When the Left exiled Life: Nat Hentoff on Abortion, Jesse Jackson and the Village Voice

Nat Hentoff, c.1958

In this world turned upside down, the “compassionate”, the “caring”, the “good guys” on the left of the political spectrum have succeeded in twisting the abortion issue, and exiling all dissenting opinion from pro-abortion orthodoxy. In this fascinating piece from 1992 I came across today (thank you to a mysterious MIT-based web site for keeping it alive), Manhattan-born atheist-Jew Jazz-loving left-leaning civil libertarian and legendary Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff reminds us, among other things, that both Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton were once staunchly pro-life. A taste from “Pro-Choice Bigots: a View from the Pro-Life Left”:

Not too long ago, (Jesse Jackson) was a pro-lifer. He wrote and spoke about the right to life and attacked advocates of abortion rights. “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life,” he would say. “That was the premise to slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation, because that was private and therefore outside of your right to be concerned.” He told the story of how he himself had almost been aborted. A physician had advised his mother to let him go, but she wouldn’t. Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being, he warned: “That’s how the whites dehumanized us, by calling us niggers. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do–and not even feel like they’d done anything wrong.”

…

Yet being without theology isn’t the slightest hindrance to being pro-life. As any obstetrics manual–Williams Obstetrics, for example–points out, there are two patients involved, and the one not yet born “should be given the same meticulous care by the physician that we long have given the pregnant woman.” Nor, biologically, does it make any sense to draw life-or-death lines at viability. Once implantation takes place, this being has all the genetic information within that makes each human being unique. And he or she embodies continually developing human life from that point on. It missses a crucial point to say that the extermination can take place because the brain has not yet functioned or because that thing is not yet a “person.” Whether the life is cut off in the fourth week or the fourteenth, the victim is one of our species, and has been from the start.

Yet rational arguments like these are met with undiluted hostility by otherwise clear-thinking liberals.

A very smart man. And, oh yeah – he’s got Obama pegged, too.

Quebec City Tea Party – April 11, 2010 – Canada Wants Small Government!

50,000 Quebecois Protest Tax-and-Spend Policies!

I’ve been waiting for this for a year, and now it’s here: the Tea Party has come to Canada! If 50,000 Quebecers are marching in the street against big government tax-and-spend policies, then there’s hope for the free world. PM Harper, I hope you’re listening: Canadians want change, Canadians want smaller government.

UPDATE: Amazing footage from inside the protest here:

Rex Murphy on Sarah Palin: An Outsider appreciates an Outsider

Few things have bothered me as much in the past couple of years more than the Canadian commentariat’s reaction to former Alaska Governor and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s emergence as a political force. The left’s vitriol is completely expected, as disgusting as it is (the true face of the left emerges, as the supposed champions of feminism savagely rape the reputation of a successful woman). But nasty attacks from the likes of David Frum, Margaret Wente, Diane Francis, and many in the National Post’s roster of otherwise sensible young libertarian commentators, had been mystifying and depressing.

Well, it took nearly two years, but finally – finally! – an intelligent Canadian pundit has figured out that the Sarah Palin phenomenon is a wonderful thing, and that her detractors’ primary source of animus comes down to the fact that she is an outsider working in an elite insider’s culture. In today’s National Post, Rex Murphy breaks it down in Understanding the Sarah Palin Effect. First, he explains why she is an attractive person and politician:

She is a cheerful human being, with a large family, an apparently easy-going and normal husband. She has a personality that would sell corn flakes — if not grow them. What career she had in Alaska, she earned. She’s at home indoors and out, radiates human warmth, seems to have some balance about herself, and has displayed over the last year or so a considerable fortitude under an avalanche of mockery and hatred. For the final stroke of this cameo I should note she is smart — smarter than 90% of the people who make a point of how rock-stupid they know she is.

She, by rights, should be queen of the feminists. All that self-reliance, her takeover of Alaska politics, the rocket ride to a Vice-Presidential ticket, a public career she blends with her family life– these seem gold-standard credentials for a real feminist. But official feminism derides herewith an unspeakable intensity. Her early critics were not beyond the inane claim that she was somehow not really a woman.

Then, perhaps using insight gleaned throughout his career, as a Newfoundland-born-and-raised outsider with a funny accent who was likely often treated like the “House Newfie” by many elitist colleagues at the CBC and Globe & Mail, he nails what may well be the #1 reason why the political and cultural elite of both left and right hate Sarah Palin so much:

I side with those who venture that the nerves Palin hits have more to do with class — where she’s from, how she speaks, where she was educated, what she likes (the moose-hunting), than her politics or her gender. She’s rural, she came into national politics from (ugh) Alaska. She and her husband have the unerasable stigmata of the modern working class. She would not be embarrassed to be seen walking into Wal-Mart.

Those characteristics and attitudes, in themselves, are not objectionable. In fact, hymns to working class habits and virtues are the very songbook of most elite American politicians and journalists. That crowd sings lustily what it does not feel. Remember the aphorism ascribed to Lincoln: “God must have loved the common man. He made so many of them.”

But America’s professional public class, and the commentariat who still have some (though declining) power to police it, like to view Lincoln’s common man, or woman, as an object in the distance, as an object of their supercilious care and concern, but not as a player in the game. Palin is simply not supposed to be a player. She’s not only from the wrong side of the tracks, she’s so far over on the wrong side she can’t see the railway station.

But there she is, in all her roughness and candour, and her spiky wit and ability to irritate her self-nominated betters. She also happens to be the most naturally charismatic politician at the moment in the United States. She is the one major figure who can claim authenticity without morally choking on the word. That makes her the populist rallying point of a nascent rejection of the fervid partisanship and Washington insiderism that is eroding the consent on which American politics is founded.

No wonder Obama claims he won’t respond when she tweets. The Hope and Change President still owns Hope, but real Change in current American politics is on Palin’s side of the ledger.

By Jove, he’s got it: the elites (moneyed, educated, urban, effete) may claim to be “for the common man” – but their policies, almost universally, effect to keep the common man at arm’s length. Whether it’s “universal health care” (public hospitals for thee, private American clinics for me), public transportation (get these peons and their beat-up Hyundais off my roads!), or the false promise of sustainable public pension plans (we’ll pay you out if we can…we’ve still got our investments), the Marie Antoinettes of both parties wish for the good things in life to be reserved for them, without having to bear the indignity of rubbing shoulders with the great unwashed. For bringing this insight to the minds of Canada’s group-thinkers – thank God for House Newfies! And God Bless Sarah Palin, who understands that the world without a strong America is a very frightening place.

Hannah Giles, American Hero

Hannah Giles, 20-Year-Old American Hero – Artwork by David Bugnon

What, pray tell, can a disgruntled 20-year-old conservative do when she feels beaten down by events?

a) Whine, complain, smoke pot and enter the cult of Ayn Rand?

b) Listen to the David Frum defeatists, ditch her principles, and tie herself into knots trying to figure out a way to make “Climate Change” a Republican issue?

c) Succumb to peer pressure, mock Sarah Palin, take a job with AmeriCorps, and fit in with the cool kids?

d) Spend her summer and her savings traveling the country dressed like a prostitute, get priceless undercover footage of crime in progress, bust corruption, and take down a major peg in the arsenal of one Barack Hussein Obama.

For doing something positive with her youth, for being David to ACORN’s Goliath, for exposing herself to law suits and leftist harassment, and for poking a huge hole in the prestige of the Marxist-Demagogue-In-Chief, Hannah Giles has earned a spot in my Hall of Fame. I’m sending $15 to her legal defense fund at http://www.defendhannah.com.

To you non-conservatives who revel in attacking Palin, Carrie Prejean, Giles, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Tammy Bruce, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other women who refuse to submit to the tyranny of liberal orthodoxy: the jig is up, you’ve been exposed again. Because you know better than I do: there’s no bigger threat to the “progressive” cause than attractive and articulate female heretics.

Che Guevara Punk Rock

To the ignorant indie creeps, campus faux-intellectuals, and Hollywood ingrates who idolize Fidel Castro’s sadistic, gay-bashing imported executioner: this is cool, not you. Viva The Clap!

(More in Reason.tv’s entertaining and enlightening Che episode.)

Abortion in Canada: Barbara Kay on the absurdity of it all

I reside in liberal Toronto, where the trite phrase “a woman’s right to choose” is trotted out as the answer to every single question about abortion. Does a fetus, or an embryo, constitute human life? Is it OK to abort such a life before a certain gestation date? Why is the last day of the first trimester any different than the first day of the second trimester? Would it have been OK if your mother had aborted you, or your brother or sister, in the first trimester – would that have been a fine choice for your mother to have made? And what about the thousands of infertile couples waiting for years, and paying tens of thousands of dollars, waiting for a healthy newborn to adopt? Somehow, “it’s a woman’s choice” doesn’t quite cut it.

As it happens, I respect a woman’s right to choose whether to have sex with a man – but once a unique individual begins to grow inside of her as a result of that choice, the choices . At that point, it’s time to grow up and choose between the two remaining options: marry the father and raise a family, or carry the child to birth and grant the gift of life to a loving adoptive family.

But I digress: this post is to promote today’s column by of one of our rare clear-thinking Canadian writers, Barbara Kay, “Sacrificing conscience to the sanctity of Abortion”. The column touches on many questions about the absurd state of abortion in Canada, focusing on two recent events: the proposed fatwa against doctors-of-conscience to refuse to promote abortion by the College of Physicians and Surgeons Ontario; and the public criticism of V-P candidate Governor Sarah Palin for carrying her Down’s Syndrome child to term by the executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada, Dr. André Lalonde.

To my liberal Jewish friends and family, I encourage you to open your minds to this liberal Jewish woman’s take on the cult of abortion. If it’s about “a woman’s right to choose”, then what about a doctor’s right to choose? And if it’s about compassion for women, then what about compassion for those who live life with the extra chromosome, who are now told that they should never have been born? If your answer is “it’s a woman’s right to choose”, then perhaps you may be unwilling to face the complexity of the issue.

Is the tedious anti-American leftist whinging over yet? Omar Khadr, getting what he deserves.

Omar Khadr, not a kid anymore. (May 2008 Courtroom Sketch)

Has the leftist hysteria over the cause of Omar Khadr subsided yet? Probably not. But the mainstream support for his return to Canada probably hit a peak the day BEFORE the “smoking gun” interrogation tapes were released last week, and is surely on the wane. As Michael Coren and Mark Bonokoski of the Toronto Sun observed this weekend, the images of a self-pitying liar showing neither a dash of remorse nor a sign of mistreatment during interrogation by Canadian officials, are more likely to have extinguished Canadians’ sympathy for him, than fuelled it.

Bonokoski’s column is a little long and plodding, but it is worth reading for its review of the history of the Khadr family, going right back to PM Jean Chretien’s personal intervention to have Papa Bear Khadr released from Pakistani custody back in 1996 so he could take his family to re-join Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Coren, as always, is pithy in his devastating condemnation of Omar Khadr:

If there has been any abuse over the years it is clearly at the hands of Khadr’s own kin. As the highly respected clinical psychologist Dr. Marty McKay told the Children’s Aid Society back in 2004 when Omar’s mother, Maha Elsamnah Khadr, came to Canada, “I am sure that you would agree that counselling one’s child to become suicidal or homicidal constitutes emotional child abuse, leading to physical abuse when the child acts upon these feelings.”

And this is precisely what the good woman has done, often and in public.

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.

The man may have suffered a different fate if the invincibly naive Jean Chretien had not, in 1995, personally pleaded with the late Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistani prime minister, to release Ahmed Khadr from prison and allow him to come to Canada. He didn’t stay long — there was work to be done with international Islamic murder gangs.

In 2004 the Khadr matriarch was brought back to Canada even though the family had lost several Canadian passports. Hey, it happens. They were flown business class from Pakistan. Hey, it happens. On public money. Hey, it happens.

Well, it happens to some people. Especially if they have friends within special interest groups and can convince credulous liberals who hate America more than they love truth and justice.

Omar Khadr is a tenuous Canadian at best, unlike most newcomers to the country who love it with pride and passion. If we feel sorry for him and his family, consider the family of the young medic smashed beyond recognition that horrible day six years ago. Good Lord, most people don’t even know his name. But they know the name of Omar Khadr.

Fact is, Khadr was captured fighting FOR Canada’s enemy, AGAINST Canada’s greatest friend and ally. Whether or not he was mis-raised by his parents is beside the point. We have no business interfering in this case, which represents: 1) Justice for Christopher Speer; and 2) Protection of America from the deranged psychos who hoped that 9/11 was only the first of many civilian mass-murders of its citizens. Sorry, Omar, but you’re getting what you deserve.

(On a related note: MR. DITHERS IS BACK! Paul Martin, Liberal PM (2003-2005) to Harper: BRING KHADR HOME! The audacity of hypocricy…this guy can’t be for real.)

“One Dominion under the name of Canada” – Canada Day and Identity

It’s a question that has plagued the residents of North America north of America for more than a century and a quarter, since a tipsy lawyer named Macdonald cobbled together a coalition of provincial pols and created a political union proclaimed as “One Dominion under the name of Canada” – what is the Canadian identity?

Most countries have some elements of a unique culture – culinary, musical, artistic, linguistic, religious, etc. – but identity needs to be deeper than just culture. It also should be defined in the positive – most University-educated Canadians’ descriptions of our identity end up boiling down to some form of “not American”. Ideally, a national identity should be: a set of values, as shaped by history and culture, that brings unity to a people in times of distress, and strength to a nation as it progresses through time.

In the past century, wars between nations of extremely strong identities caused the world’s intellectual culture to react sharply, and promote a well-meant but ultimately destructive idea: that national identities are a cancer that, once excised, will put an end to wars, and harmony to mankind. Natan Sharansky’s latest book explores this concept in great depth. Consequently, young nations like Canada were discouraged from ever developing a proper identity. Religious identity? Forget about it, wars were fought over religion. British ancestry? Nah, the Brits are on the decline, and that would offend Quebec. New World optimism? No, we’re just as guilty of oppression as the old world, thanks to our treatment of the Natives. With deconstructionism, multiculturalism, internationalism, and other mushy “ism”s ruling the day, developing a Canadian identity has been nearly impossible.

There should be hope. We live border-to-border, sea-to-sea with the world’s strongest identity of the past hundred years – the United States of America. We could have adopted the best of America’s ideals that has granted its people the self-confidence to build the most powerful, most prosperous, most welcoming nation on earth, where people from every country in the world wish to migrate to more than anywhere else on earth. Yet, out of petty insecurity, loyalist resentment, jealousy, and ideological elitism, most Canadians reject anything “American” out-of-hand.

But where might we be if we opened ourselves to the best of America’s values? We could start by coming to terms with a few simple facts:

1) our very existence, and any material success we have achieved, comes almost exclusively from the British colonial/mercantilist system, which introduced the concept of government based on Judeo-Christian morality to the world, enshrining individual freedom into law, and proving that the elimination of slavery is the true road to riches.

2) the American revolution, while a rejection of the particular British regime of the era, was not a rejection of British ways. In fact, it had far more in common with a church schism, in which the breakaway group saw itself as perfecting the original idealism of the system. America’s concepts of free expression, individual liberty, free enterprise, local community autonomy, and proud worldwide proselytism, all come from Enlightenment England, and are simply hardened with a more rigid religious and ideological edge.

3) French culture is not incompatible with this British-inspired Judeo-Christian English idealism. One need look only at the Bayou, where expelled Acadians have survived and thrived for centuries now, deep in the American south.

4) Evil always tries to fill a vacuum, and disaster usually follows. Europe, most affected by the post-war trend towards one-world-identity idealism, is deep in the throes of a demographic nightmare that, if analysts like Mark Steyn, Bat Ye’or, and the late Oriana Fallaci are right, will have Christian and Enlightenment Europe relegated to the history books within a generation. Canada can follow Europe, or it can develop a sustaining identity like America.

How to define Canada’s identity? First, the country needs to be convinced that “not America” is childish and destructive. Then, an opportunity opens wide: the best of American values can be enshrined here, with the advantage of not having the baggage of slavery and Jim Crow as a significant blight on our history.

In the meantime, as we celebrate the holiday formerly known as Dominion Day, don’t forget where the founders got the word “Dominion” from:

Genesis 1:28-29: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

Principal Shimon Waronker of The Bronx – Judaism at its best

Courageous, humble, God-fearing, standard-setting, military-trained family man…this is Judaism at its best! If you don’t love this guy, there may be something wrong with you.

Click here to view “A man’s passion to be principal” – NBC Today Show Clip

(Note the impact of student uniforms. To those who say “let kids express their individuality through what they wear,” I say, “let kids express their individuality through what they think and create.” Really – if you need the contrivance of clever clothing to express your personality, you may not have one.)

The Same-Sex Marriage Catastrophe: Dennis Prager on California’s Supreme Court Decision

It’s a very, very difficult thing to win an argument against same-sex marriage pushers – particularly when so many conservatives have thrown up the white flag and completely turtled on the issue (yes, that includes you, Hon. Stephen Harper). But no one is going to convince me that it is simply “progress” that must be accepted. As I’ve said on the issue for years: why do we so rashly overturn an institution that has served our society so well for thousands of years, and why can’t we have a mature conversation about it without accusations of “homophobia” being tossed in as a debate-stopping grenade?

In the wake of the California Supreme Court’s 4-3 split decision last week overturning the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, Dennis Prager, perhaps the most clear-thinking, articulate social conservative in America today, dedicated his column this week to the topic, giving an eloquent but sharp explanation as to why the concept is simply wrong, and why it still needs to be fought. Worth a complete read; particularly if you are one of those “aw, it’s no big deal” types. Some excerpts:

Since the secular age began, the notion that one should look to religion — or to any past wisdom — for one’s values has died. Thus, the modern attempts to undo the Judeo-Christian value system as the basis of America’s values, and to disparage the Founders as essentially morally flawed individuals (They allowed slavery, didn’t they?). The modern secular liberal knows that he is not only morally superior to conservatives; he is morally superior to virtually everyone who ever lived before him.

…

The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity — especially females — can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction — until now, accomplished through marriage. But that of course is “heterosexism,” a bigoted preference for man-woman erotic love, and therefore to be extirpated from society.

Any advocacy of man-woman marriage alone will be regarded morally as hate speech, and shortly thereafter it will be deemed so in law.

…

We have entered something beyond Huxley’s “Brave New World.” All thanks to the hubris of four individuals. But such hubris never goes unanswered. Our children and their children will pay the price.

Anticipating reactions to this column — as to all defenses of man-woman marriage — that it or its author are “homophobic,” i.e., bigoted and unworthy of respectful rejoinder, it is important to reaffirm that nothing written here is implicitly, let alone explicitly, anti-gay. I take it as axiomatic that a gay man or woman is created in God’s image and as precious as any other human being. And I readily acknowledge that it is unfair when an adult is not allowed to marry the love of his or her choice. But social policy cannot be made solely on the basis of eradicating all of life’s unfairness. Thus, we must love the gay person — and his and or her partner as well. But we must never change the definition of marriage. The price to society and succeeding generations will be too great.

And don’t forget the law of unintended consequences – no one knows the full scope of the problems that will be unleashed. And don’t tell me that “the sky didn’t fall in” here in Ontario; it’s only been a couple of years. Get back to me when a generation has been raised in a same-sex environment.