That's A Turnabout

When I first started writing this blog, Michael Coren was a regular target for my ire, especially when he would go off spouting right wing talking points about gay marriage.  Quite frankly, I saw little difference between his columns published in the Sun newspapers and the tirades of his then ally Charles McVety.

About a month ago, I saw a segment on CBC's Power and Politics (starts at 1:39:00) where McVety and Coren were talking about Ontario's new sex-ed curriculum.  I was shocked at the irrational flailing about of McVety, and even more stunned by how reasonable Mr. Coren was sounding.  

It turns out that Mr. Coren has had quite a change of heart.  

I applaud Mr. Coren taking steps to change in light of new evidence and information.  While I don't expect to agree with him on all matters in the future, I applaud his thoughtful, reasoned approach.  I wish him well.  

Institutional Racism In Conservative Ideology

This post has been evolving for quite a long time.  However, in the last few days, a series of pieces have been published which bring together several threads of thought that I have been exploring for the last several years.  

There has long been a degree of bigotry and racism underlying modern day conservative ideologies.  At a glance, it appears to have its roots in the politics of religious literalism and the desire for simple, black-and-white explanations of the world in which we live.  My thinking on this matter has clarified enormously in the last few days.

The first part of this was a very thoughtful analysis published in the Toronto Star:  "The Ideological Roots of Stephen Harper's Vendetta Against Sociology".

Harper’s two disparaging comments about sociology, however, also need to be understood alongside his gutting of the long-form census in 2010. It is widely accepted that this action fundamentally undermined Canada’s ability to understand its own demographics, long-term social trends, and inequalities — in short, its sociology.

So what does Harper have against sociology? First, Harper is clearly trumpeting a standard component of neo-liberal ideology: that there are no social phenomena, only individual incidents. (This ideology traces back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society.”) Neo-liberalism paints all social problems as individual problems. The benefit of this for those who share Harper’s agenda, of course, is that if there are no social problems or solutions, then there is little need for government. Individuals are solely responsible for the problems they face.

If this isn't chilling to you, it certainly should be, because it is a concise explanation of the apparent blindness of the Harper government to the consequences of decisions such as cancelling the long form census and other tools which can be used to inform government policy.

The second and third pieces of this story were published in the Calgary Sun today.  The first being Lorne Gunter's column:  Aboriginal Leaders: Canada's Shame in its Relations With First Nations.

Aboriginal leaders claim the Harper government's decision highlights Canada's "shame" in its relations with First Peoples. They believe it is proof of widespread racism and sexism in the government and in the broader Canadian society as a whole. 

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau says the Harper government is "out of touch" and "on the wrong side of history." 

The United Nations - that paragon of sanctimony, hypocrisy and inaction on real human rights abuses around the world - has chimed in. 

And even the country's police chiefs have insisted something must be done. 

So does all this support mean an inquiry really would be a good idea? 

No, it is simply another example of how much our nation's elites (police chiefs included) are seized by political correctness.

It's true that aboriginal women and girls are killed or disappear with greater frequency than non-aboriginal women - nearly three times as much. But the "why" is not as much of a mystery as our chattering classes would have us believe.

Most murdered or disappeared aboriginal women are not the victims of some vast conservative conspiracy or of white racism. They are the victims of the men in their lives.

Most killed or abused aboriginal women are killed or abused by aboriginal men - not callous white cops or violent white johns.

Wait a minute.  Nobody in their right mind is going to believe that a public inquiry is going to identify the guilty culprits.  That isn't the purpose of an inquiry.  The purpose of such an inquiry is to ask much bigger questions.  Questions such as whether the conditions on reservations contribute to domestic violence, and how a man like Picton managed to operate for multiple years, or why aboriginal people are grossly over-represented in Canada's prisons.

Of course, if you take a simplistic, black-and-white view of the world, any murder boils down to "catch the offender and punish them".  Simple, easy and horrendously misguided.   If you don't ask the big picture questions about these situations, you will never fully understand what is going on.  In fact, one is left very much in the dark, with the rather ridiculous assumption that bad people do bad things and that's all there is to it.

Anyone with even a little bit of grounding in reality and common sense will have long ago realized that people respond individual to their circumstances, and collectively to their environment.  Sociology is the study of societies and their behaviours.  The systems within a societal context will influence the individuals living in it.

In Canada, we have over two centuries of relations with the First Nations.  There are enormous problems with these relations, and much of it goes to the differences in what the First Nations understand the treaties to mean and how the Indian Act enacts those same treaties.  I know there are a plethora of other issues to be considered as well, but at its core, the Indian Act is a profoundly flawed piece of legislation which assumes the "superiority" of Colonial-era British society relative to the First Nations and very much embodies a series of structures that to modern eyes arguably impose a degree of structural and system racism which acts against our First Nations.

The overly simplistic rubric of the Harper Government blinds it to these issues.

The second item was a column by Michael Coren:  In The Wake of Tragedy a Sobering Reality

As a Catholic I can tell you with absolute certainty that if countless horrors had been committed by Catholics in the name of Catholicism, I and legions of my co-religionists would protest. I know the same would be true of most other religions and cultures.

Coren's claim that he would protest if countless horrors had been committed in the name of Catholicism is of course completely undermined by his own past utterances on a wide range of matters, not to mention his relative silence with regards to the sex abuse scandal that has plagued his Church for decades now.

But, we are told, these repeated beheadings and murders have nothing to do with most law-abiding, civilized Muslims. Perhaps so, but then it could be argued that neither does a book by Salman Rushdie or a drawing by a Danish cartoonist but that hasn’t stopped endless demonstrations and threats. 

Then there is the reality of the Islamic response. While I am sure that most Muslims are appalled by what happened to James Foley, even a cursory glance at social media reveals thousands of comments defending and justifying what happened, by Muslims on every continent. It might be comforting to believe that Islamist violence and bloodlust is a fringe psychosis, but every survey and all of the anecdotal evidence indicates that a sizeable minority of Muslims support it, an even greater number feel it is in some obscure way justified, and more still refuse to condemn it.

Funny how Coren can see this so clearly in the Muslim faith, and is so quick to call it out while turning a blind eye to the centuries of misdeeds done in the name of Catholicism.

While Coren may well be his own special brand of crazy, his blindness to the systemic racism and bigotry of his position is no different than that of Harper.  The simple, harsh reality is that the ideology they all subscribe to blinds them to the systemic problems they are creating and the very problems which aggravate already awful situations.

The minute you take a position that there "is no such thing as society", it becomes easy to wash one's hands of collective responsibility.  Perhaps the even greater irony of that is that same flight from collective responsibility makes it easier to label entire groups as "other" and criticize them for not meeting whatever arbitrary standard you may set.

I am quite certain that if you were to confront Harper, Gunter or Coren with the implicit bigotry of their positions, they would deny it.  Their very ideological constructs are so limited in their understanding of large, complex systems like societies that they cannot comprehend the idea that their positions foster othering and judgments on incomplete information.

A stage is not only set upon which racism and ethnic bigotry can flourish.  In Harper's Canada, it is not only growing and flourishing, but the flames of ire are being fanned by it.  I can only hope that we are able to replace our current government with one whose perspective encompasses a much broader view of what Canada is, and what it can become.

Shorter Michael Coren: Harper's Corruption Is Small Potatoes

I have never considered Michael Coren to be even remotely reliable in his analysis of anything.  The simple fact is that he is so firmly embedded in radical conservatism that he can't possibly bring himself to see anything wrong with anything that Harper has done.

Case in point:  His latest column whining about the media paying attention to the Senate Expenses Scandal.

Apparently, in Coren's mind, the festering boil of corruption in Ottawa is not important.  We should all be paying more attention to the Ontario Liberal government.

So where are the exposed and shamed names, where are the CBC hacks and the brave Toronto Star reporters demanding to know what has been going on?

Most of the time we haven’t even been told where Dalton McGuinty is, and Wynne is treated as if she’s above suspicion. Yet on some television networks, Ford Watch has become a soap opera, with even his non-appearances discussed, and reporters are receiving praise for calling Mike Duffy names. There’s courage for you.

To hell with Ford and with Duffy and the other Senate mediocrities.

I want real journalism and real accountability, and I want to know where my money is and who spent it and then covered their tracks.

Being dumb or greedy is wrong, being a major thief far worse.

Well...let's start with the obvious.  Apparently a corrupt conservative government in Ottawa is less important in Coren's mind than a corrupt liberal government in Queen's Park.

News Flash to Michael Coren:  Corruption in Ottawa affects the entire country.

No, we need to pay extremely close attention to the corruption in Ottawa.  It is not small potatoes corruption.  The further we dig, the more the stench of corruption becomes all the more pungent.  Harper has driven Ottawa into the ground with his short term political gain strategy.  EVERY citizen of Canada is paying the price for this.

While the uproar in Ontario over power plants is serious, I don't think it can be held as superseding the ongoing issues in Ottawa ... unless of course, like Coren, you are a Conservatroll seeking a way to divert attention from the mess that Harper has created in Ottawa.

For the first time in years, the media is finally doing its job:  publicizing what the government in Ottawa should be held accountable for.

It's About Accountability and Responsibility

Ironically, in spite of the headline, I'm not going to be talking about Stephen Harper and his band of twits. This is about the seemingly endless sex abuse scandal that continues to rock the Roman Catholic Church ... and Michael Coren's utter misunderstanding of the situation.

It’s Saturday, so it must be time for yet another attack on the Roman Catholic Church — this time involving lies about the Pope, his brother and, before long, his auntie Freda and his pet cat Hans.

Logical thinking and balanced thought were eliminated from this subject long ago. It’s church-bashing time and why bother about poverty and war when you can pretend that Catholicism is to blame for everything.

Of course - the nitwit picks up on the role that the current Pope has apparently played in one diocese, and conveniently ignores the fact that what's coming out now shows us a picture of an organization that has actively and systemically enabled pedophiles in its midst.

Yet if we are to believe the media, abuse is almost exclusively Catholic and — here we go again — all because of celibacy and an all-male clergy.

Complete trash-talk of course. A failed priest says no more about Catholicism than a failed Canadian says about Canada.

Nice straw man argument there, Michael. Care to try again? I don't think people really care what vows a priest takes. While personally I find the notion of a celibate priesthood a bit ridiculous, that's really an internal matter as it has little or no effect on the parishoners whether the priest is married or not.

While sexual abuse is obviously grotesque, the number of occurrences in the Catholic Church is neither higher nor lower than any other denomination or religion and the same as those in education, sports and any other institution that involves a power dynamic between adults and youth.

Again, Coren completely misses the boat. In those other "institutions", the abuser and their enablers are subject to criminal prosecution, and rightly so. The issue here is that the Catholic Church has tried to not only set itself apart from the laws in so many lands, but has actively attempted to protect its clergy from prosecution - not just once, but repeatedly.

Worse, from an optics point of view, is that the current Pope's name appears repeatedly in this history - including renewing or re-approving the original protocol the church came up with to conceal child molesters in its midst.

People are looking for something here - it's called accountability. The rot in the clergy has been percolating to the top, and today the people who are implicated are very highly placed in the church hierarchy. These are people whose acts and actions attempted to protect the abusers, but coerced the abused into 'vows of silence' and generally tried to place the clergy outside the laws of the land.

If a hockey coach abuses his players, he goes to trial. If his leadership moves him around to conceal his tracks, they too are culpable for their acts. Why should a member of the clergy be any different simply because they are part of the Catholic Church?

In The Department of Not Getting It

We have the Catholic Church and Michael Coren.

First up is the following news brief from Zenit: Vatican Official Asks Security Group for Genuine Respect:

He pointed out that "incidents of hatred, discrimination, violence and intolerance against Christians and members of other religions continue to occur too frequently in the OSCE region and are symptomatic of the lack of peace in the world."

Monsignor Frontiero suggested that the OSCE's commitment to combat intolerance aims to promote genuine respect of "the differences among us."

The Holy See representative explained that "an absence of convictions is not synonymous with tolerance."

And, he contended, only skepticism and relativism remain if there is an absence of some "convincing notions of truth which require that we be tolerant with one who has a different idea of the truth of things."

On a first glance, there's not much to disagree with in Monsignor Frontiero's comments. Discrimination against someone on the basis of their faith is wrong, and should be challenged at every turn.

However, given the church hierarchy's involvement in firing someone for being transsexual, it starts to smell of hypocrisy to me.

Then we have Michael Coren's most recent contribution to the National Post in which he adopts a stance towards criticism of the Vatican that is very similar to the "support Israel at all costs" mentality we regularly see out of the hard right wing.

Today secularism is the ideology of fashion but Catholicbashing, the last acceptable prejudice in polite society, is the toxin the runs through the contemporary bloodstream of Western liberal society.

What Bishop Raymond Lahey is accused of doing is unspeakably awful, but an abuser no more represents the Church than a criminal politician represents democracy. But no, we are told, it's inherent to Catholicism because the Roman Catholics won't change with the times.

Right - I've heard this before - and explained why Coren is wrong.

But Coren goes even further down the rabbit hole of trying to justify the inaction of the Catholic Church towards the pedophiles in the priesthood:

On a clinically practical level, celibacy has nothing to do with sexual exploitation. The abuse rates inside the Catholic Church are almost precisely the same as those in other Christian denominations, non-Christian religions, education, public service and virtually all institutions.

That doesn't make it right, nor does it justify the Church actively protecting these predators by concealing them and moving them about - or just blatantly ignoring their activities.

The issue is not the presence of pedophiles in the priesthood, it is the rank hypocrisy of a church organization that seems to think that on one hand it can justify enabling these people while actively engaging in discrimination, persecution and marginalization of those they deem "immoral".

Among thinking people, it's hard to accept the Church's "teachings" when the odor of corruption and hypocrisy wafts from the Vatican on a seemingly weekly basis.

As an aside, Mr. Coren might want to consider the fact that unlike a lot of faiths, the Catholic Church is also a political institution which regularly tries to inject itself into the political dialogue of the world - this is all the more offensive when their pronouncements on subjects are so often at odds with their own actions.

As an aside - my beef is not with the Catholic Faith per se, but rather the political structure and its denizens who claim to be the speakers and keepers of the faith - somewhere along the way in the last 2000 years, they lost sight of the real value the Church is capable of bringing to the world

Yet Another Coverup

So ... the Church knew that Lahey was into porn 20 years ago.

At the time, Lahey was the bishop for St. George's diocese in western Newfoundland. In 2003 he moved to Nova Scotia to head the diocese of Antigonish.

"I asked him what he did with [that information], and Father Molloy mentioned that he had taken it to the appropriate authorities. In this case, it would have been Archbishop [Alphonsus] Penney," Currie said.

Penney was not available for an interview Monday, but CBC News reached Molloy in Florida where he is now a priest. Molloy confirmed what Currie told CBC News.

In short ... once again, the church hierarchy quietly hushed it up ... until 20 years later when his laptop is checked and found to be full of child porn. This is precisely what I was talking about when I excoriated Michael Coren for his naive defense of the church.

Coren Doesn't Get It ...

As if it should come as any surprise, but Michael Coren is trying to defend the Catholic Church in light of a former Archbishop facing child porn accusations.

It says a great deal about the man who is accused but, and this is important, it says little if anything about the organization to which he belongs.

If, for example, a leading Tory, Liberal or New Democrat were caught with child pornography, would we then assume the Tory, Liberal or New Democrat parties were somehow culpable? Of course not.

No, Michael - once again you have got it wrong - very wrong. The issue of the Catholic Church and its ranks of pedophiles in the priesthood is not just about a small percentage of the clergy engaging in sexual predation from a position of trust in the community.

It's about the Catholic Church having in place a hush-hush plan to cover up the misdeeds of their clergy starting in the 1960s - a tacit approval of their behaviour from the Vatican. The church didn't want them to face justice, and took steps to ensure that they did NOT face justice.

It's also about an organization which spends its time condemning everybody it can for having an active sex life; for using contraception, for being GLBT and so on. In a context where they have actively protected and nurtured the worst kind of sexual predators out there - pedophiles.

The church has, at no time, either taken responsibility for its role in these situations, nor has it ever done what it constantly demands of others - repented for its misdeeds. The Pope issued a flaccid apology of sorts recently, but then turned around and has tried blame it all on "homosexual priests" - ignoring the Vatican's own complicity in the situation. Further, the Vatican has gone out of its way to leave the affected parishes twisting in the breeze, while the coffers of the Vatican continue to house an astonishing amount of wealth.

Until the Catholic Church takes responsibility for what happened, and its role in the whole sordid mess, every time another clergyman shows up with his hands dirty, you can expect it to reflect not just upon the individual cleric, but upon the church itself as well. Taking responsibility for what happened is the first step; repentance is the next.

When the Catholic Church starts dealing with its own sexual issues in a realistic and meaningful way, then, and only then, will they be in a position to talk about sexuality with the rest of us. Dealing with things realistically will help - and coming up with bogus tests to determine if a seminary candidate has "homosexual tendencies" isn't realistic! Until then, the church hierarchy continues to look like a bunch of hypocrites.

Michael Coren: Hypocrite and Whiner

I see that Michael Coren is busy whining about the opening of the Queer Hall of Fame this past week.

Just like when I was a child and that longed-for present wasn't in Santa's sack, my hopes were dashed this week when I wasn't included on the list of the first inductees into Canada's Queer Hall of Fame. Pierre Trudeau, swimmer Mark Tewksbury and drag queen Robert Kaiser, known as Joan-E, were there but I was ignored. I can't say it doesn't hurt because it does.

Well, Michael, it might have something to do with your incessant whining about the evils of the GLBT in our society ... just sayin'.

It's not like you've done anything for GLBT people in Canada, Michael. In fact, I would hazard a guess that most GLBT people - and their allies - consider you to be someone worth remembering as a reminder of why the fight for equality must continue.

Gay people have a right to be gay. Just as Muslim or Jewish people, sports fans or Star Trek devotees or anybody else have a perfect right to be exactly who they are and what they want to be. But their first and most important loyalty should not be to their sexuality, religion or hobby but to their citizenship. This was the case at one time in our history but no longer.

Huh? What the heck is this? Loyalty to Canada - and to being Canadian has exactly zero correlation to wanting to be an equal participant in Canadian society, and before Canadian law. To infer that agitating for equality is somehow disloyal is beyond insulting - it also reflects upon how little Mr. Coren understands of Canadian identity.

You Only Just Figured This Out, Coren?

Apparently, a little glimmer of reality finally penetrated the TheoCon fog of Michael Coren's mind:

A War Built On Lies

We have been lied to about that terrible war and only a fool would think that we are suddenly being told the truth about the current ones.

It was horrific then and horrific now that good people have to die for agendas rather than causes.

Coming from a man who has argued for dropping nuclear weapons on Iran, or all of the great things our troops are fighting for in Afghanistan, it's more than a small surprise that Coren is finally starting to question the truth value of the reasons we have been fed about why we are engaged in Afghanistan, or why the US attacked Iraq.

When we are being told stories about why we are going to war by our politicians - and their allied commentators - we should treat them with more than a little skepticism.

Michael Coren: The Misogynist Chronicles Ctd

I really should know better than to read Coren's rantings - they are inevitably so full of idiocy it's amazing that he continues to be publishable.

His latest piece is another "get back in the kitchen, woman" column, in which he not only tries to claim that women shouldn't be working, but that the world's problems with parenting are entirely the fault of feminism.

There is more to this case and judgment than just this one passage of Cunningham's ruling, but at first sight it does seem rather strange.

Truth is truth, lies are lies and unless MacLeod's lifestyle goes directly to character it has no influence on the credibility of her evidence. It does, however, say something about her decisions and choices and about how the contemporary world regards motherhood.

We're not supposed to say it anymore but motherhood is pretty important. There are, of course, many women who are forced by economic circumstances to work outside of the home. But there are others who seem to believe that raising a child is less significant than alleged self-fulfilment or even political ambition. Ms. MacLeod, do you seriously believe you can be both an exemplary mother and a full-time politician?

The arrogance of Coren's close to that last paragraph is beyond words. In that one sentence, he has belittled the efforts of every working mother and father in this nation. I know far too many couples who struggle daily with keeping work, finances and raising their families in balance to accept Coren's blithe inference that you can't be both a good mother and a career woman. (or for that matter, a successful career man and single father)

Yes, I know people will say the father can do the job just as well and that it's all about quality time but this is nonsense and denial. Real parenting is about the time that isn't quality.

The quality stuff, the fun stuff, is easy. It's the driving to soccer yet again, the sitting with them when life is awful, the meetings with the teachers, the helping with the homework, the being there stuff that makes you a good parent.

Oh yes, so it's only the maternal parent that can ride out the rough patches, the difficult times? Right. I'll keep that in mind - in the same place that I keep my belief in Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.

Mr. Coren's attitudes don't even begin to recognize the realities that most families live with today. Perhaps, because of his semi-celebrity status, Mr. Coren has gathered enough wealth that he can afford this idealized stay-at-home world where his wife does all of the hard work raising the children, and he just has to do the "quality time" routine - that isn't real for most parents in urban Canada these days.

Believe me Lisa, sitting in committee rooms with political hacks mouthing the party line is not the same as seeing your child, to and for whom you are responsible, grow by the day into a unique human being.

Perhaps, Mr. Coren, you might want to write that same sentence with yourself as the subject of it? I think a lot of us can think of more pleasant ways to pass the day than in meetings with political hacks.

For Mr. Coren to place the burden of raising children primarily on the female parent, and then complain that "men are treated unfairly" is ridiculous, stupid and infuriating. It is, in fact, the very social structures that he idealizes that resulted in those court rulings he bemoans, not feminism. It has only been in the last 25-30 years that the burden of parenting has become more evenly shared by mother and father - and that has been a product of economic necessity for many.

I will agree that the family courts still make rulings which do not reflect the realities that many single fathers experience on a daily basis, but that will only change when the laws of the land change, and the courts are convinced of the realities. Ironically, those are the very realities that the Status of Women ministry used to fund research into tracking - until the HarperCon$ came along and slashed funding.

[Update 18/08/09]:
Mindelle Jacobs hands Mr. Coren his ass on a plate
[/Update]

Michael Coren: Adding New Depth To Sexism

I don't care much for Michael Coren has to say on good days. Most days, I just try to ignore him.

Then he writes something as utterly offensive as this.

So Canada sacrifices another victim on the altar of equality.

Last week a young girl dressed up as a soldier died in the increasingly futile and pointless war in Afghanistan. She was 21 years old, had been in the country for two weeks on her first tour of duty and probably weighed a little over 100 pounds.

Let's start with the basic offensiveness of Coren's wording. Karine Blais was not "playing" at being a soldier, so the phrase "dressed up as" is not only wrong, it's denigrating. The implication being that a woman can never be a soldier. Never mind that Ms. Blais had to go through the same Basic Training that everyone of her male counterparts had to, and probably could have quite cheerfully laid Mr. Coren's flabby, middle-aged paunchiness out in about 2 seconds - unarmed.

Yes, yes, yes, I know it's fundamentally anti-Canadian to say this but I'd prefer to articulate the views of the silent majority than hide behind some modernist fetish that places more importance on the myth of absolute equality than the safety of a girl who should be laughing with college friends rather than fighting theocratic madmen.

You know, Mr. Coren? You aren't part of any "silent majority" here. You are part of a very small minority that still pines for some idealized notion of the nuclear family, and in particular women's role in that. You want someone who is waiting at home for you after a hard day at work, ready to soothe whatever ails you.

It is beyond insulting to Ms. Blais' memory for you to insist that she should be at college. Remember, she chose to join the army (just I chose not to years ago). Whether she had plans to go to college after a few years in the military or not, only she and her family know that - and it's irrelevant to you anyways.

What Mr. Coren doesn't recognize here is that Karine had the right to make the choice to join the military. It wasn't so long ago that she wouldn't have had such a choice at all.

On the "altar of equality", as Mr. Coren puts it, we have but one word - choice. Gender equality is about having the right to choose one's own path in the world, regardless of being born male or female. If that means the right for women to choose to take on combat roles in the military, so be it - just as it also grants the right for men to choose to become stay-at-home parents.

If captured, of course, such a woman would be repeatedly raped. And tortured. Again, I'm not meant to say this. Not Canadian, not CBC, not Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Not the sort of thing we're supposed to feel, so we pretend that men and women in the army, police and fire service are given the same tests and have to fulfil the same requirements. Yet truth still breaks through.

Oh, how nice of Mr. Coren. He's trying to protect Ms. Blais from the horrible fate that would await her should she be captured by the enemy. Is he really so thick between the ears that he believes she didn't think about that risk? The risk of rape and sexual assault is everywhere, Mr. Coren. Women know about it, and live with it every day of their lives.

Mr. Coren has only demonstrated his complete ignorance of what has happened since WWII in this part of the world. That he takes such a snide, paternal tone in his article serves but to reinforce the impression that he lusts after a social ideal that never has, and never will exist.

That Slithering Sound is The Base Squirming

I'm not even sure Coren's latest column can even be parsed using the rules of the English Language. Even if it contains the odd sentence that is correctly structured, the overall argument makes somewhere between little and no sense.

Stephen Harper has been told by his advisers that he must avoid social issues if he is to win the election and, horror, unborn children were mentioned twice in the past seven days.

Pesky little things. Why can't they just agree to being slaughtered and stop muddying the waters of Canadian politics ...

Of course, Coren's whining about Bill C-484, which the Tories have suddenly decided to stop supporting because it is now a political liability.

These current mentions are tenuous at best. In a desperate attempt to make the prime minister look like the president, Stephane Dion asked Harper where he stood on abortion. A sordid attack.

Is it such a "sordid" thing, Michael? The Leader of the Opposition has asked our Prime Minister to state what his position on the subject is. It doesn't take a genius to suspect that there's an inconsistency or two between Harper's statements and his support for Bill C-484. I think what is far more significant is Harper's outright refusal to answer a simple question.

Even though Harper has proposed alternative legislation on the issue that is insultingly weak, he and his party are still held up as vile fundamentalists who want to force women barefoot into the kitchen.

Something I've never understood in that when my wife is making dinner I'd far rather she wore shoes. Choice, however, is apparently all important in this discussion so I shan't dictate footwear.

How generous of you Mr. Coren. I'm sure your wife appreciates your magnamity in the matter.

Harper hasn't proposed any legislation yet - there's no government bill before the house to replace C-484, and the Con$ don't seem overly interested in promoting C-537, which would do the correct thing in the first place.

Thing is, almost every survey shows that at least 50% of Canadians are opposed to abortion.

Really? Let me see if I get the reasoning here correct. Even if I accept the assertion that 50% of Canadians are opposed to abortion, since when does that have anything to do with an individual woman's right to make that decision for herself? There are lots of life decisions that people make that others would oppose. The issue around abortion is not a matter for some kind of "will of the majority" to decide. The long term, legal issue is really about a woman's access to health services in general, and reproductive health in particular. But, then again, Mr. Coren is also the same man who argues that teaching about sexuality in school is a bad thing. I suppose I should not be too surprised.

But at heart it's about doing what is right. Our beliefs regarding health care, welfare, housing, education, foreign policy and general social justice are all vital, but ultimately irrelevant if we deny the most basic right of all -- the right to life -- to the most vulnerable.

Perhaps, Mr. Coren, you would do better to argue about what is right for yourself, and let others lead their lives in a safe, peaceful manner. But thank you for admitting by your own reasoning that C-484 really is about abortion, and that the Fetus Fetishist crowd really is all about regulating everybody else's sex lives.

Coren: Citizenship is Conditional

In the right-wing of Canada, it seems that citizenship in Canada is conditional - even if you were born here.

Omar Khadr is a tenuous Canadian at best, unlike most newcomers to the country who love it with pride and passion.

He's not a newcomer, Mr. Coren - Khadr was BORN in Canada. This is one of the points that the right-wingnuts in Canada keep forgetting. Omar Khadr has not renounced his Canadian citizenship to my knowledge, and he was born here - he's not a "tenuous" Canadian - he IS CANADIAN. The double standard that is at play here is revolting in the extreme. Canada's laws are clear enough on the matter.

Naturally, Mr. Coren spends most of his column convicting Omar Khadr based on his parents:

She has also, of course, loudly expressed her hatred for western culture and condemned Canada as a vile place where all children are drug addicts or homosexuals. She said she did not want such a fate for Omar or for her other son Karim, who suffered spinal damage after a firefight with the Pakistani soldiers who killed her terrorist husband.

Wait a second, Mr. Coren. What if others were to assign to your offspring the bigotry towards others you have shown? Surely you would own your own actions as distinct from those of your offspring. Let's not forget that under both American and Canadian law, Omar Khadr was not at what we call the 'Age of Majority' in 2002. Legally, that means that he is not held to the same degree of responsibility for his actions as he would were he legally an adult.

But, more importantly, we live in a country where the laws devolve rights and responsibilities to the individual. That means similarly that while we must hold the parents accountable for their actions, we cannot legitimately convict the son based upon the words and deeds of the parents.

The only valid criticism of the United States is that this young man should have faced a trial by now. If, however, he had been in prison just a few miles away from Guantanamo on Cuba he would have been beaten to death in one of Castro's death camps.

Talk about a bunch of crap. Not only are there enormous legal, moral and ethical problems with the entire construct that is embodied in Guantanamo Bay, defenders of Khadr's treatment while in custody conveniently gloss over the fact that the Americans were applying adult interrogation techniques to a sixteen year old. For all intents and purposes, he's still an adolescent in many respects. (Please note that the reasoning centers of the brain are not fully developed until sometime around the age of 20)

As for tying it to criminal justice issues in Cuba, I don't think Cuba is an active participant in Afghanistan at all, so that's a completely irrelevant red herring.

I've said this repeatedly. The issue here is not what Khadr did or did not do. The issue is the negligence of the Canadian government where Canadians held abroad are concerned. The HarperCon$ have done absolutely nothing until public pressure reaches the boiling point. Think about this. If you are detained abroad, access to consular services and intervention is considered by most to be a fundamental right. Under Harper, that has gone by the wayside - a warning to all Canadians who travel abroad.

Michael Coreen Attempts To Understand Science

... and then use it to self justify his Fetus Fetishism by squawking about Morgentaler's Order of Canada.

The word "fetus" merely means "young child" and, anyway, after three months of growth nothing new develops. At nine months the unborn child is more mature, but then a five-year-old is more mature than a two-year-old.

This such a gross oversimplification of the development of a fetus during pregnancy. There's Coren's claim that a fetus is fully developed at three months, and then we find reality:

Fetuses are not capable of feeling pain at the beginning of the fetal stage, and will not be able to feel pain until the third trimester. At this point, uncontrolled movements and twitches occur as muscles, the brain and pathways begin to develop.
...
From weeks 11 to 14, the fetal eyelids close and remain closed for several months, and the appearance of the genitals in males and females becomes more apparent. Tooth buds appear, the limbs are long and thin, and red blood cells are produced in the liver, however the majority of red blood cells will be made later in gestation (at 21 weeks) by bone marrow.

Then Coren goes on to attempt to debunk arguments related to abortion in a classic 'straw man' attack style:

Rape and incest

Most of these arguments are entirely spurious, such as the point about abortion in the case of rape and incest. Such tragedies provide less than a fraction of 1% of the reasons for abortion and they are mentioned by abortion advocates simply to make pro-lifers appear extreme.

We should ask if those who support abortion in these exceptional cases would oppose it when rape and incest are not the causes of pregnancy. We know the answer.

Straw man #1 - support for abortion at all means supporting it under all circumstances, therefore we can dismiss this argument.

Wrong. Dead wrong. The problem with this simplistic framing of the situation is that the argument places the onus entirely upon the woman to reveal and explain her sex life. I don't need to point out that there's nothing here that holds the man in the picture accountable for his actions, is there?

But before legal abortion, the pro-abort people say, enormous numbers of women died in backstreet procedures. Actually this is mostly propaganda. Of course such horrors occurred, but there are no reliable figures and informed sources dismiss most of these claims as nonsense.

Again, another straw man argument. Essentially, he's saying that women dying because they sought an abortion "in the back alley" isn't a big deal. The issue around back alley abortions is not just that women were killed or horribly maimed as a result, but the fact that women found it necessary to seek out underground health care in the first place.

Even if true, they continue, only women have a right to an opinion on this issue. No. Men are fathers, men are taxpayers, men are citizens. Men also are abortionists. But surely it is the nature and quality of the argument rather than the gender of the individual that should inform our position.

As a man, Mr. Coren will never be pregnant, will never carry a baby to term. It is not him who would be "held accountable" for his sexual activities. In short, he has no say in the matter. When men like Mr. Coren can be held accountable for their sexual activities (in or outside of marriage - it's not like Christianity doesn't have a long history of "bastard" children born outside of the marriage bed!), and they pay the biological price for bearing children, then they have a say in this matter of women's health. Until then, he has no say unless the woman chooses to involve him.

Gender bias does, however, lead to far more baby girls being aborted than baby boys. Rather a bitter paradox for feminist ideology.

Why yes, you misogynistic ass, that's all the fault of the feminists. It couldn't have anything to do at all with people who haven't yet figured out that women are just as important and valuable as men, could it?

Michael Coren: Abstinence Because Girls Are Icky

Did Michael Coren never get out of grade school or something?.

His latest gem is an amazingly misogynistic rant revolves around the movie "Sex and the City" and contraception. Basically, he's blaming movies like "Sex and the City" (and I presume its television series predecessor) for the spread of STI's in New York - and of course, the world would be so much a better place if we were all good abstinent little "Christian" robots who held off sex until we got married.

Of course, Michael's contact with reality is tenuous at best, but his focus on "Sex and the City" - and in particular feminine chastity that he appears to nearly fetishize - is creepy and smacks of both hypocrisy and ignorance.

Yes, I know that according to the Bible, women are temptation that men must resist ... yadda yadda yadda... If Michael had even the faintest inkling of reality he would have long ago figured out that even at the height of Church power in Western countries, the church couldn't even keep its own clergy abstinent! There are so many people around whose ancestry includes the illegitimate offspring of some cleric or another who was supposedly "chaste" it's not even funny.

Nothing in Michael's column even starts to acknowledge that when it comes to sexual fidelity, human males are rather prone to wander about. In the past, this was often winkingly referred to as "sowing one's oats" among other euphemisms; youthful sexual curiousity created more "shotgun" weddings and "overeager brides" who delivered a baby in somewhat less than the usual 9 months after wedding day.

Although the "abstain" crowd is technically right about one thing - if you aren't having sex, you can't acquire an STI - they overlook and grossly misrepresent the basic human condition that leads people to be sexually active. I don't know what little fantasy world Coren lives in, but apparently in it, nobody has any instincts, or perhaps every time those instincts rise to the foreground, the individual drops in prayer until the feeling goes away - either way, it sounds like a pretty grim little world.

Telling people about condoms and contraception is not about encouraging promiscuity (as Coren argues) - it's really about giving people the knowledge they need to keep themselves alive in the face of a reality that a lot of people are going to have sex at some time or another in circumstances that Coren wouldn't approve of. In an era where some STI's can be lethal if untreated, not teaching people about condom use is akin to handing someone a table saw and not giving them instructions on how to avoid getting their hands lopped off while operating it!

Coren getting on his high horse because there's a movie out there that happens to play on the mythology surrounding feminine sexuality is merely further proof in my mind that the man has no concept of what goes on in the real world.

Dear Mr. Coren:

Just. Shut. The. F***. Up.

We already know you're clinically insane, but your weekend tirade simply adds a whole new dimension to the phrase 'cognitive dissonance'.

In one column, you go from condemning a man just diagnosed with brain cancer for an event decades in the past to whining about school violence, funding for gender surgery and punishing poverty.

Regardless of Senator Kennedy's past, and what he did or didn't do in the past, your comments about him are inexcusable and callous. The man has just been shown the form of how he will leave this world, and you berate him for what? Where's that much vaunted sense of compassion that conservative christians like you keep spouting off about? (Oh wait - that vanished decades ago when political christianity became more about trying to regulate everybody else's life than anything else)

Much as it may please a kid being beaten half to death to know that his attacker is marginalized or may not enjoy full equity, the solution to gang violence, murderous teenagers and the mass decay of inner city public education is, for a start, to dismantle school boards that issue absurd and pointless press releases.

Ah yes, typical conservative thinking. Instead of addressing the problems, you'd punish those who identify the problems. Brilliant thinking Mr. Coren. Perhaps you'd like to try again.

Or perhaps your concept of "christianity" is far too rooted in punishment and retribution? Ah, I see it is:

More importantly, punish rather than reward irresponsible behaviour. Just as an example, cut off welfare payments to women who have several children by several men before they've reached 20 years of age.

Oh yes, punish those who are already in poverty. Brilliant, just brilliant, Coren. After all, we all know that those young girls who have multiple children when they are young did so deliberately, and their fathers were merely seduced by their feminine wiles. If the suppositions in your accusation weren't so laughably predictable, they are certainly derived from the standard biblical fundamentalist stance that women are somehow inherently evil and devious creatures. (Makes me wonder how Coren's wife can stand him, if his writing is a reflection of what he says and does at home...)

Also in Ontario the Health Ministry decided to restore full funding for sex change surgery, after having not fulfilled its election promise to finance special and crucial education to autistic children. If only those annoying autistic youngsters could prove that they were born in a body of the wrong gender!

There's so many problems here - and it's a pity that Coren manages to mangle all of them.

First of all, I doubt that the Ontario Ministry of Health made any promises in the last election, much less anything to do with providing specialized education for autistic children.

Second, I would expect that the Ontario Government provides services for the education of autistic children through whatever ministry is responsible for children, youth and education. A few minutes with Google turns up this press release from 2006, and there seems to be more in subsequent months. Once again, Coren mangles the facts.

Lastly, his sniping at gender transition related surgery simply shows us all just how clueless the man really is. The number of such surgeries requested in a year is a handful, and for the psychological well-being of those who request it, it is important. But then, Mr. Coren has shown us just what "christian compassion" really means in his mind so many times in the past that his christianity is filled with hostility and retribution.

At a national level no Canadian labour union or left-wing church called for a boycott of either China or Iran, after it was exposed that these two countries alone account for the vast majority of the world's executions and torture.

I don't know where that aside came from, but in typical pseudo-con style these days, it's a classic linking of unrelated topics. Yes, Michael, it's amazingly important to the world that Canadian organizations squawk about topics in other countries - when we have our very own variety of loon here at home to deal with.

Michael Coren - Loon Extradordinaire

Michael Coren is a loon, of that there is no doubt in my mind. He may even be among the most irrational of an already irrational crowd. His latest column for the Sun makes a few leaps of logic that are noteworthy in their utter stupidity.

The Liberals may be desperate, but Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier certainly isn't. He seems to have done very well for himself with the delectable Julie Couillard, a former girlfriend who once dated an undesirable in a biker gang. Biker chick or not, it's all rather irrelevant unless, of course, you have a leather fetish and want to know where the photos are.

I'll come back to Michael's stupidity about the appearance of Maxime Bernier's SO later - that deserves its own special beating.

Here's his first mistake regarding Mr. Bernier - frankly few of us really give a damn about his girlfriend or her background. That's not the issue. The issue is that our country's Minister of Foreign Affairs isn't doing his job. Nor is his S.O./G.F./whatever conducting herself appropriately when she's 'on stage'. There are protocols and a certain level of decorum that should be observed, especially when you are in foreign lands. One does not, for example, show up in a deeply conservative, religious country and wear a dress that's styled for the Montreal nightclub circuit.

Second, Bernier's commentary on so many topics has been offensive to many of the people that he is in fact responsible for developing constructive relationships with.

However, I'm being all too rational about this, because Michael desperately wants to ride his hobby horse - regulating everybody else's sexuality:

There are, by the way, numerous stories of other Canadian politicians -- some revered -- who are notoriously promiscuous. One of them is a leading champion of women's rights but is known to cheat on his wife on a regular basis. Various gay MPs, Liberal as well as Tory, have their private lives respected as well. And to a certain extent this is as it should be.

Wow - that almost sounds reasonable...then Michael falls off the wagon:

One Canadian judge who ruled on several gay marriage cases was challenged because his daughter was in a lesbian union.

It was alleged that this prevented him from being objective and it was argued that a judge in the U.S. in a similar situation excused himself from such hearings. Not this judge. Not in Canada.

There is also the wider issue of what private indiscretion and immorality says about someone's ability to lead, govern and decide. If a man is prepared to deceive and lie to his wife -- the person he has sworn to regard above all others -- he will betray and lie to people he has never met without a second thought.

Ah...really? Then why is Michael not calling for a purge within the various churches to rid the clergy of child molesters and supposedly celibate priests that have fathered children out of wedlock? Or perhaps he'd like to consider his statements in light of the miraculously "cured" Ted Haggard?

No, of course, Michael wants us to think that conservatives never have these kinds of "moral" lapses that he is so concerned about. (and his past columns reflect that is is more worried about the 'morality' of others than any of us really wish to think about too hard)

With the Clinton case it led to the deaths of many innocent people after the president instigated a drive-by shooting in the Balkans to distract attention from his sexual antics with an intern. Serbs died because Bill couldn't keep his pants on.

Right...Clinton is personally responsible for the civil/ethnic war in the Balkans? Horsefeathers. If one looks further at it, the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia started under the tenure of George H. W. Bush, not Bill Clinton. Second, NATO intervention in Bosnia happened under Clinton's tenure - but only after the "ethnic cleansing" atrocities became known to the world.

Claiming that Clinton started a war in Bosnia as a distraction from the Lewinsky affair is laughable logic, and seemingly typical of conservatives who are so desperate to have absolute power these days - linking utterly unrelated topics together.

Put in perspective - Clinton got caught with his pants down. Bush Jr. started not one but two foreign wars in his first term in office. Clinton certainly lied about the Lewinsky affair, but nobody died as a result of that event.

In contrast, uber-conservative Bush Jr. lied about the reasons for starting the Iraq war, and arguably has hardly pursued the public reasons for invading Afghanistan (capturing one Osama bin Laden - remember him?) with any particular vigor. How many casualties have there been in Iraq and Afghanistan - it's in the thousands...

Returning to Coren's stupidity, his last paragraph brings me back to something I wanted to address earlier:

that the Liberals have lost their way and, good lord, that the poor fools don't even know a handsome woman when they see one!

Okay, Bernier has hooked up with the proverbial "trophy wife" that the knuckle-dragger crowd likes to idolize. Sure, she's attractive. As I've already pointed out, that's quite irrelevant to the criticisms of Bernier in the Foreign Affairs portfolio. Second, were I in her shoes, I'd be more than a little miffed at a bald-headed, slightly paunchy middle-aged goon slobbering over my appearance. (Yes, I know it happens, but women typically have brains too - something Mr. Coren seems to have forgotten in his testosterone-addled ravings).

Ministerial Censorship Versus Legislated Process

The sexuality-obsessed and deeply repressed Michael Coren has been on a real tear this past week.

First, he managed to persuade the editors over at National Post to publish another of his anti-gay screeds. His reasoning on SGM is so pathetically poor it's not even worth my time to dissect it.

Second, he opened his yap on the Bill C-484 issues, and he makes the most amazing leap of illogic, claiming that there is some equivalency between C-10 and various human rights commission complaints.

I can't pretend to be a regular viewer of the television show Kink. ... There also are some quality products that are given a tax credit, but the point about the government's proposed C-10 legislation is that it doesn't threaten anything that's any good. Only cheap trash watched by a handful of people who should really fund their pornography through their own pockets.

Screech. Halt. All Stop.

I don't like the example Coren puts forth any more than he does. But then again, what I've seen of "evangelical television" doesn't exactly grab my interest either - in fact I find it just about as offensive for different reasons. But then, that plays into my point. Coren's whining about his right not to be offended, and demanding that his morality be imposed by ministerial fiat with NO review process, no process whatsoever other than the opinion of the minister of the day and whoever happens to have the minister's ear.

Really? They should, then, be campaigning for magazines such as Maclean's and Catholic Insight, websites like Free Dominion and Five Feet of Fury and a whole bunch of journalists who are currently under attack by numerous federal and provincial Human Rights Commissions for indulging in genuine freedom of speech without any fatties in latex or government handouts.

"Genuine freedom of speech"? Just what is that really, Michael? Your right to spout anti-GLBT lies with impunity? Your right to marginalize others for offending your moral code?

Of course, he's whining about HRC's underneath it all. However, the HRC's - even Alberta's - have a process that is clear, documented and publicly visible. (In spite of what Coren, Levant and others may claim) More to the point, only a small percentage of complaints actually go much beyond initial investigation. For the most part, the opinions of the minister responsible seldom come into the picture - any more than they do in other matters of law.

Second, there's a massive difference between someone's art being offensive to others, and a discrete attempt to marginalize members of society for offending Mr. Coren's particular sensibilities.

Allow me to illustrate by example. I do not like evangelical television - for a variety of reasons I find it deeply off-putting. The solution is simple - I don't watch it. I am not asking that it have whatever government funding it receives pulled, nor do I care if it does receive some funding. I don't partake in it, and frankly I have no interest in doing so.

The other side of the coin comes when people like Coren open their fatuous mouths and demand that GLBT people be treated as second class citizens (with the full burden of paying all of the taxes anyhow, I might add). The difference is that GLBT people offend Mr. Coren's sensibilities, and therefore he demands marginalization - not merely socially (which happens already), but in law. Making it harder for someone to get a job or to live their lives in peace is quite different from funding for the arts.

Step back from this for a minute or ten, and it becomes quite clear what the difference is. In one case, there is a process that is public and known to weigh the balance of competing rights; in the other we grant to the political minister of the day the arbitrary right to change the rules on a whim - largely on the basis of whether or not they are "offended" by something.

It always fascinates me how the first people to cry censorship when conservatives merely suggest a level playing field are just the sort of people who write letters to newspapers calling for people like, well, like me, to be fired.

That's a level playing field, Michael? No it isn't - in fact, there's no equivalence. I have a right to ignore art that offends my sensibilities - which I exercise on a daily basis; on the other hand, I have no right to demand that (for example) evangelical art be denied funding because it offends me.

Granting ministerial fiat rights in matters of "public morality" is extremely dangerous, especially if there is no process for review, input or otherwise besides the lobby system. Even the quasi-judicial HRC model works better than that.

Abortion Is Racism?

Oh, I see. The latest meme out of the religious right wing (the same people who wish to argue that being gay is an acceptable reason to be shot) is that abortion is racist because it can be used as a form of ethnic population control.

Of course, like any technology, procedures like abortion can be used for both good and ill. To make his case, Coren cites a supposed telephone conversation between someone wanting to make a donation to Planned Parenthood that would be earmarked specifically for a patient based on their ethnicity.

Based on this, Coren figures that Abortion is just evil, and is being used for something approximating genocide. Lovely. That's about as logical as the twit I blogged about earlier today who tried to blame Larry King for getting himself shot. Whatever. The point around the abortion discussion is that a woman has control over her own body. If more black women wind up using abortions, perhaps what we should spend the time to understand why these abortions are happening (perhaps its a function of grinding poverty? Perhaps she (the woman) would find herself dreadfully beaten by her spouse if she became obviously pregnant? The reasons for someone seeking an abortion are many and not always trivial. Even if that money was officially "earmarked" in a way that seemed racist, it may end up doing a lot more good than Mr. Coren imagines - perhaps by allowing someone to keep their job, or survive just a little longer to escape an abusive partner with their existing children.

Of course, coming from the same lunkhead who called for dropping nukes on Iran, I'm not at all sure that Coren's moralizing position here means that much. Perhaps Mr. Coren would do better to pay attention to his own life, and get his nose out of the lives of others - especially when it's quite clear he's somewhat less capable of empathy than your average rock.

The Wingnuts on Aqsa Parvez

Like you couldn't have predicted Coren's latest literary turd coming on the heels of Aqsa Parvez's murder.

Not that we know why, or even if Muhammad Parvez killed his 16-year-old daughter Aqsa last week in Mississauga, Ont. But we do know that he has been charged with the crime and that friends told reporters there had been terrible arguments about Aqsa's refusal to wear Islamic head covering and that she wanted a different path from that of her family.

You should have stopped there, Michael. You almost sounded reasonable. The fact is that Muhammad Parvez (or someone in his household) has committed a crime, and will be held to account under Canadian law for that crime.

Sadly for the world, Coren didn't stop at that paragraph and launched into a tirade of muslim-bashing that is truly appalling:

Which is probably just what the owner of a Christian bookstore in Gaza thought three months ago as he was murdered and his shop firebombed. Or Danny Pearl, shortly before the American journalist had his head cut off by Islamic terrorists -- who, naturally, filmed the whole thing and made sure their chants from the Koran were loud and clear.

Why yes, Michael, the wingnuts in Islam are a vile, violent bunch of beasts. But claiming that they represent the greater body of Islam is about as valid as saying that Fred Phelps represents Christianity.

Or the wretched gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia sentenced to 200 lashes for daring to be in a car at the time of the crime with a man to whom she was not married or related. Or the women stoned to death for adultery. Or the Iranian men hanged because they were homosexual.

Hold it a second. This criticism is coming from the same guy who wanted to turn Iran into a glass parking lot not so long ago? Really. Or the same guy who has bemoaned how "feminism has ruined the family"? Again, I wouldn't even begin to suppose that the laws in Saudi Arabia are defensible under our standards (they aren't), but Christianity hasn't exactly been a paragon of virtue either.

Only a bigot would argue that every Muslim was violent or opposed to Western freedom. But only a coward or a liar would argue that there was not a profound and deeply worrying link between conservative Islam and myriad acts of terror, intolerance and hysterical anger.

Just like the oh-so worrying link between Stephen Boissoin's letter and a gay bashing in Red Deer, perhaps? Oh wait - Boissoin was a Christian, so he was only "discussing an opinion"...sorry I forgot.

While I am deeply troubled by what happened to Aqsa Parvez, Canada's laws already speak to this matter quite clearly on numerous different levels. Unlike Mr. Coren, I do not believe or claim that such incidents are representative of anything except the actions of individuals, and not of the greater body of Islam. (The practising muslims I know are not particularly prone to violence)

As to whether certain social attitudes in the Middle East (esp. towards women) need to change, I do believe that change is necessary. But I am also not foolish enough to think that such change is going to be delivered successfully at gunpoint.

Those who choose to live in Canada are subject to our laws, which for the most part reflect a generally egalitarian view of the citizens of our nation. Mr. Parvez will be held accountable for his own actions under Canadian law. Mr. Coren, like Ezra Levant is far too quick to turn the issue into a judgment of someone else's faith.