National Pest Gets It Wrong

This National Post editorial by Jonathon Kay finally catches up with its comrades on the right, aka the Blogging Tories, labeling NDP Leader Jack Layton as Taliban Jack. The problem is that his argument is totally fallacious, fabricated and not factual.

In the case of Afghanistan, in particular, this defeatism is grimly ironic coming, as it is, from a politician who postures as the champion of gay rights and feminism: But not for the presence of brave NATO troops, the country would fall into the hands of medieval theocrats who behead homosexuals and treat women like burka-clad dogs.

Hey guys I hate to spoil your tirade but the country is already controlled by medieval theocrats, war lords, misogynist homophobic males, which is why it is called the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

And women still are forced to wear burka's, female child brides are for sale, girls schools are burned out, freedom of the press does not exist, oh yes and it is still a crime if you are homosexual.

Liberating Afghan women from the Burqa was a sub-text of the war against the Taliban. Although some Afghan women have discarded the Burqa, after the fall of Taliban, an overwhelming majority continue to wear it as a matter of choice and social norm. So far the Burqa has survived the American bombing and the NGOs onslaught. International activists for women’s rights have been disappointed, and are now silent, by the mass of Afghan women continuing to wear Burqas.

Male with male sex is socially condoned but not as homosexuality, rather it exists because it is an outgrowth of patriarchal oppression of women. Patriarchy is about power over others; domination, S&M is the logical extension of patriarchy. Male sexuality is thus one of a dominant over a submissive regardless of the gender of the latter.

Puritanical Taliban tried hard to erase homosexuality and pedophilia from male-dominated Pashtun culture in Afghanistan; now that Taliban no longer rule, some people in Kandahar are indulging in it once again; problem is so widespread that government has issued directive barring 'beardless boys'--euphemism for under-age sex partners--from police stations, military bases and commanders' compounds; under Taliban, anyone found to be homosexual was buried alive, ancient punishment prescribed by Shariah, compendium of Islamic laws

The source pointed to the fact that behaviour between men, which would arouse curiosity in many western countries such as holding hands, kissing or embracing is not considered as explicit sexual behaviour in Afghanistan. The source was of the opinion, that homosexuality was common in Afghanistan in connection with the sexual debut due to the strong degree of separation which is practiced between the sexes. The source knew of commanders who were known of having relationships with young boys. However this does not lead to a general accept of homosexuality in Afghanistan. The source mentioned that rumours had been circulated, that people from the Panshjiri-dominated security forces had raped young Pashtun men with the aim of demonstrating their power.

In liberated Afghanistan it is still a capital offense to be a Christian.

Something the Post forgot to mention.

And speaking of burka clad dogs.




















h/t to Montreal Simon.


SEE:

Anti Islamism Manifesto

Islam And Class War

The Need for Arab Anarchism

Dr. Marx on Islam

1979 Fascist Counter-Revolution in Iran

WOMEN AND ISLAM


NDP

Afghanistan






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Procreation To Save The White Race

Behind the attacks on immigration, abortion and birth control, from the Christian right lays the underlying belief that this is the result of the permissive sixties, which introduced no fault divorce, the birth control pill, common law relationships, and a materialist culture that through public education, in particular educational access by women, decreased the birth rate.

Now right wing pundits are claiming that the declining birth rate which results from capitalist production and social liberalism is not just a threat to Western Civilization but to White Civilization.

Fight illegal immigration with procreation

If politicians won't find a way to deport illegals, then it is time for Americans who care to take matters into their own hands. By having lots of babies.

America will have to shoulder the responsibility of being the only Western democracy left; at least the only one big enough to give the remaining "whites" a geographical location to call "home," and – here is the important part – a place relatively free from hostile cultures.

While this is addressed to an American audience in an American publication its author is an influential Canadian Evangelical; Tristan Emmanuel.

Behind the attacks by the Christian right on womens rights, reproduction freedom; which attacks birth control as well as a womans right to abortion and promotes abstinence instead of sex education, their attacks on gay marriage, which is simply an extension of their attacks on our right to no fault divorce, common law relationships, open marriage and free love.

Its all about a return to the not so distant past when America was white, middle class and happy. The mythical 1950's.

As a local Christian (Baptist) church pamphlet I came across says;

A Christian Home. So many precious children are growing up in a home filled with hatred, strife, poverty, and neglect. It is no accident that the devil fights hardest in his attack on the home, using tools such as homosexuality, abortion and divorce. The nuclear family of the 1950's with its working dad, stay at home mom, and 2.3 kids is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. A Christian home, with a loving atmosphere, a happy marriage, a providing father, a teaching mother, and obedient children is even more rare.

2.3 children? The teaching mother exists, women are cast into the pink ghetto of working as an extension of their housework; nursing, teaching, day care, elder care, etc.

The reality is that this idyllic family is as much a the myth as the rest of the Christian belief system.

The Christian right wing wants to social engineer society backwards. As such they deny the liberal progressive nature of the very capitalist system that they defend.

Demand for children is affected by four principal classes of factors: "direct economic costs and benefits of children" [(1) P: 766] costs with regard to time, income and wealth, preferences and norms. Modernization has implications for all the factors mentioned above. With modernization, the costs (economic and time) of children increase, the benefits decrease and preferences and norms change. Money tends to be used for the purchase of consumer goods rather than for having and raising more children.

Other important factors that determine fertility are the material and non-material costs of regulation. Monetary costs, according to the researchers cited above, do not appear to be a significant barrier to contraceptive use, rather, access to information about contraception and the psychological costs associated with access are more important. Moreover, there is also the fear of incurring health costs (especially in case of abortion).

Besides these, Bulatao and Lee [(1) P: 775] mention the importance of communication between husband and wife regarding contraception. They see this as a determinant of fertility and view it as a psychological cost. Among the various sociocultural factors that affect demand, supply and costs of regulation are the nature of marriage and more generally the "patterns of sexual unions . . . their stability; their composition, including whether they are polygynous or monogamous and whether families are extended or nuclear; and their formation and dissolution" [(1) P: 777].

Education (in particular that of women) and residence (rural or urban) are two additional socioeconomic factors that affect fertility. However, these two factors operate through several channels, making the exact determination of their influence very difficult and allowing many possible explanations. In addition, the mode of production (familial or industrial) is critical in determining the value of children's labour, which in turn affects the demand for children. Moreover, government policies and efforts made by governments to mobilize the mass media, to make access to information regarding contraception easier, to make contraceptive measures available, and to reduce the costs of regulation are also important [(1) P: 784].

Simmons [(2) P: 96] summarizes the effects of the individual variables considered in various research studies. He has found a strong relationship between women's education and fertility. Women's labour-force participation, sex preference, availability of family-planning services, general environment and population programmes and policies were found to have a medium effect on fertility, while infant mortality, per capita income, income distribution and preferred number of children had only a weak effect on fertility.

See:

A Tale Of Two Canada's

Abortion, Adoption, or Abandonment

Thank God for SSM

Back Door Abortion Ban

December 6 Will Live In Infamy

Marx on Bigamy

Secular Democracy


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Bank Union

Banks and credit unions need unions. Especially those credit unions that were created by unions. But even then being unionized does not mean that the management and democratically elected board that runs the credit union will act differently than any other boss when it comes to the union. As the ongoing strike in Hamilton by credit union workers shows.

We are reminded of the exploitation of tellers and other bank workers by Karen a contributor to the Progressive Bloggers.TD Bank Needs A Union for underpaid Workers - by poor teller

And by the latest class action suit which while successful in the U.S. may not be as successful in Canada which does not have tort law.

Teller launches CIBC lawsuit

CIBC facing class-action suit over unpaid labour

Such class action suits would not be necessary if bank workers were unionized.

And once upon a time in Canada we had the beginnings of a bank union drive organized by SORWUC in the lower B.C. mainland amongst credit unions and later the CIBC.

The success of that drive in the 1970's emboldened the labour movement, but instead of supporting SORWUC which was an independent Canadian union organized by rank and file women, it saw SORWUC as a competitor. So instead the old style business unions tried their hand at bank organizing in Toronto amongst the big five banks, and failed. Never to try again.

In light of this new class action suit, SORWUC tried to organize CIBC branches as did the CLC affiliates. But they were defeated by legal battles and the deep pockets of CIBC. Which is why this class action suit faces a dubious future.

The resulting defeat of SORWUC led the banks to aggressively reduce their workforce of tellers replacing them with ATM's, the one armed bandits that rip us off with their monopolistic surcharges.

The irony is that thirty years later women workers in banks are still unorganized, while the labour movement has changed embracing the social unionism of SORWUC. Bank workers need a union, and the labour movement in Canada needs to organize these unorganized workers. It has been done, it can be done, it must be done.

1972 Association of University and College Employees (AUCE) and the Service, Office, and Retail Workers’ Union (SORWUC) are formed as feminist unions in response to the resistance of mainstream, male-dominated labour to organize traditional women’s jobs, or to bargain for issues of importance to women. They also applied feminist principles to collective decision making and action. Neither
exists today.

GENDERING UNION RENEWAL:
WOMEN’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO LABOUR
MOVEMENT REVITALIZATION
Paper prepared for the Union Module of the Gender and Work Database
Jan Kainer
April 18, 2006

Many new and independent women’s organizational structures emerged in the seventies because of a lack of support for feminism within labour movements. In Canada, feminist women who supported labour struggle and wished to unionize women, formed their own women-centred structures to overcome the obstacles they experienced from organized labour. In 1972 the Service, Office and Retail Workers of Canada (SORWUC), a self-described “grass roots, feminist union” (Lowe, 1980:32) was formed by women labour activists to unionize workers in service sectors where women predominate. Despite a weak commitment by the Canadian labour movement to SORWUC, the union certified 26 units in the banking industry. Eventually limited resources and an important legal decision restricting certification (i.e. unionized) units to bank branches in small, scattered locations, undermined the momentum of the campaign, and the union was unable to continue its organizing efforts. While SORWUC was relatively short-lived, its alliance with the women’s movement sustained, and informed, other organizing achievements, as this activist explains: (Jean Rands cited in Rebick, 2005:91) We got our confidence from the women’s movement. We were intimidated, but we supported each other and kept reminding ourselves that organizing was our right…we believed that workers should be the ones negotiating, rather than trade union leaders. Collective agreements should be readable by workers too – short and well indexed and written in plain language.

Bank Book Collective An account to settle; the story of the United Bank Workers (SORWUC).Illustrations and cover by Pat Davitt.

Press Gang Publishers Vancouver 1979 127p., wraps, illus. "In 1976, a group of women bank workers decided to organize their workplace. The banks were enraged. When they decided to do it themselves, the big unions were upstaged. Over the next two years, nearly a thousand bank employees in western Canada participated in a unionizing drive that challenged not only the banks but organized labour's approach to a workplace they had long considered beyond their range of union activity."

Thinking Through Labour’s Organizing Strategies: What the Data Reveal and What the Data Conceal

Efforts to organize women in the Canadian private sector are not new. One of the most important campaigns took place in the mid-1970s and involved an attempt to organize chartered bank workers. The Service, Office, and Retail Workers Union of Canada (SORWUC) made an important breakthrough in organizing predominantly female bank tellers in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. At the height of the organizing drive, more than one thousand workers were signed up.

SORWUC was a small, avowedly feminist union dedicated to implementing a nonbureaucratic democratic process. It perceived itself to be a movement of women workers, but the CLC and the Canada Labour Relations Board (CLRB) took a different view.

SORWUC’S connections to the women’s movement and the political Left were regarded with suspicion by both organizations. Marc Lapointe, head of the CLRB, expressed skepticism that a feminist group could be considered a legitimate trade union. Indeed the Banks, the Labour Board, and the CLC declared SORWUC to be irresponsible, not acting as a legitimate trade union, and unable to play by the rules of the game because its leaders were naive, incompetent, or linked to subversives.

Prior to SORWUC’s efforts to organize bank workers, the Canadian Labour Congress
(CLC) had established an organizing fund through a levy on its entire membership. In response to SORWUC’s campaign the CLC, using this fund, established the Bank Workers Organising Committee (BWOC) with the purpose of enlisting all of its affiliates to contribute organizers and union support to the Committee. Several of the affiliates, however, refused to participate, arguing that bank workers were part of their jurisdiction so they should be the ones to organize the banks, not the CLC.

To this day, this stance on the part of many affiliate unions blocks the possibility of a coordinate response to organizing the unorganized. It is a discourse of ownership. Unions in a particular jurisdiction perceive that they own the workers; if those workers join a union, it must be their union. The lack of solidarity among unions over who should organize bank workers and how it should be done contributed to the failure of the BWOC. There were other important reasons as well, including the very aggressive anti-union campaign conducted and coordinated from the headquarters of the chartered banks.

As well as placing nails in the coffin of a coordinated, solidaritistic approach to
organizing the unorganized, the failure to organize chartered bank workers also enforced the discourse that women were difficult to unionize.

Feminism as a Class Act:
Working-Class Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Canada
Meg Luxton

The 1970s in particular was a period of women’s organizing activities in unions. For example, at the 1970 United Auto Workers convention, union women called for "full equality now." 34 The fight for affirmative action started with struggles to get women hired into so-called non-traditional jobs or all-male preserves at workplaces such as Stelco and Inco or in the trades; such initiatives demanded union support for challenges to employers. 35 Union women formed organizations to help them fight inside the labour movement to improve women’s situations; for example, in March 1976 Organized Working Women (OWW) was formed in Ontario, with Evelyn Armstrong as its first president, with a membership restricted to women already in unions, while in September 1979 Saskatchewan Working Women (SWW) formed with its membership open to all women who agreed with its objectives. Frustrated by the lack of support for women in the existing unions and outraged by the failure of the union movement to organize in predominantly female workplaces, a group of socialist feminists in 1972 formed an independent union in BC, the Service, Office and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada (SORWUC). 36 Unable to sustain their efforts in the face of employers’ hostility and the reluctance of the union movement to support them, they collapsed after a few years but their initiative prodded the union movement to pay more attention to predominantly female sectors of the labour force.


Responding to increasing pressures from their members, unions began to take up union women’s issues. 38 They held conferences, educationals, and training programmes. Many unions from locals to national organizations developed women’s committees or caucuses intended to help women identify their concerns, develop the strategies and tactics to advance their issues, and strengthen their capacities to intervene in the male-dominated culture of the union. In 1965 the Ontario Federation of Labour set up its first women’s committee, which was chaired by Grace Hartman, then a Vice-President of CUPE. In 1966 that committee organized a conference on Women and Work. 39 In 1976 the CLC held its first conference for women union activists. Unions developed new structures and new positions. In 1977 the Ontario Public Service Employees Union hired its first full-time equal opportunity co-ordinator. Recognizing their failure to get women into leadership positions, some bodies developed affirmative action measures. In 1984 for example, the CLC designated a minimum of six women vice-presidents. They recognized that when competent women leaders are visible, more women are likely to participate and more men and women are able to accept women in leadership positions. Even more important were the positions unions adopted both in contract negotiations on, for example, maternity and parental leave or same-sex spousal benefits, and in union policies such as providing child care at conventions. Finally, unions were also part of, and supported the activities and organizations of the women’s movement. They co-sponsored specific activities such as International Women’s Day demonstrations and joined coalitions to work on campaigns such as those for employment and pay equity, access to abortions, and quality child care.

What makes an Approprite Bargaining Unit?

The appropriate bargaining unit sets the initial constituency within which a trade union must gain employee support for collective representation. The right to collective bargaining set out in labour statutes should not be illusory, so labour boards resist creating such large and diverse bargaining units that they are impossible to organize. The B.C. Board put the proposition this way in one of its leading cases:

It is an absolutely fundamental policy of the Code that the achievement of collective bargaining is to be facilitated for those groups of employees who choose to use this procedure as the means for settling their terms and conditions of employment. (...) If bargaining units are defined too widely, or a number of separate groups are put into one unit, it is unlikely in the department store industry that the employees will agree on union representation. In these circumstances we will not deny collective bargaining to those small pockets of employees who, by reason of their own special needs and interests, have.

That does not mean the Board will carve out totally artificial units, based solely on the extent of organization by the union (and sufficiently to give the latter a majority). We will require some reasonably coherent and defensible boundaries around the unit over and above the existing, momentary preference of the employees. (...) However, we will not reject applications for small bargaining units on the basis that a large unit is a more rational structure for hypothetical collective bargaining in the distant future, where the result will be the denial of actual bargaining rights now.

Woodward Stores (Vancouver) Ltd. [1975] 1 Can. L.R.B.R. 114

This approach is especially prevalent in industries that are historically hard to organize. See, e.g. SORWUC v. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce [1977] 2 Can.L.R.B.R. 99 (Can.L.R.B.); CUBE v. Canada Trustco Mortgage Company [1977] 2 Can. L.R.B.R. 93 (Ont. L.R.B.). In each of these cases the board found a single branch of a financial institution an appropriate bargaining unit.

Jonas Gifford – December 2004

· Kitimat CIBC (20 yrs earlier) – board rejected application of Kitimat branch, saying ABU was all CIBC branches in CDA – de facto denial of CB for bank workers

· SORWUC and CIBC (1977)

· Held: branch is the ABU

· Comments: BUT note that board recognized this as a variant of foothold – eventually wanted to rationalize

iii. Comment

· Pluralism cares about negotiation of CAs, not about organization

· Bank EEs in CIBC got ability to unionize, but lost a lot of bargaining power b/c restricted to branch

· This especially b/c CIBC really didn’t want to be unionized

· Used protracted litigation – applied for judicial review for EVERYTHING

· Effect – serious $$ impact on SORWVC

· Effect – delayed CB process w/ significant $$ implications – union just couldn’t afford the whole process, also EEs wouldn’t want to keep paying dues for nothing

General Barriers to Women's Trade Union Participation

Women's Unions: Many unions in which women form significant sections of the membership (like banking and retail) are still not recognized as legitimate by employers. Two examples are the Canadian banking system (SORWUC; CUBE), and Eaton's Dept. Store (RWDSU; UFCW)

Costs more burdensome for union than employer (e.g. organizing small workplaces; 1 reason for SORWUC self-decertification)


Saskatchewan Working Women (SWW)

The SWW was a grassroots, feminist organization of female wage earners which operated from 1978 to 1990. SWW was formed by an alliance of trade union women and community-based feminists. Members of SWW came from many different political backgrounds, including the Waffle, the New Democratic Party, various Communist, Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist parties, the women’s movement on university campuses and women’s centres, and the trade union movement. Some SWW women were also involved in the organizing drives of the Service, Office and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada (SORWUC), a feminist trade union active in Saskatchewan and BC. SWW originated because an increasing number of women were joining the workplace and becoming both unionized and mobilized.

Vancouver History Timeline 1987

Local 1518 of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers Union), with 23,000 members, began representing 57 home care workers when the Service Office and Retail Workers Union (SORWUC) merged with it.

Sisterhood & Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times - Google Books Result

Janet Mary Nicol, " `Unions Aren't Native': The Muckamuck Restaurant Labour Dispute Vancouver, B.C. (1978-1983)," Labour/Le Travail, 40 (Fall 1997), 235-51.

"IN THIS SOCIETY," explained First Nations union organizer Ethel Gardner to a skeptical First Nations community, "being in a union is the only way we can guarantee that our rights as workers will be respected." (1) Ethel was an employee at the Muckamuck restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia when its First Nations workers decided to organize into an independent feminist union in 1978 and subsequently struck for a first contract against white American owners. The dispute allied First Nations people with predominantly white trade unionists and made an even wider community aware of their circumstances. The union picketed the restaurant for three years, discouraging customers from entering, while the owners kept the restaurant functioning with the use of strikebreakers, many of them from the First Nations community. When the owners closed their operation in 1981, the union ceased picketing and both parties waited a further two years for a legal ruling from the Labour Relations Board. Finally in 1983, the owners were ordered to pay remedies to the union, but sold the restaurant and pulled all their assets out of Canada, refusing to comply with the decision.

Songs For Ourselves, Revisited:

Most Friday evenings for the last couple of months, a group of women has appeared near the corner of Davie and Denman in Vancouver, unpacked guitars and tambourines, and started singing. The scene is the SORWUC [Service, Office and Retail Workers' Union of Canada] picket line at the Muckamuck, a Vancouver restaurant, and the strike is into its ninth month. We pass out song sheets to the other people on the picket line and spend two or three hours picketing and singing together about our goals and our struggles. They are feminist songs; at the same time they are songs for all working people. The strikers and their supporters on the picket line are both female and male and we all bellow out Working Girl Blues, the Secretaries' Song or Solidarity Forever.

Helen Potrebenko, one of Vancouver’s most uncompromising feminist writers, was born on June 21, 1940 in Grand Prairie, Alberta. After arriving in Vancouver to attend university, she documented the struggles of a female cab driver to earn a living in her novel Taxi!. “It just never occurs to them we’re people and not zoo animals to be stared at,” the narrator writes, “and that we have feelings and don’t like being prodded and mauled by thirty different guys in one day.” Potrebenko’s second book, No Streets of Gold, is a social history of Ukrainians in Alberta. Her collection of fiction and other writings, A Flight of Average Persons voiced her pride in the dignity of working class lives, particularly women disadvantaged by a patriarchal society. Potrebenko marked the second anniversary of her participation in the strike to earn a first contract for SORWUC workers at the Muchamuck restaurant on Davie Street in Vancouver with the publication of Two Years on the Muckamuck Line. The owners of Vancouver’s first restaurant to exclusively serve West Coast native Indian cuisine ultimately left Vancouver in the strike’s third year. Six workers had been fired upon the union’s application for certification and the owners had refused to negotiate. “The Muckamuck hired scab labour and tired to keep the restaurant open,” says Potrebenko. “Sometimes they were assisted by outside goons. When the owners finally left town, the Labour Relations Board bestirred itself to order the Muckamuck to pay a token $10,000 because of its illegal activities. This could never be collected. We’ve never officially called the strike off.” The restaurant became the Qualicum Restaurant, operating with the support of the union, but the restaurant eventually closed.

LOU NELSON X10-34
Patricia Lucille Nelson was born in Montreal on December 12th, 1953. Although
both her parents are from the West, Nelson and her four siblings grew up in
Laval West and St-Eustache (Québec). She studied the humanities and
languages at Vanier College in Saint-Laurent, printing at Ahuntsic College in
Montreal and worked at Classic Books before moving to the West in 1974.
Nelson quickly settled in Vancouver and started working in a screen printing
shop, a coop house and, in 1975, she joined Press Gang. Here she worked on a
voluntary basis and she became a press operator. This is also the time when
she came out as a lesbian and decided to change her name to Lou, a shortened
version of her middle name, in honor of the occasion. It is also when she
became involved more actively in the feminist, socialist and unionist movement
that prevailed in Vancouver in those years. For example, she joined the NDP in
September 1974. The following year, she participated in the occupation of the
Vancouver Canada Manpower Centre Office to pressure the Canadian
Government to make real changes regarding women and work. She supported
Press Gang by involving herself in numerous fundraising activities and helped
organize the 1979 Conference on Women and Work. “In order to sustain
herself”, she ran Simon Fraser University Student Society’s printshop for four
years. While working at SFU, she also got involved with the feminist union
Service Office and Retail Workers Union (SORWUC).

See:

Feminizing the Proletariat

Whose Family Values?

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HIJABS AND HABITS

Expressing our oppression as women in solidarity with our sisters. And since this call for solidarity comes from a Catholic there is no difference between the hajib and the habit. Both are symbols not of liberation but of patriarchy.

I am calling out to every woman in this world who, regardless of her ethnic origin, religious background or even sexual orientation, will recognize my voice as female, feminine, and therefore will feel and acknowledge the resemblance, the sorority. I am calling on to you my sisters because some of us are suffering today and I believe that we, as loving sisters, must show them we will not turn our backs on them. Muslim women are indeed women like us, mothers, daughters, and sisters. The most common thought when a Muslim woman is seen wearing a Hijab (headscarf) is to assume that it is a sign of oppression and that this woman is not free of her own choices. Yet in the “Western” world (of what I know myself from France and Canada) wearing a Hijab is certainly a very difficult and courageous act because it is the visible and unmistakable sign of a religion that has become synonymous with terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. But “terrorism” has no race or religion. The Muslim community, Islam, have nothing to be forgiven for. The actions of some people cannot justify the generalization of a whole group. I think History has proven this point many, many times. People from my father’s family have perished in concentration camps during World War II along with Jewish people, communists, homosexuals, and many other oppressed groups rejected solely because of their existence. This situation is not different. As human beings we cannot accept this injustice: we cannot condemn and reject Muslims on account of their nature. I was raised a Christian and as such I will address the Christian community, in particular the Catholics. Oh my sisters and brothers I am asking you, for the love of Jesus (peace be upon his head) himself: who is the good Christian? who is the good Catholic? I will tell you. The good Catholic is the one who hid his Protestant neighbours on the night of August 24, 1572 at Saint Barthélémy, France. An estimated 70,000 Protestants were killed in France, 3,000 in Paris. Yet a lot survived because good Catholics extended their hands to their Protestant brothers and sisters. The same good Catholics, good Christians, saved their Jewish neighbours from deportation during World War II. The good Christians today, I have no doubts, will reach out their hands onto their Muslim brothers and sisters.
All I am asking of you is to follow my lead in a peaceful and symbolical gesture: let us wear a Hijab for a day. Let us show our solidarity and love for our Muslim sisters who choose to wear it every day, not as a sign of oppression, but as a sign of courage and honesty.

Nuns should wear the habit

After reviewing A Nuns Habit, which lists poorly devised reasons for not wearing the habit, I feel encouraged to write on the subject. In short, my opinion remains that all religious sisters and nuns should wear the habit of their respective orders. No longer should these women, who have given their lives to the service of God and the Church, be dressing like laypeople. It is time to return to the ancient practice of wearing a distinct habit - this is not fulfilled by wearing laypeople's clothing!

The habit inspires women to leave their lives and gives themselves to God. The same is true for men who are inspired by the garments worn by priests and monks. To enter a religious order, one does not just experience a change of heart and soul, rather, there is also a change in the physical realm. For example, many religious orders require the women to adopt a new name when they become a nun in addition to wearing the habit.

See:

Spot The Contradiction

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Libertarian Challenge of Canada's Prostitution Laws

All Libertarians both those of the Left and the Right should support this court challenge by Canadian Sex Workers. Of course the most outspoken support for these workers rights have come from the Left.

But even those on the right should recognize the fact that this is an impediment to self sufficiency and an attack on the right to run a business.

But our right wing Libertarians in Canada are simply Republicanadian conservatives. For a real individualist libertarian perspective check out Lady Aster

It is also an issue of public safety and crime prevention as the Picton case so horribly shows. These women would not have been forced to ply their trade on the streets and died at the hands of a serial killer if the Canadian laws had not forced them to.

Prostitutes launch constitutional challenge

A group of current and former prostitutes and an Osgoode Hall law professor joined forces yesterday to launch a constitutional challenge aimed at striking down three provisions of the Criminal Code dealing with the sex trade.

The challenge effectively amounts to a call for decriminalization.

"Some people may find this controversial," law professor Alan Young said at a news conference in Toronto yesterday, "I don't."

In the past, Prof. Young, well known in the Canadian legal community, has launched similar challenges to Canada's marijuana laws.

Currently, prostitution is not illegal. However, communicating for the purposes of prostitution is against the law. That's one of the three sections being challenged by Prof. Young and his supporters, who say the law keeps women from ensuring their clients aren't likely to harm them.

The team is also challenging the provisions on "bawdy houses" and living off the avails of prostitution, saying the two laws force prostitutes onto the street and keep them from hiring security and support staff in the same way other businesses do.

If for instance women and the men that work in this industry formed a business it would be subject to far more regulation, for their own safety, for their health, ending drug use, for age legality, and for eliminating pimps. And hey they would pay taxes. And of course the best form of business would be a worker owned and controlled cooperative and if the business was privately owned then the workers should have the right to unionize. As I wrote;

Sex Workers Union: Whether strippers, prostitutes, escorts, porn actors, etc. women workers in thus unregulated industry face the dual oppression of being exploited by owners and customers, and their banishment by society at large. The exploitation of children and young adults as well as immigrant women is allowed to exist due to this free market. Laws against prostitution need to be abolished and the regulation of this industry be under workers control through a sex workers union.

Sex workers have an alternative method of organizing as well. They could form a religious order, a tax free charity, the Order of Jezebel, and thus could provide religious rites by the members of the Order. After all this is the traditional meaning for 'get thee to a nunnery.' And they would not have to pay taxes!

Prostitution and Religion are historically co-joined, the temple prostitutes in the ancient pagan cultures, and later with the Christian Bishops of Bath running brothels in that fine city in the middle ages.

With a charitable brothel system, the Order could earn enough to pay for education and other skills thus limiting the time spent as a Sister or Brother allowing the members to move on to other professions without the usual social stigma.

According to Nelson's Bible Dictionary Corinth was ancient Greece's most important trade city. At Corinth the apostle Paul established a flourishing church made up of a cross section of the worldly minded people who had flocked to Corinth to participate in gambling, legalized temple prostitution, business adventures, and amusements available in this first century navy town. The city soon became a melting pot for the approximately 500,000 people who lived there at the time of Paul's arrival.

Merchants and sailors, anxious to work the docks, migrated to Corinth. Professional gamblers and athletes, betting on the Isthmian games, lived there. Homeless slaves, free or runaway, roamed the streets day and night. Prostitutes (both male and female) were abundant. All of the Mediterranean world relished the lack of standards and the freedom of thought that prevailed in the city. These were the people who eventually made up the Corinthian church. They had to learn how to live together in harmony, although their national, social, economic, and religious backgrounds were very different.

Near the city's market place were the butcher stalls or meat markets that Paul mentioned in 1 Corinthians 10:25. The meat was often dedicated to pagan idols before being sold. This presented a culturo-religious problem for the Christians in Corinth. Rising 1,500 feet above the city and to the south of the acropolis was a fortified hill upon which loomed the infamous Temple of Aphrodite or Venus. This pagan temple and its 1,000 temple prostitutes greatly influenced the city's culture and morals.

Prostitution
Prostitution was an active and profitable enterprise in the Middle Ages. Historians examining town records have found that most towns and cities had some sort of brothel, often an official one that was actually publicly owned, though this was more common on the continent than in England. Prostitutes, while an inevitable part of urban and town life, existed in a rigorously restricted space, both in a physical sense and in less tangible but no less noticeable ways. In most places, common women were only allowed to sell their "wares" on certain streets or in certain neighborhoods, and sumptuary laws (i.e., laws mandating that prostitutes should dress in a manner different from other women) were passed in order to make whores immediately distinguishable from respectable women.

So why did medieval women go into prostitution? Ruth Karras notes that while most medieval prostitutes were probably not coerced into their trade, becoming a prostitute wasn't any woman's childhood fantasy, either. As for the actual reason, Karras makes this observation:

Whereas for men prostitution sometimes substituted for marriage as a sexual outlet, for women it substituted for marriage as a means of financial support. It was difficult for a woman to support herself outside the conjugal unit . . . [f]or those who did not marry -- whether by choice or by circumstance -- options might be limited even under favorable economic conditions (Karras, 49).

Prostitution may have been the only acceptable way for some women to support themselves in the absence of a husband who would provide for them economically. Unfortunately, most prostitutes' reasons can only be guessed at due to a lack of records in this area. Historians must generally rely on court records that mention women accused of whoredom; very rarely do records detailing the workings of actual brothels still exist. Since the records in question seldom define what they mean by "whoredom" it can be difficult to figure out if the women in question were truly prostitutes (women whose services were generally available to all and sundry in exchange for a fee) or just a bit licentious (akin to Chaucer's Wife of Bath).

Contributing further to the confusion in England, at least, is that for most women in the trade, prostitution was not their sole occupation. When a woman's normal occupation didn't bring in enough money, she might turn to prostitution in order to make up the difference. Therefore, prostitution may have even been, for many women, a cyclical income source undertaken during whatever was the "off" season for their regular occupations (Karras, 54).

See

Sex Workers

Legalize & Unionize the Sex Trade

Feminizing the Proletariat

Sex Workers Want A Union

Marx on Bigamy

Whose Family Values?

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Men Smarter Than Women

Test-osterone makes the grade

Men fare better on IQ test - of CBC viewers, anyway

Well what do expect when the majority of contestants are men, the show is developed by men, the research is based on work by men and the show is based on male knowledge paradigms. The results are about as valid as those used by the fascist ideologue Phillip Rushton.

Parker and his team of colleagues drew lessons from other shows when writing the test. Since 2001, when the Netherlands aired the first Test the Nation, the format has been repeated in 40 countries.

Though the tests are all different and the categories varied, one interesting constant reappears in every show, Parker said.

"To date, men have slightly higher IQs than women. That's the only common pattern," he said.

In careful diplomatic language, Parker avoids drawing conclusions and explains the results this way: "Why is that? Maybe men are more competitive. Maybe it's more important to them and women don't take the test as seriously."

Canadian fellas scored about one point higher than women -- a minute difference, Parker pointed out. What's more, women underestimated their IQ while men overestimated themselves.

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Paleontologist Versus Paleo-Conservatives

I found this interesting post on Marie Stopes the mother of the British and Canadian birth control/planned parenthood movements.

Shh don't tell the Conservatives this is on the governments Natural Resources site or it might disappear.

Of course being a paleontologist she would be well steeled for dealing with controversy from the religious right. In todays world her profession as a paleontologist would give her a leg up on confronting the paleo-conservatives.

Past lives: Chronicles of Canadian Paleontology

Marie Stopes: paleobotanist at St. John

It is not often that the Geological Survey of Canada considers it necessary to hire a foreign expert to adjudicate a local paleontological matter. In 1911 Marie Stopes was brought in as a hired gun to check the paleobotanical work of Sir William Dawson in St. John, New Brunswick

Marie Stopes, in a romantic pose looking like the Lady of Shalott, aged 30, about the time she worked on the Fern Ledges fossils. (From Ruth Hall's book - Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes.)

In 1940, a Mr. J.F. Coates, M.P. from New South Wales gave a speech in the Australian Parliament that included this statement: "The Empire today has three enemies -- all from Munich. One is Hitler, the other Goebbels, and the third that doctor of German philosophy and science -- Dr. Marie Stopes. The greatest of these is Marie Stopes". Why such enmity? Her German doctorate was in the field of paleobotany -- not usually a field that provokes vitriolic hate. But Stopes was also the author of the first sex manuals, Married Love and Wise Parenthood, and an active promoter of birth control who established Britain's first family planning clinics in 1921. The Marie Stopes International now provides reproductive health services in over thirty countries and, in 1999, she came first in the Guardian's "Women of the Millennium" poll.

But our interest here is not primarily with Marie Stopes, the birth control promoter; it is with Marie Stopes, the paleobotanist, who in 1911 was hired by the Geological Survey of Canada to settle a vexing controversy about the age of plant fossils at "Fern Ledges" near St. John, New Brunswick. With a Ph.D from Munich and a D.Sc. from London, this 30-year-old lecturer in botany at the University of Manchester, and the author of Ancient Plants, was well qualified for this task.

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Infantile Leftism

Juvenile delinquency is not political even if some folks claim it is. This is no different than the riots on Whyte Avenue last year. The political and media message are lost in the vandalism.

Some will claim this is Black Bloc Anarchism, I on the other hand believe it is simply infantile leftists trying to justify their juvenile delinquency as political when it is no different than drunken louts on Whyte Avenue fighting riot cops.

The demonstration was supposed to be for 'making a statement ',but the message got lost.

ENOUGH!! A Woman's Place is NOT at home!
Call to action: International Day Against Police Brutality, March 15 (details below)

On Thursday, March 8th -- International Women's Day -- Montreal police brutally attacked and injured three women who came to the aid of Jaggi Singh when the police arrested him at the annual Women's Day celebration in Montreal.

As the state spins it, Jaggi Singh is to blame for everything! We see it very differently. The arrest of Jaggi Singh and the brutalization of the three women are inextricably linked. Jaggi Singh was there to celebrate International Women's Day with his sisters and got arrested. As women we are very familiar with being blamed for our own victimization -- the woman who was raped "asked for it", what was she doing out there anyway? Why was she dressed like that? Milia Abrar, who was murdered in Montreal in 1998, had challenged traditions: she asked for it. The missing women, mostly Indigenous sisters, along the 'Highway of Tears' asked for it. The women at École Polytechnique asked for it. The woman whose partner killed her asked for it. The women who were brutalized by the police on 8th March asked for it!

However the result was vandalism, which is neither radical nor revolutionary, but reactionary. And you can tell from the headline below, the message got lost in the reporting. Nice going folks. You didn't make the point, you missed it.

This is neither Direct Action nor Anarchism in Action. It is just a justification for hooliganism. It is reactionary, like soccer hooliganism, as it brings more police violence on people. It does not expose that violence as unjustified in the mind of the public.

Anarchism is about propaganda and agitation aimed at educating the masses that they can be self reliant, self sufficient and live in a cooperative fashion without the State, police or fear of violence. Supporting or engaging in this kind of vandalism is the antithesis of that message.

See my previous posts on the futility of this kind of infantile anarchism.

More than a dozen arrested after Montreal anti-violence demo turns ugly

Rioters build a fire in the middle of the intersection of Berri and de Maisonneuve as demonstrators protest against police brutality. Thursday in Montreal. (CP PHOTO/David Boily) Anti-police rallies turn ugly in Montreal, Vancouver CBC British Columbia - 4 hours ago Anti-police rallies in Montreal and Vancouver turned violent Thursday as demonstrators clashed with police, leading to several arrests. Montreal police arrest 15 at demonstration Globe and Mail More than a dozen arrested after Montreal anti-violence demo turns ... Canada.com 680 News - Canoe.ca all 28 news articles »

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