good idea to tell pro-life voters anything that will cause them to stay home on election day. They need to get out there and vote for the most pro-life party – no two parties are exactly equal on the abortion issue.
If you want to read more about how pro-lifers ought to vote, you can read this article by Scott Klusendorf of the Life Training Institute. And you can read about the pro-life strategy of the clever Canadian pro-lifer who predicted all of these things here. It’s called “Save the Storks”.
Canada election results 2015 (click for larger image)
A friend of mine pointed out this post by a pro-life woman based in Calgary, Alberta named McKenzie. As you all know, Canada lurched hard left last Monday, electing a strongly pro-abortion Liberal Party government, led by a man who insisted that candidates in his party swear their allegiance to abortion on demand, through all 9 months of pregnancy.
I took a look at some of the pro-life Members of Parliament and noticed that a bunch of them stepped down this election, and many others were defeated by Liberals. So, McKenzie is looking forward and seeing where the pro-abortion Liberal Party is going next now that they have a majority government.
She writes:
As tempting as it is to write a semi-encouraging post about the state of affairs for the next two to four years, the reality is that the political sphere of the pro-life movement has been dealt a treacherous blow in seeking to protect the most defenseless lives among us.
In the foreseeable future, here are three possible federal pressures we can expect from our Parliament over the next few months and years:
1. Legislation inhibiting, directly or indirectly, the freedom and mobility of life-affirming organizations, including pregnancy resource centres, and their ability to reach women seeking abortions. We’ve had zero laws restricting abortion access throughout all nine months of pregnancy since 1988, but that hasn’t stopped our new Prime Minister from enforcing a strictly pro-choice view among his party. The question at the front of their minds seems to be, “how much further could we go in promoting abortion in our society – and overseas?” A reasonable prediction is that the CRA and Human Rights Commissions will put additional pressure on Christian or pro-life charities to comply with any new laws enacted, regardless of their protections under the Charter – similar to our friends in California presently forced to give out abortion information alongside life-affirming options at pregnancy resource centres, though abortion clinics are not required to reciprocate.
CRA = Canada Revenue Agency, their IRS. We’ve already had a scandal where the IRS, probably under the direction of the White House, went after charities that were working against the Democrats on certain issues like stopping voter fraud. She is expecting to see the CRA used similarly to go after pro-lifers. As you know, the Human Rights Commissions are tools used by the secular left to punish conservatives for offending people on the secular left. The laws are only ever applied against conservatives, and they almost always lose their cases. Well, pro-lifers are offensive. McKenzie thinks that the HRCs are going to go after them.
Another one:
3. Economic policies directly and/or indirectly inhibiting our ability to donate towards charities and charitable causes, especially pro-life or pro-family causes. Less money in the hands of private donors (especially those in the middle class) in a recession, coupled with higher redistribution through taxes, hits families the hardest when men and women are in their peak income-earning years. Less resources to go around means less charitable giving when mom and dad need to put their own needs for bills, food, and shelter first.
This is not surprising. The left is always anxious to go after charitable giving, because people are giving their money to causes they care about and the left doesn’t get any benefit. What the left prefers is that they take the money from potential charitable donors and then use it to buy votes. Obama’s latest budget of 2015 was the latest attempt to limit charitable contributions. She is expecting that pro-life donors will be targeted by the new Liberal majority government. And she undertstands that whatever impact she is going to have as a Christian is going to be funded by her own efforts to work for money, he husbands efforts to work for money, and the charitable donations she can get. The government never funds the efforts of Christians and/or conservatives to push Christian or conservative views. Which is why it makes zero sense for Christians to vote to expand the federal government outside of its Constitutional responsibilities.
So what are my thoughts on all this?
Well, I wish more pro-lifers down here were as aware of the effects of laws and policies on life plans. If you read the rest of her post, McKenzie clearly has some kind of pro-life plan there, and it’s a good one in that it’s practical and evidence based. She intends to get results. But she’s not looking inside at her own feelings and thoughts when she makes these life plans, she’s looking at politics and laws and trying to anticipate where the threats will come from, and how to adjust. I wish pro-lifers here were more like that… especially when it comes to size of government. We need to keep our own money and not give it to the government. We need to keep the government away from our rights, e.g. – free speech and religious liberty.
Anyway, if you follow the gay rights vs religious liberties battles we are having now with florists, bakers, photographers, etc., then you might recall that similar things were happening in Canada 10-20 years ago. Canada was going through these problems in the late 90s, early 2000s, when the Liberals were in charge. It sort of died out when the Conservatives took over, but there’s no reason I can see for it not to come back now that Canada has elected a Liberal majority. I’m going to be watching the situation closely up there, because whatever the Liberals do up there now is likely to make its way down here in the next 10-15 years – if we elect Democrats.
WINTERY KNIGHT 