24 x 7 Campaigning ... Foot, meet Mouth

Harper just couldn't help himself, could he?

During the news conference, Mr. Harper attacked Mr. Ignatieff, saying he was irresponsible for comments he allegedly made about Canada's position within the Group of Eight industrial nations. Mr. Harper was basing his criticism on a fragmentary quote supplied to him by a staff member before the news conference began. The quote, uttered by an academic, that Mr. Ignatieff is alleged to have said suggested a new configuration of the world's big powers to replace or augment the G8 might leave Canada out.

“Mr. Ignateff is supposed to be a Canadian,” Mr. Harper said. “I don't think you go out and float ideas like this that are so obviously contrary to the country's interest and no one else is advocating them.”

Mr. Harper, you're on the world stage - leave the petty, partisan politics at home. You have embarrassed not just yourself and your party, but Canada and Canadians by trying to make your appearance on the world stage another campaign stop.

But, there is something to be said for giving Harper enough bait that he embarrasses himself at such a high level:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has apologized to Michael Ignatieff for questioning the Liberal Leader's support for Canadian international interests, saying he based his attack on a quote Mr. Ignatieff never uttered.

“During that press conference, I attacked Mr. Ignatieff for some things he had allegedly said about Canada and the G8,” Mr. Harper said this afternoon at a wrap-up news conference of the Group of Eight major industrial nations.

“This was not a quotation of Mr. Ignatieff. I regret the error and I apologize to Mr. Ignatieff for the error.”

That's as close to an apology as Canadians will ever see out of this Prime Minister. Unfortunately, he hasn't apologized to his peers in the G8 for trying to use it as yet another campaign moment, nor has he apologized to Canadians for making the entire nation look like a bunch of rubes.

Of Bibles, Marriage and Overactive Imaginations

In the wake of Diane Ablonczy's recent faux-pas that has likely terminated any chance of ascending the ladder of Stephen Harper's cabinet, I find this little turd floating in bowl of the internet.

It appears to be an attempt to justify opposition to gay marriage because ... well, apparently men are beasts if they aren't in the company of women:

Homosexual male culture is the way it is because it centers upon encounters between men and men alone. Everything that's most animalistic about men when they are not in the company of women has an excellent opportunity to emerge to the fore.

Ummm...sure. Right. Somehow, this doesn't quite mesh with any of the gay couples that I have known, but then I won't say I'm wildly familiar with their bedroom encounters.

But, beyond the blithe suppositions that the author starts with about gay male behaviour, it's what he posits will happen if the US allows gay marriage.

... But then he goes on to describe the rest of his lifestyle, which is not exactly domestic. I'll spare you, but one detail caught my eye.

I had previously assumed that in his "marriage" he and his boyfriend are monogamous. Not so. Savage writes about how he would like to detail their adventures but his "boyfriend" vetoes the idea.

What was I saying about those tenets of sexual adventurism? Oh yes, that they may please Dan Savage and many other gay men. Sexual sterility goes inevitably with their lifestyle. Even in a "marriage" like Dan's, monogamy isn't expected. And there's no necessary limit on lurid public expressions.

Monique, don't you see? Girls and women were hurt by males with increasing and heartbreaking frequency as the Sexual Adventurist Code of Values was progressively adopted since the 1960s as the norm among heterosexual males. No, we didn't need homosexuals to teach us these things. It was old fashioned heterosexual adventurism. Many women are still paying the price.

Well, let's just think about this for a moment. Sexual promiscuity in men has been met with a nudge and a wink for centuries - going back to the earliest recorded civilization. Among the Romans, the men of the house bedding slaves, the neighbor's wife and whomever else happened to be convenient was tacitly accepted - mostly because it meant that there was less chance of a woman being perpetually pregnant. An early, and crude form of family planning, but planning nonetheless.

Of course, since the 1960s, what has happened is that women have started to assert that they have a say in whether or not they want to have sex, and when they want to bear children. Something that has long offended the holier-than-thou crowd.

But there's a real problem with the writer's implicit assertions. First, he seems to believe that men are incapable of managing their sexual desires. This is blatantly false, and as has been pointed out in numerous sexual assault trials where the defense tried to claim that they "couldn't help themselves" because of how the victim was dressed, an line of reasoning that is simply insulting to both men and women.

But now gay activists want society's seal of approval on their lifestyle, and it is, on average, far more extreme in its adventurism. And you think that will not encourage heterosexual men and boys to keep on hurting women as they do now, or worse? If homosexual males treat each other that way, with their activity officially endorsed by the government, why can we heterosexual males not relate to you, heterosexual women, in a similar fashion?

Wait a second, here. How can you possibly make such a leap with any intellectual honesty? Let's just consider something for a moment. Homosexual couples have been a visible and tacitly accepted part of our society since the 1960s. To the best of my knowledge, the rates of domestic violence have not substantially changed; and if he is referring to subjects like marital breakdown, well, I don't think you blame that on the homosexuals somehow.

Imagine a man and a woman, of impeccably heterosexual tastes, with an open marriage on the Dan Savage model. Every woman with a brain in her head knows that in such a relationship, she's likely to be the one who gets hurt.

Ummm...I hate to point this out, but heterosexual couples have engaged in "swinging" for a lot longer than a few decades. It may have been quietly hushed up, but rest assured that it went on. This is perhaps the great irony of the entire construct of marriage - it creates a set of boundaries and rules for people to live by, and the first thing that half of them seem to want to do is find ways around those rules. (and don't get me started on the delightful church practice of "indulgences" and other ways to sidestep supposed scriptural prohibitions!)

No, sorry, but blaming homosexuals for the infidelities and abuse that happen in heterosexual relationships is simply stupid.

However, the article's author in a subsequent writing goes on to describe women as sluts. Well, I suppose it fits into whatever weird idea of relationships the author has. Sadly, I think he's spent to much time with his nose buried in scripture, and not enough time looking around the world and reveling in the diversity that resides here.

There Goes Ablonczy

I'd say that Diane Ablonczy's career in Harper's cabinet is toast:

Federal Tourism Minister Diane Ablonczy has given up responsibility for overseeing a major stimulus fund that sparked controversy in Conservative Party ranks after it gave $400,000 to a Toronto gay pride celebration in mid-June.

Conservative MP Brad Trost, a critic of the Pride Week grant, is suggesting that the Harper government stripped Ms. Ablonczy of responsibility for the fund as a punishment.

If you want more of what Trost said, it's here - on Lifesite News - a "backdoor source" for the PMO to signal to the religious right wing without most of the population picking up on it. (I had seen the Lifesite article a couple of days ago, but I consider Lifesite so biased that I waited for a more credible source to pick up the story as well)

Trost's statements in the Lifesite article are telling - as they give us a pretty good idea how much influence and/or control the fundagelicals have in Harper's government:

Speaking to LifeSiteNews.com from his riding office in Saskatoon today, the 36-year-old Conservative said, "The pro-life and the pro-family community should know and understand that the tourism funding money that went to the gay pride parade in Toronto was not government policy, was not supported by - I think it's safe to say by a large majority - of the MPs. This was a very isolated decision."

Trost also hinted that Minister Diane Ablonczy, who was responsible for the funding, lost the file as a consequence of the embarrassment to the Party. Protesting more than once that there was no "official connection," he said, however, "it should be noted that the file has been reassigned to a different Cabinet Minister since that announcement was made." He added, "The whole tourism program and funding for major tourism events is being reviewed."

Trost claimed that "almost the entire Conservative caucus" including "most of the Prime Minister's Office were taken by surprise at this announcement."

"It shouldn't be deemed to have been a change in Party policy," he said, adding, "Most of the caucus is still strongly pro-traditional marriage."

Ablonczy was one of the few reasonable members of the Reform/Alliance band. You can pretty much guarantee that she will be quietly banished to the backbenches. If Harper could afford to lose the vote in the House of Commons, I'm sure he'd turf her out of caucus as well - he hasn't exactly shown himself willing to forgive mistakes.

[Update]
From the Toronto Star:

But in his criticism of his colleague, he did not mention his government funds Saskatoon's Pride parade. The Saskatoon Diversity Network received $9,000 from Canadian Heritage this year for last June's Pride Festival.


So ... Trost's interview was for what purpose, precisely?
[/Update]

More Dog Whistles Out of Edmonton

So, Premier Stelmach finally said something about his direction yesterday.

A defiant Alberta premier broke ranks with some of his own senior cabinet ministers Tuesday, declaring that, under his watch, taxes will never increase to help the government escape from its multibillion-dollar deficit and a deepening fiscal hole.

One day after some of his most trusted ministers said both tax hikes and program cuts are needed to redress the province's revenue crunch, Premier Ed Stelmach said his government won't hike personal or corporate taxes, and vowed never to adopt a provincial sales tax.

This is another dog whistle moment - to the extreme right wing base that now seems to have control over the Alberta PC's. It's a signal that under Stelmach, the government is going to get axed down to as small as he can make it.

It shows a disappointing lack of vision and wisdom on his part though. He has just shackled himself to only surviving on existing revenues - by far the majority of which are coming in from a natural resources sector that has been pummeled in recent months.

Stelmach has just taken so many tools off the table, that his government's ability to respond to the economic situation we see today is reduced to two things: borrowing money and cutting services. That's it.

It's a sacred cow in Alberta that we will never have a provincial sales tax. When times have been good, that's been feasible for the government to get away with, and it plays well at the ballot box. What Stelmach, and others, fail to recognize is that a Sales Tax would go a long ways to stabilizing the revenues that the Alberta Government sees.

Unfortunately, Stelmach is playing to his base - he has been more blatantly since the April budget, and it's going to get a whole lot worse in the coming months. Especially when the leadership of the governing party isn't even willing to consider all of the tools that are available to him in addressing the current situation.

Stelmach's approach is going to make the recession in Alberta lot worse, and a lot deeper for longer in short order - purely so he can shore up his support within the party.

Talk about a government being past its "best before" date!

Harper and Ignatieff In Calgary

Ugh ... one of the things I hate about Stampede is that every 2 bit politician seems to think that it's the most wonderful opportunity to come around campaigning.

Harper hasn't helped his case any - not with what he said, or the latest round of attack ads.

Frankly, to infer that opposition to "mandatory minimum" sentences has anything to do with support - or lack of it - for certain varieties of criminals is simply cheap politics on Harper's part. Mandatory minimum sentencing does little in the long run except put more people in jail for longer - the US "War on Drugs" has used precisely this tactic only to achieve the highest incarceration rate in the western world.

The Liberal Leader said the ads, which blast the Bloc for voting against a law that would impose minimum sentences in child trafficking cases, further divide the country.

“I'm in politics to defeat the Bloc Quebecois with real arguments rather than slurs and vicious ad hominem personal attacks,” Mr. Ignatieff told a cheering crowd.

The Conservatives have also run attack ads that criticize Mr. Ignatieff for spending much of his adult life outside the country.

Mr. Ignatieff said there's plenty to criticize about the federal Tories without stooping to attacks on anyone's character or patriotism.

I think Ignatieff's right on this one. The politics of character assassination and slurs are something that Mr. Harper has imported from George W. Bush's America, and quite frankly, it's something that Canadians should walk away from. It does none of us any good, and we deserve better from our politicians than what Mr. Harper has delivered.

Mr. Harper also portrayed his government as trying to get tough on crime but being shackled to the actions of “the three parties of the left.”

Think about this for a moment. Harper's been pretty careful to only introduce the least odious aspects of his legislative program while he's governing with a minority, and he's whining about being "shackled" by the opposition? Just what would he be doing if he had a majority? I suspect it would be bad - bad for Canada, bad for Canadians. As far as I can tell, the Reform "base" is still firmly in control of the HarperCon$, and there's nothing about that political movement that is good for Canada as a whole.

Harper has demonstrated a lack of understanding about human rights, the obligations of the government to its citizens - at home and abroad, fiscal management and accountability. How many more chances does this buffoon want?

Harper, Military Salutes and other Corruption

As if I needed another reason to think of Stephen Harper as a complete ass.

Dave over at TGB points out the arrogance and disrespect that our Prime Minister has shown for Canada, Canadians, and our system of government on Canada Day.

Lies, Damned Lies and Lousy Research

I'm a little late coming to this story - others have covered it before me, mostly because I haven't had time to give it the analysis it so richly deserves.

Entitled Legalizing Deception: Why “Gender Identity” Should Not be Added to Anti-discrimination Legislation, this article from Catholic Exchange comes as no real surprise, given the utterances from Pope Ratzinger.

However, this article is sufficiently awful as to deserve being examined in some detail. Superficially, it almost appears to have been researched fairly well and only on closer inspection do the problems with the foundations become apparent.

Such legislation is designed to give legal protections to those who reject the sex they were born with and want to be publicly accepted as the other sex -– the so-called ‘transsexuals,’ ‘transgendered,’ ‘gender queer,’ transvestites, and others. Such persons deceive themselves, deceive others, and are being deceived by mental health professionals and surgeons. The public is being deceived by the media and activists into believing that so-called ‘transsexuals’ were born with biological problems that are remedied by surgery and that it is possible to change your sex.

As an opening thesis, this sets the tone for the rest of the argument - essentially it is the often used claim that the transsexual is "deceiving" others. It also takes a gratuitous swipe at the treatment professionals that assist transpeople with the challenges that they face.

Let's see what else they have to say, shall we?

One lie leads to another. A clearly male person presents himself in public as a woman. He has had surgery and hormone treatments to perfect his impersonation and he demands that we pretend this makes him a woman. He wants us to use female pronouns when speaking of him and to allow him to use the ladies’ restroom. He also wants to change his birth certificate and driver’s license. While some persons who present as the other sex are obviously not the sex they pretend to be, others are able to deceive their sexual partners without informing them of their true sexual identity.

Persons who present themselves in public as the other sex say they need such protections because they are afraid of violence. This fear is real. When someone is deceived — particularly in such a personal matter has the sex of an intimate partner or potential spouse — anger is an understandable reaction. Violent acts can never be condoned, but if such legislation is passed those who have been deceived will be denied any legal recourse and the deceivers will be portrayed as victims.

If one were to blithely accept the thesis that transsexuals are "deceptive", this tautology makes sense. However, that is precisely the kind of reasoning that the defense in the Angie Zapata case tried. This "blame the victim" logic is wrong - no matter the circumstances. It has been tried repeatedly over the years, whether we are talking about rape, gay bashing or trans bashing.

However, the author is just warming his audience up at this point, before delving into his attempt to render transsexualism irrelevant or invalid as a condition. To do this, he turns to a particularly debatable bit of hypothesis:

Some males are autogynephiles, who began in adolescence to engage in paraphilic transvestite fetishism. A paraphilia is a sexual attraction to something other than another person. In this case a man is sexually aroused by to the image of himself as a woman.

The whole notion of autogynephilia is the invention of Anne Lawrence and Ray Blanchard. I know that Anne Lawrence self-identifies as autogynephilic, and she has written extensively about the concept. Many in the transsexual community disagree strongly with the very notion of autogynephilia - especially as a broad diagnostic notion.

My own thoughts on the idea have undergone some changes recently. I don't accept the idea as describing all transsexuals - it may describe a subset of those who seek transition and surgery, but I doubt that it describes very many. However, as a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago revealed, the notion of autogynephilia should not be used to exclude someone from access to surgery, since the post-surgical results for these people is generally positive. In other words, even if a transsexual is autogynephilic, that is far from fully describing the situation that individual is dealing with. (This conversation was with someone in the research/treatment community, and he had some very interesting things to say)

Those who are obsessed with the idea of being the other sex often resist therapy. They refuse to look at the psychological reasons for their desires. Some mental health professionals, frustrated by their inability to treat this disorder and concerned about their clients’ obvious dysphoria, are willing to go along with this deception. They give in to their clients’ demands and recommend a surgical solution to what they as therapists know is a mental health problem. They deceive their clients into believing that a “sex change” is possible.

The “sex change” surgeons know they can’t change a persons’ sex, they can only create a non-functional appearance of the other sex, but they also know they will be well paid for their skill and so go along with the deception.

These paragraphs grossly malign the treatment professionals who work with transsexuals. It characterizes them as "giving up" or worse being in it "just for the money". This is a gross misrepresentation of a group of professionals who came up with the WPATH Standards of Care, which are so carefully structured to ensure that the right steps are being taken.

Transsexuals are not typically resistant to therapy, but transsexualism in general doesn't respond to the therapy techniques used for other conditions such as OCD. There's decades worth of evidence for this. One cannot even call it an obsession and be correct in understanding what is going on.

This is not atypical when someone writes about transsexualism without actually understanding the condition itself, or worse, has a political agenda firmly rooted in perpetuating ignorance.

Lawrence also points out that when autogynephiles are not accepted as the sex they want to be they can be vulnerable to narcissistic rage, which is defined as the “disproportionate, compulsive pursuit of revenge that seeks to obliterate both the offense and the offender.”[6] ...
If you want to understand the full potential of such wrath, consider the case of John Michael Bailey, whose book The Man who would be Queen provoked retaliation from a small group of persons who didn’t like being labeled autogynephiles. They used the Internet to make outrageous accusations against Bailey, attacking his children, trying to turn colleagues against him, and to have him fired from his job.[8]

Ummm...no. Attempting to connect two, dramatically unrelated topics in this kind of manner is beyond irresponsible.

First of all, Bailey was castigated for publishing a book based on arguably awful research.

The broad base of the transgender community is rightly upset by that book, and seriously question both the validity of Bailey's work as well has his motives. Far too many people who have read Bailey's book have concluded that it doesn't describe their experience of being transsexual to accept it as being even remotely descriptive of the condition overall.

Lawrence applies the following clinical description of narcissistic rage to Bailey’s opponents:

…need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims… There is utter disregard for reasonable limitations and a boundless wish to redress an injury and to obtain revenge… The fanaticism of the need for revenge and the unending compulsion of having to square the account after an offense…The narcissistically injured… cannot rest until he has blotted out [the]… offender who dared to oppose him, to disagree with him.

Even if only a small number of autogynephiles are prone to narcissistic revenge, they could cause incredible harm to anyone who speaks the truth. They would see injury everywhere, file complaints, and institute lawsuits.

Has Anne Lawrence interviewed even a reasonable number of the people outraged by Bailey's book? That isn't a clinical description, it's conjecture. In this, I respect Ms. Lawrence's choice to defend someone whose work she respects. However, I do not think that it is even remotely reasonable to make such projections without actually doing some kind of sensible study of the people you are attempting to describe.

The laws adding “gender identity” to anti-discrimination legislation would allow men and women with serious psychological disorders, some of whom are prone to narcissistic rage and revenge to use the law to persecute business owners who are attempting to protect the privacy of customers in restrooms and locker rooms.

Oh yes, the "freak in the locker room/washroom" argument. This is nothing more than a sadly inadequate attempt to excuse discrimination and bigotry. While Ms. Lawrence has connected Narcissistic Rage to non-passing autogynephiles, I think that such a connection is at best debatable. I would like to see some population studies to investigate such claims. For now, I think it's important to note that the diagnostic criteria for Gender Identity Disorder make it quite clear that such a diagnosis should only be made in the absence of other significant disorders.

Further, most transsexuals are considerably better able to cope with adverse situations after transition than before. Also, the article is attempting to falsely characterize transsexuals as unstable and suffering from serious mental illnesses beyond their gender identity issues. Again, this is rarely the case, and the diagnostic criteria in the DSM IV TR safeguard against such situations.

And it gets worse. In some places, at age 11 these children who think they are the other sex are given puberty-blocking hormones so that secondary sexual characteristics do not appear. Then they are given hormones proper to the other sex, so that at age 18 they can be surgically mutilated. In other words, the entire educational, psychological, and medical establishment is conspiring to see that these children never receive proper treatment. There is no research on the long-term effects of these hormone treatments on developing the bodies and brain. Do we really believe that 11-year-old children have the judgment necessary to decide to permanently surrender their sexual identity and reproductive potential?

Worse? Obviously the author has no idea that the Endocrine Society has drafted treatment guidelines for transsexual persons - based quite strongly on the WPATH Standards of Care I referenced earlier.

... and yes, an 11 year old in the early stages of puberty (Tanner Stage 1 or Stage 2), may well have more than enough awareness of their inner gender being at odds with their body. Far too many transsexuals report awareness of something being awry long before any social gender awareness would have started to develop to ignore. While not all youth who experience cross-gender identity become transsexuals as adults, the interesting thing about the puberty stalling drugs is that once they are taken out of the picture, puberty can proceed normally (if a few years late, perhaps)

The interesting counter point is that even though a smaller fraction of childhood GID patients go on to pursue GRS as adults, the author has failed to note that by far the majority used to end up living as gay males. (At least in Dr. Richard Green's study). What would happen with these individuals if they had the option to transition during their formative teenage years? We do not know yet, but I suspect that we will find out in the years to come.

Sadly, the author of the column at Catholic Exchange appears to have gone out to find literature to support his preconceived notions about transsexuals, rather than bothering to educate himself about the topic as a whole. In doing so, his article rests almost entirely upon the heavily disputed works of Bailey, Blanchard and Lawrence.

To be perfectly honest, I would like to think that Anne Lawrence would be horrified to find her work being used in such a ham-handed manner to justify denying transsexuals protection from discrimination.