Attention liberals: Not all your critics are religious extremists
You don't have to be the Pope to oppose abortion
Kelly McParland, National Post
Areader emailed recently to suggest I must be a religious fanatic, because I don't support abortion.
He explained that the vast majority of people who oppose abortion are fundamentalist religious wackos who believe there's a "spirit" in the fetus, and that's why they object to aborting it.
News to me. I told him I hadn't been to church in years, and religion had nothing to do with it. I just think it's wrong to take someone else's life without their consent. And I can't convince myself that the roundish tendency you'll notice among pregnant women results from something other than a life growing inside them. You don't have to be the Pope to believe a person's life is his own, and the rest of us should keep our hands off.
He wasn't buying. He'd convinced himself anyone opposed to abortion is a religious nut, and that's all there was to it.
I got the same sense from reading John Moore's Tuesday column on the recent Ontario climb-down on sex education ( "Hide your kids. The liberals are coming").
The Ontario government was planning to introduce a program that would expose grade school pupils to more explicit sexual references. Grade 1 students would be taught the correct names for body parts; Grade 3 students would learn about sexual identity and orientation, while kids in Grades 6 and 7 would deal with terms like "anal intercourse" and "vaginal lubrication."
The changes had been available on a government website for several months, but no one noticed until recently. When a sudden outcry resulted, Premier Dalton McGuinty quickly reversed course, embarrassing some of his Cabinet members who had been dutifully defending the changes. Now he's being attacked from the opposite direction, for caving in to fundamentalist nutbars. Because if you get a bit queasy at the notion of Grade 6 kids being tutored on masturbation, you must be a fundamentalist nutbar, right?
"Religious conservatives came out swinging," wrote Moore.
"The message was ... that the policy had been developed by activists with an agenda and with no consultation. None of this was true, but that doesn't matter in a political world that now runs not on a daily news cycle but on one that goes hour by hour.... The premier was defeated by talk radio, sound bites, Twitter and Facebook."
I'm a bit puzzled by that last line. Mr. Moore makes his living as a talk radio host, so why is he disparaging opinions formed from listening to talk radio? Is he saying that if we hear him on the radio we should disregard anything he has to say, but if he writes it in the paper, that makes it legit?
But mainly what bothers me is the notion that, once again, anyone who opposes programs favoured by liberals and their friends must be religious extremists bent on imposing fundamentalist views on the nation. The Canadian Taliban, in action. It's true that opposition to the sex program originated with some conservative religious groups that were first to notice it, but why assume every parent who subsequently expressed alarm must therefore be a card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe?
I don't particularly care about grade school kids being taught the realities of sex and their bodies at a young age. Most of them will learn all about it from the Internet anyway, well before a teacher raises the subject in class. But I can understand that many parents would prefer to handle the subject themselves, and don't want to be usurped by some bureaucrat at Queen's Park working to an artificial schedule that assumes every kid hits the same maturity level at the same magic moment.
Maybe it makes liberals feel better to write off opponents as religious nuts. That way they don't have to give serious thought to any opinions that differ from their own. It's a lot easier on the brain, and leaves more time for listening to talk radio.
http://www.nationalpost.com/story-printer.html?id=2963380
No comments:
Post a Comment