30 years ago but never to be forgotten

Geneviève Bergeron (1968-1989)
Hélène Colgan (1966-1989)
Nathalie Croteau (1966-1989)
Barbara Daigneault (1967-1989)
Anne-Marie Edward (1968-1989)
Maud Haviernick (1960-1989)
Maryse Laganière (1964-1989)
Maryse Leclair (1966-1989)
Anne-Marie Lemay (1967-1989)
Sonia Pelletier (1961-1989)
Michèle Richard (1968-1989)
Annie St-Arneault (1966-1989)
Annie Turcotte (1969-1989)
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (1958-1989)

May they rest in eternal peace. And may they ever remind us of the need to eradicate violence against women, and indeed, hate in general.

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10-18-2019 UPDATE: Scott wrote to his Green Party candidate

*** 10-18-2019 UPDATE: after waiting 12 days for a response from Mr. Daniel Green, (also after having voted in the advance polls for his Liberal opponent, Rachel Bendayan - oh well) today, at 3:10 pm, I received the following response:

Hello Randboro,

Thank you for your email.

We at the Green Party of Canada understand that you were troubled by a recent story on the Green Party of Canada’s stance on abortion.

Rest assured it is, and has always been, the Green Party of Canada’s policy that all women must have timely access to safe, legal abortions.

Although the Leader does not have the power to whip votes, all Green Party Members of Parliament must endorse the Green Party’s values, including a firm support of a woman’s right to choose. There is zero chance an elected representative of our party will ever reopen the abortion debate.

We vet all candidates to ensure they agree the abortion debate is closed in Canada. Any who disagree are not allowed to run.

We hope that we can continue to count on your support.

Best,

Kat Lorimer

--
info@greenparty.ca 

So... I guess I wasn't wrong at all, was I? How can anyone know how their MP would vote on any issue before them, given this canned response from the Party HQ?

*** END of 10-18-2019 UPDATE (original post below) ***


Given the nature of the Green Party of Canada, and their leader's stance that all votes will not be whipped, I decided that I would reach out to my local GPC candidate, Daniel Green, to understand his own positions:

Mr. Green,

As a committed humanitarian and former GPC financial officer for the riding of Papineau, (but mostly because of my devotion to the continuance of life on this planet) I voted for you in the recent by-election and was pleased to see you came in a strong third.

I did not know then about your party's position on not whipping votes.

That said, I feel the Green party platform is insufficient for me to determine whether or not my vote should go to you again on the 19th of October. I find your bonafides on environmental issues to be substantial, however it behooves me to ensure your stances on other contentious issues would not leave me crestfallen should you come to represent me and the others in Outremont riding in the HoC.

For this reason, when Justin Trudeau speaks clearly about women's right to choose on the decision of abortion, I rest confident that your rival, Ms. Bendayan, will not let me down. When he speaks about any other policy, I feel confident in voting for my Liberal candidate, even if the policies they put forth today are less than the climate crisis demands. Because they give me confidence they will be what they portend to be, as a government. As of now, they have my vote.

Am I wrong?

Sincerely,

Scott Murray

On Progressively Blooging

I return to blogging today because I understand there has been a disturbance in the Force.

It isn't right to say that we should consider whether or not a woman has control over her body. All this wondering aloud about "when life begins" is truly BS, coded talking points expunged from Great Amounts of Male-Dominance Seed Money collected from paranoid, depraved anti-social oddities of the human race that are as willing to jump aboard a ship of well-meaning fools as they are incapable of feeling the fit of their fellow fools' shoes.

It's a false argument: "where does life begin?"

I don't know and you don't know, and if there is one thing for certain, it's that outside of our cushy Canadian existence, where the sanctity of human life is held higher (if not nearly high enough for our humanitarian ideals), there are craploads of people elsewhere, whom we leave to suffer and die prematurely every time Bono snaps his fingers, while we arm their oppressors for our own profit - in order to enjoy such a high level of health and prosperity for ourselves. Within our borders. And not, so much, without.

So if you find yourself wringing your hands over the decision of a woman to excise the growth within herself before it becomes a viable human being for which she will be ultimately responsible, ask yourself what you are doing to alleviate the suffering of those who are already here and grasping for hope for any kind of life. Ask yourself if this is really the debate we need to engage in. Ask yourself why you feel you are progressive in your blogging.

There are those of us who have been here a spell, who await your answers.

When Facebook becomes Hatebook

I was a reluctant FB joiner at first. I have known it to cause weird, unintended social faux-pas between people innocently updating their friends' pages with manoevres that turn into clumsy - and very public - rebukes. Plus, the site owners surely love to exploit human frailty with their seductive games and doodads that cull our personal data to feed marketing engines for advertisers.

Still, I have stuck it out with this devil I know because it remains a useful tool for cheaply keeping up with scatter-shot friends and family whom I otherwise risk ignoring completely.

But when they continually allow a nasty page to propagate the damaging message that rape is a trivial, laughable matter, I can't fathom what they are thinking. I wasted no time in reporting "It isn't r.a.p.e.... It's SURPRISE SEX (:" to the FB administration through their internal reporting tool, only to look in shock at the number of people who purportedly "like" the page (currently, 42+ thousand). But wait - how does a moronic page like that get all those deluded people "liking" it without getting shut down? Turns out it has been up with that mind-blowingly offensive title for over three and a half months since it was first reported to the FB administrators!

Well, one of those people who spotted it and flagged it offensive months ago is fed up with waiting. So what action did Facebook user Yasmin Rebelle take? You guessed it: she started up a reaction group on FB called: We Demand the Deletion of "It isn't r.a.p.e.... It's SURPRISE SEX. (:"

Damn straight, Yasmin. I am with you, and I hope any readers of this blog are too. I also have committed myself to deleting my FB account if they don't smarten up and do as this new group requests by this Friday. And I hope any FB users out there are willing to join me. Because it isn't so much that some unthinking juvenile lunkhead created the page in the first place. The problem is the gatekeepers at Facebook are not doing their jobs to shut it down.

Facebook is a very powerful message propagator, and though it is rightly and wonderfully open to all who wish to express their opinions, the owners of the site have a responsibility to stop harmful attitudes like this one from spreading. Because the page creator is calling on others to view rape as something less than the revolting, violent crime that it is, and they need to be reined-in. To wit:



hat tip to Antonia for the youtube find above.

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Shout out to the Saudi Arabian delegation

Hey guys, when you start allowing the women of your country to drive, then you can share your opinions with the rest of the world on global warming.

Until then, just shut it.

Sad Anniversary

Geneviève Bergeron (1968-1989)
Hélène Colgan (1966-1989)
Nathalie Croteau (1966-1989)
Barbara Daigneault (1967-1989)
Anne-Marie Edward (1968-1989)
Maud Haviernick (1960-1989)
Maryse Laganière (1964-1989)
Maryse Leclair (1966-1989)
Anne-Marie Lemay (1967-1989)
Sonia Pelletier (1961-1989)
Michèle Richard (1968-1989)
Annie St-Arneault (1966-1989)
Annie Turcotte (1969-1989)
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (1958-1989)

20 years ago the 14 women listed above were brutally killed, simply for being women, by a depraved, damaged man who was brought up to think of women as being somehow less deserving than men. Somehow less than equal. This is backward thinking and hopefully we can quell it with enough time, and enough unrelenting effort at hammering home the vital message:

women and men are equal

I will never forget. And I will do everything I can to ensure my children learn that message.

It saddens me still to think of how these 14 women died so senselessly, except to serve as a tragic example of how we sometimes fail to learn.

May they rest in eternal peace.

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Give Unto Woman What is Woman's

A woman must have control over her own body. But the anti-abortionists will never be satisfied with that. I am sickened to learn of this 40-day campaign of self-righteous busy-bodies, bent on harassing women at abortion clinics across the United States and Canada - even here in Montreal.

From Antonia Zerbiasis:

The birds of `pray' who will be targeting women's clinics in Canadian cities for the next 40 days really don't care about saving lives.

If they did, they wouldn't be so much about intimidating the desperate women and girls who are seeking abortions.

That's because, no matter how much they will attempt to cloak their vigils outside two Toronto clinics with solemn vows to "never stop defending life," their true agenda is unveiled by their lack of support for babies once they're born, their often impoverished mothers and the kind of sex education and contraception accessibility that would avoid abortion in the first place.

Nowhere on 40DaysForLife.com is there any discussion of any of these matters.

Of course not. I wonder what these people would have had Mackenzie Phillips do if abortion wasn't an option for her after being impregnated by her own father? There are more than enough unwanted children in this world. And when safe abortion is not an option, the result is that women die. Needlessly.

As for our governing Conservatives, Zerbisias goes on to remind us of where they stand:

There are reports in the blogosphere that Harper will replace Status of Women minister Helena Guergis – who hasn't done much for women, but that's another column – with the anti-choice Cheryl Gallant, who has fought against gay rights and even parental leave.

It just gets worse.

Last weekend, a prominent American anti-choice activist made a speech at the "Value Voters Summit" where she proposed that abortions be performed "in the public square."

This is the true backlash against feminism, whose second wave became a tsunami after the pill became widely available in the late 1960s.

It's all about keeping women down to those Biblical depths where they are little more than breeding stock, born to serve their masters.

...

No wonder Harper boasted two weeks ago, in a closed-door meeting of the party faithful, that he killed the mechanisms for women to protect their constitutional rights.

Zerbisias signs off her blog post saying she worries about the prospect of a Harper majority government.

Antonia, let me just say this: As a Canadian; as a proud father; as a feminist; as a humanitarian, I couldn't agree more. This is a public health issue, and it's also about protecting women's rights, and protecting the integrity of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

That's why we can't get these Harper Conservatives out of power fast enough.

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Remembering Dec. 6, 1989: May they rest in eternal peace

Geneviève Bergeron (1968-1989)
Hélène Colgan (1966-1989)
Nathalie Croteau (1966-1989)
Barbara Daigneault (1967-1989)
Anne-Marie Edward (1968-1989)
Maud Haviernick (1960-1989)
Maryse Laganière (1964-1989)
Maryse Leclair (1966-1989)
Anne-Marie Lemay (1967-1989)
Sonia Pelletier (1961-1989)
Michèle Richard (1968-1989)
Annie St-Arneault (1966-1989)
Annie Turcotte (1969-1989)
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (1958-1989)

"Je Souviens" came to mean something more to me on this day than whatever the original intent of using it as the line on our license plates. I am so grateful to have the chance to raise two boys of my own to understand that we need to build a world without violence - towards women or anyone for that matter.

It's the least I can do in their memory. That and to keep singing:



Each time I feel like this inside
There's one thing I want to know
What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

If you want to say NO to violence against women...

Guess I'm #198,776. Put your name down here, (that's the United Nations Development Fund for Women) if you want to add your voice to the chorus. Tip 'o the hat to April Reign for putting this out there.

This is why we must never let up, and part of the reason I will always refer to myself as a proud feminist.

And while you're at it, don't forget to inform yourself on how close we are to having anti-abortion legislation enacted by Parliament (there is still time for it to get the kibosh in committee or on third reading in the HoC).

The Green Party of Canada - the only national party led by a woman - weighs in on where women stand today in terms of equality.

Happy International Women's Day (if a day late).

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