October 2013 archive

The Right to Life – a given?

What if the right to life was a natural, inalienable human right to age 18, but after that it was an acquired, alienable right?  So you had to deserve it somehow, you had to deserve to be alive.  And you could lose it, by doing any of a number of things…

The Pill for Men

‘Outrageous!’  That was the word used way back in ’85 in response to the expectation that men take a contraceptive that had a side-effect of reduced sex drive.  Hello.  Let me tell you about the contraceptive pill for women.  Side-effects include headaches, nausea, weight gain, mood changes, yeast infections, loss of vision, high blood pressure, …

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Needs and Wants

I don’t like living in a global community.  When everything is so interconnected, everything I do (or don’t do) is bound to be at someone else’s expense.  Mere self-interest seems impossible; selfishness is inevitable. For example,

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The Wife

The Good Wife, The Trophy Wife, The First Wives Club…why in the 21st century do women continue to be so frequently identified as wives?  That is, identified in relation to men? We don’t see a similar proliferation of tv shows and movies with “husband” in the title.  The word is emasculating.  It would be especially …

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Ladies, It’s Your Fault – GREAT video!

Check out this GREAT video!  “Ladies, It’s Your Fault!” 

Our Christian Language

I hadn’t really thought about it until I saw ‘his word’ corrected to ‘His Word’ on a Writing Competency Test at a publicly-funded university. I can accept a capital on ‘God’ because the word is being used as a name, and names are generally capitalized.  (Though I do find it rather presumptuous to so appropriate …

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Marriage: A Sexist Affair

Marriage, by its very (traditional) definition, is a sexist affair: it involves one of each sex, one male and one female.  And I suppose this is because, traditionally, the purpose of marriage was family: to start a family, to have and raise children. This view is fraught with questionable assumptions, glaring inconsistencies, and blatant errors.  …

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The Revision of “Oh Canada”

I’m all for sex-neutral language. In fact, I think we should completely revamp English to eliminate all sex-specific terms (except ‘male’ and ‘female’, to be used only in relevant contexts, most likely only in medical contexts).  As is, the language encourages, obsessively, sex-differentiation when sex is, or should be, irrelevant.  As is, it supports the …

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School Crossing Signs

You’ve seen the signs I mean – silhouette figures of two children about to cross the road: one boy, one girl.  (How do we tell?  One’s wearing a skirt.)  (That’d be the girl.)  (Really, do most girls still wear skirts to school?) So, yes, let’s emphasize sex.  Boy and Girl.  Ms. and Mr.  Nothing else …

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