The Sixth Estate

Earlier this fall, the Harper regime appointed a new Supreme Court judge, Richard Wagner, who sits on the Quebec bench and is the son of a former Progressive-Conservative leadership contestant. At the time, the Globe & Mail defended the appointment on the grounds that the Supreme Court had suddenly developed a “pressing need” for judges with specialized knowledge of commercial law, but urged Harper to “try” to find a “qualified woman” to fill the next appointment in order to keep the gender balance on the Court intact.

This was a fairly silly position, and I immediately wrote a post pointing out that three women on a 9-member Supreme Court bench wasn’t out of the ordinary given that only around 1 in 3 Crown appointments made by this government go to women. I’ve finished making that spreadsheet for the year 2012 now (up to the present, anyhow), and I’ve noticed something else:

This year, 15 of 55 judicial appointments have gone to women. These include judges appointed to the Supreme Court, the provincial branches of the federal court system, and the Tax Court. That comes out to around 27%: in other words, for every female judge the Harper regime appoints, it appoints almost 3 male judges. This is pretty much in keeping with the ratio of Harper’s appointments to the Supreme Court.

Stop the Bullying of Canada’s Most Vulnerable – The Baby on in the Womb

In light of this new awareness of bullying, consistency and credibility demands that we tackle the most cruel and most common bullying of all — the bullying, and ultimately killing, of babies in the womb.

Maurice Vellacott, fresh on the heels of the smackdown of his pro-life colleague Stephen Woodworth by the increasingy dictatorial Harper regime, has brought attention to a new way in which we who belong to the pro-life community can draw attention to the ongoing holocaust of the unborn child. And this one, I can assure you, will in no way lead to mockery or discrediting of that community in any whatsoever!

Vellacott points out that if we’re going to crack down on bullying, which we should, we should start by outlawing the bullying of the unborn fetus.

But I didn’t call you together to discuss science today. Instead, because of the seriousness of this issue and because I’m sure it will soon be drowned out by legions of socialist pro-choicers trained to salivate on command by the Liberal Party, I’m going to make a statement that I hope will force even my left-wing audience to sit up and pay attention:

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Right? I mean, that is the standard he’s claiming to set, isn’t it? The reason burkhas and niqabs have to be banned from Canada isn’t because they make women too hot in the summer sun, or because they turn women evil, but because they represent a misogynist religious faith that preaches that God made men superior to women. That‘s what we think has no place in Canada, and not just some pieces of cloth. Oddly enough, it seems perfectly acceptable for a man who thinks God wants women to wear burkhas, and does everything in his power to make his wife or daughter wear one, can become a citizen. There’s no rule banning that.

So what exactly does our esteemed Minister of Immigration have to say in his own defence? You see, it occurs to me that Jason Kenney is a staunchly faithful Roman Catholic. According to his church, God didn’t make women and men equal, either. That’s why only men can be Popes. And bishops. And priests:

The masculine character of the hierarchical order which has structured the church since its beginning…seems attested to by scripture in an undeniable way… As a matter of fact, we see in the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles that the first [Christian] communities were always directed by men exercising the apostolic power.

I realize many Catholics don’t feel this way. But Kenney is a longtime conservative Catholic activist, and at least to my knowledge, he has never publicly denounced his church. He got his political start in San Francisco trying to ban pro-choice student groups from a university campus.

Now, lest I be accused of an anti-Popery polemic here, let me say that this has nothing to do with Catholicism specifically. There are plenty of Conservative MPs with backgrounds in conservative Protestant faiths in which women are not seen as fully equal, too, and every last one of them insists that the reason men get the positions of authority and women can’t is because God set up the church that way.

So here’s my demand. Jason Kenney, if you’re going to ban burkhas and niqabs, fine, go ahead. But before you do that, have the good sense to stand up and say, in public, that anyone who claims we should have any modicum of respect or loyalty or reverence for a God who teaches that men are superior to women is a disgraceful, backwards, misogynist s**t and that these primitive sexist beliefs have no place in the Dominion of Canada. And I want him to say that the Pope is counted in that number, because last time I checked, Benedict XVI was saying that ordaining women as priests was a “most serious crime,” ranking right up there with pedophilia.

Otherwise, Mr. Kenney, climb down off your moral high horse and stop pretending that you care one whit about liberating women from the oppression of religion. Because if the only difference between you and them is a disagreement over choices of headgear, frankly, that doesn’t impress me very much.

Someone has to be the first to call Rob Bredin an idiot, and I guess it’ll be me:

Let’s get real… The feminization of young men… is why no male student was man enough to stop this murderous rampage…

No male in the engineering class did, as in more modern times, this demanding and gender-biased motif has fallen into desuetude, usurped by a touchy-feely, unmanly, unchivalrous politically correct mush. That is the real shame of this massacre.

There you have it, folks. The real shame of the Montreal massacre — the real tragedy we should be talking about, not this petty wailing about a few dead women — is that male engineers just aren’t the good manly men they used to be.

I don’t know what hole you’ve been hiding in since the 19th century, sir, but please do the rest of us a favour and crawl back into it.