Anti-Trans Protests, Gender Criticals, and Groomers

It’s a little difficult to miss the torrent of anti-transgender hatred spreading about these days.  Whether it is street preachers organizing “protests” over transgender people existing, or failed political candidates trying to whip up a mob on Twitter, it seems as though they are everywhere.  

The lie is always the same - ‘they’re coming for your kids’.  They inevitably conflate issues, linking the existence of transgender people to the content of sex education curriculums.  Or complaining that frank and direct material talking about sexuality is somehow “grooming kids”.  Anyone with half a brain and a bit of reason understands that is nonsense, but that doesn’t stop the propagandists from continuing their lies. 

Then something like this pops up: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-stampede-lawsuit-sexual-harassment-1.6919239

So, for a decade, this guy is literally grooming and sexually assaulting youth.  Meanwhile, even when the Stampede Board became aware of it, they turned a blind eye to it. Not for a year, but for multiple years. Sit with that for a moment. 

The offender was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to a decade in prison.  Five years later, we finally get an admission from the Stampede that they knew about this for years? 

If you’re worried about “groomers” and pedophiles, I’m going to suggest that the problem isn’t trans people, it’s elsewhere.  Hardly a day goes by where my various news feeds don’t have a headline about someone in a position of power over youth abusing their charges. 

Do you know what I never see in those articles?  Evidence that the person is transgender. They can be anything else - coaches, pastors, priests, youth group leaders, and on the list goes.  These are often respected members of society.

One might come to the conclusion that the motives of the people going after transgender people aren’t as pure as they claim. 

Last Week's Lies Are Inoperative

Remember Harper & Co. swearing up and down that there was absolutely no evidence to support allegations of prisoner abuse?

Not so much.

So ... I wonder what this week's lie will be to cover up last week's that has been disproven?

Canada's Conservatives: Detention Without Trial

I cannot believe this appalling abuse by the Canadian government.

The Conservative government reversed itself today and denied an emergency passport to Abousfian Abdelrazik, preventing the Canadian citizen - blacklisted as a terrorist - from flying home to Montreal.

In a terse explanation, it said Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon considers Mr. Abdelrazik a national security threat.

In a one-sentence letter, delivered this morning to Mr. Abdelrazik's lawyers, the justice department said “the minister of foreign affairs has decided to refuse your client's request for an emergency passport.” It cited Section 10.1 of the Canada Passport Order which says “the minister may refuse or revoke a passport if the minister is of the option that such action is necessary for the national security of Canada or another country.”

The refusal represents a complete reversal of the government's written promise of three months ago to issue Mr. Abdelrazik an emergency passport if he had a paid-for ticket home. Mr. Abdelrazik remains stranded in the lobby of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, where he has living for nearly 11 months, granted “temporary safe haven” by former Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier.

As the Globe and Mail points out here, not only is there no case against the man, but the government is simply moving goalposts about in an effort to be obstructive.

Let's consider this for a moment. Mr. Abdelrazik is virtually a prisoner in the Canadian Embassy in Khartoum - he really cannot leave the embassy without risking arrest and further maltreatment at the hands of Sudanese authorities. The Canadian government refuses to issue him the travel documents he needs to return to Canada, and worse, insists that he get himself removed from a "travel ban" list that the UN maintains. Individuals cannot approach the UN to have themselves removed from that list, their government is obliged to do this.

In essence, the Canadian government has imprisoned Mr. Abdelrazik without trial, without charge and without recourse. Think about this. This is yet another in a long, and seemingly growing list of Canadian nationals abroad that the Conservative government has failed. In this case, the Canadian government has done worse than that, it has acted maliciously to obstruct Mr. Abdelrazik.

Canada's Conservative government - standing up for ... well ... repeating George Bush II, actually.

Good Lord ...

If you can read this in its entirety (without walking away in anger), one has to wonder just why it is Harper refuses to do anything on behalf of Omar Khadr.

Mr. Vandeveld also discovered that, after Mr. Jawad's transfer to U.S. authorities at the Bagram detention facilities in northern Afghanistan, he was subjected to several forms of abuse, including “linguistic separation” and the “frequent flier program,” which involved moving detainees constantly from cell to cell for weeks at a time as a form of sleep deprivation. It emerged last year that Mr. Khadr had been subjected to the same program.

“I couldn't bring myself to believe Americans could do this,” he said. “This was just sadistic mistreatment of a kid.”

Or does Mr. Harper actually believe that abuse and torture are acceptable ways to treat people?

Or perhaps, you'd like to consider the following bit about evidence:

Mr. Vandeveld travelled to Kabul to interview the Afghan security officers who detained and questioned the suspect. The Afghans produced a written confession with Mr. Jawad's thumbprint at the bottom. The only problem was, the confession was in Dari – Mr. Jawad speaks Pashto, and is functionally illiterate

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on here, does it? To anyone with even a modicum of respect for law and due process, this is beyond the pale. For our government to be complicit in such activities is repugnant indeed.

Just How Is This "God's Plan"?

I've known for a long time that religious conservatives despise feminism. This is not surprising really, for feminism's very existence calls into question many of the fundamental assumptions about social lives and structures that are embedded in the scripture. So, if you are inclined to assume that scripture should be handled literally, feminism in all its forms is deeply unsettling.

In many respects, it comes as no big surprise to me that evangelical christianity has invented its own anti-feminist movement.

To the age-old question of “who is God,” Kassian complained, feminism answers, it’s up to you. And this, to Kassian, is a blasphemous statement of authority in and of itself, and even a sign of self-worship. “According to feminism, women decide, and ultimately, that means that they themselves are God.”

Actually not really. Feminism doesn't generally have anything to say about the concept of "God". However, what it does do is call upon women to think and act for themselves.

It gets better:

“Wimpy theology does not give a woman a God big enough, strong enough, wise enough, good enough to handle the realities of life in a way that enables her to magnify Him and His Son all the time… Wimpy theology doesn’t have a granite foundation of God’s sovereignty underneath.” Non-wimpy theology gives women both a God strong enough to see them through the worst of life, Piper continued, and also a set of non-negotiable mandates for life. Namely that submission is a wife’s divine calling, and truest form of power. “I distinguish between authority and influence,” he said. “A woman on her knees sways more in this nation than a thousand three-piece suited Wall Street jerks. There is massive power in this room, so I do not take lightly this moment.”

Now, personally, I don't buy the biblical 'man as head of the family' routine - I never have. Real families are active partnerships between the spouses, not situations where one partner places themselves in submission to the whims of the other.

Then, someone sat down and started pointing out the dark side of this woman-as-submissive mentality:

In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet, writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”

When these clowns are telling women that the spouse who is beating them every couple of weeks is doing "God's will" and that women are meant to suffer at the hands of an abusive spouse, they are doing something far worse than the abuse itself - they are fostering the very grounds that abuse will flourish in.

Saddleback’s position is “typical evangelical fare on the subject of domestic abuse and domestic violence,” responds Andersen. Typical because, like other well-known and extremely influential evangelical leaders, Saddleback is pushing a message of “leave while the heat is on,” but only with the intention of returning to the marriage when the violence has cooled. This is the message that Andersen tracks from Christian leaders as prominent as megachurch pastor John MacArthur, Focus on the Family head James Dobson, and established Christian radio psychologists Minirth and Meier on the far-reaching Moody Media empire. “Everyone with a lick of sense knows that, in a violent marriage, the heat is never really off,” Andersen tells me. “Everything can be fine one minute, and the next minute you’re dead.”

I don't care what scripture says about wifely submission, or for that matter the man's right to beat his spouse. Abuse is abuse - and it is wrong. Period. If scripture says it's "okay", then the scripture is simply demonstrating that it is an artifact of an era long past, and it is time to move beyond interpreting it literally.

Why Non-Discrimination Laws Are Needed - Reason #2,354,931

I've ranted about the kind of nastiness that can be levelled at people for being different many times on this blog. In the last couple of weeks, there has been a surprising amount of vileness in the news: a lesbian couple gets assaulted, another couple is denied housing, and a transwoman was shot to death.

Then we have the latest whining out of Peter Labarbera based on a non-discrimination clause in the Obama transition team hiring application page:

The Obama-Biden Transition Project does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or any other basis of discrimination prohibited by law.

Whines The Peter:

Will big-boned men in dresses and high heels like this fellow be allowed to use women’s restrooms in federal buildings under the Obama Administration? That’s what Obama’s plan to create “rights” based on gender confusion might bring.

I won't even begin to tear apart the errors in LaBarbera's ignorant tirade. Suffice it to say, that it is the insane rantings of people like him that make it abundantly clear that broadly inclusive non-discrimination laws are absolutely necessary. As are harsher remedial laws like S. 318 of the Canadian Criminal Code.

Ironically, religion is so often the root source of discrimination against marginalized groups, and it is one of the first rights to be recognized and protected in law. (and rightly, it should be) As long as people like LaBarbera cloak themselves in religiosity, the good that many faiths do will be masked by the blunt nastiness and ignorance.

Wingnuts - Failing To Comprehend Context

The residents of Lower Wingnuttia apparently have no concept of context.

According the Lifesite, you'd think that a charity had written a piece of explicit erotica for children:

WORTHING, UK, May 28, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A prominent UK charity has been implicated in the production and distribution of a sexually explicit “educational” pamphlet aimed at children as young as seven. The booklet has been removed from one school in West Surrey after complaints from parents, but the charity responsible, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), has defended the material, saying the sexual material is already covered by the national sex education curriculum.

The charity, ChildLine, a branch of the NSPCC, produced a 20-page illustrated booklet in order to help children identify and report instances of abuse, including sexual abuse. ChildLine operates a children’s abuse telephone and internet hotline and helps connect children and families to social services. The NSPCC is the foremost UK charity working in child protection and the prevention of cruelty to, and abuse of, children.

The booklet, titled “In the Know, Keeping Safe and Strong”, includes a quiz in which children are to identify the abusive situation among three scenarios that include “a goodnight cuddle from mum” and a visit to the doctor. The third says, “Your uncle promises you a new MP3 player if you take your knickers off and sit on his lap.”

At first glance, you might think that's a bit over the top, until you take the time to read the actual pamphlet, and you realize that the pamphlet is purposefully direct in its wording throughout. There's good reason for this - it is meant to give children the vocabulary needed to say that something is wrong when it happens - and abuse happens to children of all ages - regardless of their vocabulary.

Contrary to what the wingnuts seem to think, where matters of abuse are concerned, childhood is not a moment of idyllic purity for the abused child. If they have the vocabulary to say what is being done to them that is abusive, then they stand a much better chance of successfully dealing with what has happened to them than if it waits until they are in their adult years.

This is one of those cases where being a little blunt about something has more long term benefit than it does harm. Do I like the fact that such pamphlets are necessary? Not particularly; but I think we are far better off putting things in the open rather than allowing the abusers to get away with it on the trust that children naturally place in the adults in their lives.

Chilling...

[Update: Nov 30/07]
From some of the comments I've been getting over the last 24 hours, it seems that the CNN link below now points to a story about a boy who refused treatment because of his religious beliefs. That is NOT the story that this article is based on. It is in fact based on a CNN interview with doctors who were refusing treatment to patients based upon the doctor's religious beliefs.
[/Update]
When Doctors start refusing treatment on religious grounds, something is vastly out of whack in the world.

Don't misunderstand me - I have no problem with medical doctors having active religious lives. However, when otherwise perfectly legal treatments are refused on the grounds that it conflicts with the "doctor's religious beliefs", then there is a serious, serious problem.

The last thing I, or any other patient, wants is to go to a doctor and instead of treatment receive a lecture on the morality of our lives as an excuse for not treating the patient.

There's an underlying misogyny to this practice, as it is most often women who find themselves refused treatment. From abortion to birth control pills or "the morning after" pills, religious doctors are refusing to provide treatment they deem "immoral".

There's more to the picture though. What if your doctor were to decide that cancer was a punishment from "god" for an "immoral life" and refuse you treatment? Or perhaps the myriad of symptoms that some women experience as part of their monthly cycle are a punishment from "god" for being "temptresses", and therefore unworthy of treatment? Pick your scenario, just about anything can be construed as 'immoral' depending on how you interpret scripture.

Oh The Evil Plans of Little Boys

Apparently, being named Alistair Butt makes you a terrorist ... even if you are only ten years old!

Yep, that's a "no-fly" list for you - securing the skies from the evil machinations of people who can barely spell 'terrorist', much less formulate any kind of real plot.

Feeling safer yet?

(Time to start up the lawsuits challenging the legality of this odious piece of crap that the HarperCONS have foisted upon us.)

Deep Integration and Infringing Upon Liberty

In a move that mirrors the insane paranoia of BushCo, the Conservative government is going live with Canada's No Fly List today.

As I noted back here, the no-fly list is arguably downright illegal in Canada, as it uses secretive information without any kind of contestable process to restrict an individual's liberty. You might sit and think to yourself that it will only sting "them evil terrists", but that's clearly not the case.

Coming from Harper's lot, this isn't a terribly surprising maneuver - they are so big on the whole "deep integration" thing that slavish obedience to Washington just seems to be their second nature. (and yes, there are reasons to suspect that the CPoC is little more than the "GOP North" these days)

By blindly mirroring the US no-fly list, the Harper government is once again repeating the very legislative errors that created the so-called "security certificates" that were struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year. It's yet another means for detention without trial, and that is a fundamental violation of civil liberty in a supposedly free country.

In an aside, I see that the Cons are trying to appeal to NASCAR fans - sure hope that gets you a pile of votes boys - in Tennessee. More cynically, I'd like to follow the money for that little escapade.

Is Micro$oft The Next SCO?

It would appear that Microsoft thinks that the FOSS world that spawned Linux suddenly owes Micro$oft a huge amount of patent monies because so much of "Microsoft's innovations" have been "stolen".

Amazingly, Ballmer is not specific about which M$ patents have been violated (which is starting to sound amazingly like the infamous SCO Lawsuit).

While this is mostly a reiteration of various threats that M$ has made against Linux in recent years, should Microsoft actually attempt to litigate this they would turn themselves into the next SCO lawsuit. As SCO has proven, alleging infringement and actually proving it are two very different things - and so far SCO hasn't been very successful.

As for Microsoft demanding license fees for the "infringed upon patents", well, they'd have to identify who did the infringing, and then sue them in court - that could be a rather difficult proposition when FOSS developers tend to be all over the place, and not just within the United States.

Abusing Their Power

It appears that the Conservative government thinks that the resources of the Federal Government are at their disposal for partisan propaganda.

As The Galloping Beaver notes, our "Minister of Public Safety" Stockwell Day has posted the following screed on his department's website:


I'd like to draw your attention to the last paragraph, which reads:

At a time when the Opposition Parties are being soft on security and soft on terrorism, Canada’s New Government remains unwavering in its determination to safeguard national security and is committed to working with all its partners to protect the safety and security of Canadians.”

If I found that screed on the Conservative Party website, I'd look and shrug at it. However, when I see such obviously partisan crap on the Government's website, I get very angry. The Government and its agencies exist at the will and the service of all Canadians, regardless of how we voted. Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition represents a sizable fraction of Canada's voters (a majority in this parliament, actually).

If Harper and crew are so willing to abuse government resources to forward their partisan chicanery now - while they have a razor-thin control over the House of Commons agenda - voters must ask themselves just how ugly are they going to get if they get anything close to a majority in the House of Commons. Harper has already demonstrated that he has little - or no - regard for anyone but his most loyal followers, and will quite cheerfully throw anyone else "under the bus".