Who is a “parent” according to Bill 28? Simply providing “reproductive material or an embryo for use in the conception of a child through assisted reproduction”

Freudian slips can be found in Ontario’s ‘All Families Are Equal Act’

by John Sikkema

November 28, 2016 (ARPACanada) — Ontario law currently states that “for all purposes of the law of Ontario, a person is the child of his or her natural parents,” with the exception of adoption. But Bill 28, the “All Families Are Equal Act”, would erase this basic rule and remove the terms “mother,” “father,” and “natural parents” from all Ontario statutes in the process, replacing them simply with “parent.” The bill is expected to reach a final vote soon.

It’s important that we get our new family law terms straight. It’s easy to get confused, as even the bill’s drafters did. The Standing Committee on Social Policy, which recently reviewed the bill, had to correct a few of the drafters’ blunders.

The main issue here: Who is a “parent” according to Bill 28?

Simply providing “reproductive material or an embryo for use in the conception of a child through assisted reproduction” does not make one a parent.

A child’s “birth parent,” a term the untrained mind might auto-miscorrect to “birth mother,” is a parent unless she (or he) has agreed to be a surrogate and relinquishes parentage shortly after the child is born. If the “birth parent” refuses to relinquish parentage, a court can deal with that problem by declaring (up to four) “intended parents” signatory to the surrogacy agreement (or anyone else, in fact) to be the child’s parents.


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Read more: www.lifesitenews.com

The focus on Castro at his death must be just that: Castro and death.

Death by Fidel

by Paul G. Kengor

Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator.

Fidel Castro is dead. To say those words is so strange. I’ve never known a moment when he wasn’t alive.

Castro came to power seven years before I was born, and I’m almost 50. I’ve been lecturing on the man every fall semester for 20 years, spending two or three weeks on him, his ideology, and the beautiful country he destroyed. It’s ironic that the day he died I finished two long chapters on him for a book manuscript, and a family friend (whose mother escaped Cuba) visiting for Thanksgiving just happened to ask how much longer I thought the 90-year-old despot might continue to live. The answer, it turned out, was a mere few hours more.

What to say in a few hundred words about a man like Fidel Castro at his death? Where to start? Where to end?

I think the answer is easy: The focus on Castro at his death must be just that: Castro and death. First, there’s the death he was responsible for since seizing Cuba in January 1959, and then, second, there are the incalculable millions more who would have died—not just in Cuba but in America and worldwide—had he gotten his way in October 1962.

So, for starters how many people were killed by Fidel and his communist dystopia?

“The Black Book of Communism,” the seminal Harvard University Press work, which specialized in trying to get accurate data on the enormous volume of deaths produced by communist tyrants, states that in the 1960s alone, when Fidel and his brother Raul (Cuba’s current leader) established their complete control, with the help of their murdering buddy Che Guevara, an estimated 30,000 people were arrested in Cuba for political reasons and 7,000 to 10,000 were believed to have been executed. Even then, that was merely the start.Unfortunately, no one truly knows, akin to how no one knows how many poor souls he tossed into his jails, from political dissidents to priests to homosexuals. Fidel’s prison-state has never permitted human-rights observers, reminiscent of how he never permitted the elections he repeatedly promised in the 1950s. That said, many sources have tried to pin down numbers and have generated some common estimates:

From the late 1950s to the late 1990s, it’s estimated that Castro killed between 15,000 to 18,000 people, whether victims of long-term imprisonment or outright execution by bullets.

That is a lot of people for a small island. And it isn’t all.

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Read more: www.visionandvalues.org

Chesterton predicted that the crisis would possibly infiltrate the Church and become a war within.

THE PROPHET OF BEACONSFIELD: CHESTERTON PREDICTED A BATTLE IN THE CHURCH
by Sam Guzman

G.K. Chesterton had an uncanny gift for prophecy. It wasn’t mystical necessarily. I don’t believe he ever saw visions of the future like the prophets of the Old Testament. But his keen intellect allowed him to see where popular fashions and ideas would inevitably lead if uncorrected, and he was almost always right.

One excellent example of his gift of foresight was his prediction of a crisis in the Catholic Church over sexual morality.

A convert to Catholicism in a still very anti-Catholic England, Chesterton wrote a defense of his conversion in the short but powerful book, The Catholic Church and Conversion. In the very last chapter, Chesterton addresses the future prospects for the Church in a modern and fast changing world.

He admits that, while there were many converts to the Church in his day (many of them famous), the Church was also bleeding a significant amount of members, especially young people. And why were they leaving? Not because they had embraced some well thought out philosophy, not because they had discovered some better religion. In fact, they weren’t leaving because of ideas at all.

They were leaving because they wanted sexual freedom. They found the Church’s morality too restricting and wanted to be free of it. Here’s what Chesterton says:

Nothing is more notable if we really study the characteristics of the rising generation than the fact that they are not acting upon any exact and definite philosophy, such as those which have made the revolutions of the past. If they are anarchical, they are not anarchist. The dogmatic anarchism of the middle of the nineteenth century is not the creed they hold, or even the excuse they offer.

They have a considerable negative revolt against religion, a negative revolt against negative morality. They have a feeling, which is not unreasonable, that to commit themselves to the Catholic citizenship is to take responsibilities that continually act as restraints.

Keep in mind he wrote this in 1926, more than 40 years before the sexual revolution and the moral convulsions of the 1960s.

Chesterton doesn’t attack these young people for their license; he expresses compassion for them. “I do not say it in contempt,” he says, “I have much more sympathy with the person who leaves the Church for a love-affair than with one who leaves it for a long-winded German theory to prove that God is evil or that children are a sort of morbid monkey.”

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Read more: www.catholicgentleman.net

Paris - 3 décembre - Colloque AED "En guerre contre le terrorisme"

3 décembre : colloque de l'Aide à l'Eglise en Détresse
Source: Le Salon Beige

Cuba - A visit to the dystopian Havana that tourists never see

The Last Communist City

by Michael J. Totten

Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2154. The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite—the Elysium of the title—while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.

I’ve always wanted to visit Cuba—not because I’m nostalgic for a botched utopian fantasy but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp’s dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished masses. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force.

Many tourists return home convinced that the Cuban model succeeds where the Soviet model failed. But that’s because they never left Cuba’s Elysium.

Ihad to lie to get into the country. Customs and immigration officials at Havana’s tiny, dreary José Martí International Airport would have evicted me had they known I was a journalist. But not even a total-surveillance police state can keep track of everything and everyone all the time, so I slipped through. It felt like a victory. Havana, the capital, is clean and safe, but there’s nothing to buy. It feels less natural and organic than any city I’ve ever visited. Initially, I found Havana pleasant, partly because I wasn’t supposed to be there and partly because I felt as though I had journeyed backward in time. But the city wasn’t pleasant for long, and it certainly isn’t pleasant for the people living there. It hasn’t been so for decades.

Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.

Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. Fidel Castro, Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara, and their 26th of July Movement forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959 and replaced his standard-issue authoritarian regime with a Communist one. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.”

Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it—and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. “This was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.” Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not—cannot—build such grand or elegant cities.

But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living standards over the period.”

Communism destroyed Cuba’s prosperity, but the country experienced unprecedented pain and deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Journalist and longtime Cuba resident Mark Frank writes vividly about this period in his book Cuban Revelations. “The lights were off more than they were on, and so too was the water. . . . Food was scarce and other consumer goods almost nonexistent. . . . Doctors set broken bones without anesthesia. . . . Worm dung was the only fertilizer.” He quotes a nurse who tells him that Cubans “used to make hamburgers out of grapefruit rinds and banana peels; we cleaned with lime and bitter orange and used the black powder in batteries for hair dye and makeup.” “It was a haunting time,” Frank wrote, “that still sends shivers down Cubans’ collective spines.”

By the 1990s, Cuba needed economic reform as much as a gunshot victim needs an ambulance. Castro wasn’t about to reform himself and his ideology out of existence, but he had to open up at least a small piece of the country to the global economy. So the Soviet subsidy was replaced by vacationers, mostly from Europe and Latin America, who brought in much-needed hard currency. Arriving foreigners weren’t going to tolerate receiving ration cards for food—as the locals do—so the island also needed some restaurants. The regime thus allowed paladars—restaurants inside private homes—to open, though no one from outside the family could work in them. (That would be “exploitative.”) Around the same time, government-run “dollar stores” began selling imported and relatively luxurious goods to non-Cubans. Thus was Cuba’s quasi-capitalist bubble created.

When the ailing Fidel Castro ceded power to his less doctrinaire younger brother Raúl in 2008, the quasi-capitalist bubble expanded, but the economy remains heavily socialist. In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage—$20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $10 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get “free” health care and education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says, “All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.”

Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. The government contracts with Spanish companies such as Meliá International to manage Havana’s hotels. Before accepting its contract, Meliá said that it wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban government said fine, so the company pays $8–$10 an hour. But Meliá doesn’t pay its employees directly. Instead, the firm gives the compensation to the government, which then pays the workers—but only after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in my hotel if that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The workers don’t get $8–$10 an hour; they get 67 cents a day—a child’s allowance.

The maximum wage is just the beginning. Not only are most Cubans not allowed to have money; they’re hardly allowed to have things. The police expend extraordinary manpower ensuring that everyone required to live miserably at the bottom actually does live miserably at the bottom. Dissident blogger and author Yoani Sánchez describes the harassment sarcastically in her book Havana Real: “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.” Perhaps the saddest symptom of Cuba’s state-enforced poverty is the prostitution epidemic—a problem the government officially denies and even forbids foreign journalists based in Havana to mention. Some Cuban prostitutes are professionals, but many are average women—wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers—who solicit johns once or twice a year for a little extra money to make ends meet.

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Read more: city-journal.org

Before we get too excited about Fillon’s free-market credentials ...

FRANCE NEEDS THATCHERISM - CAN FILLON DELIVER IT?

Thatcherite candidate François Fillon is favourite to win today’s Les Républicains primary run-off vote against centrist Mayor of Bordeaux Alain Juppé. Fillon – considered an Anglophile – has spoken of his respect for former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the vital reforms that she and President Ronald Reagan undertook in the 1980s.

M. Fillon spoke at the 2014 Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, held by the Centre for Policy Studies at the Guildhall in the City of London. In the build-up to the conference, he was interviewed by the Daily Telegraph:

"The media are overwhelmingly on the Left; that's why it seems like that to you. And our universities are hotbeds of Marxism. But I can feel changes in public opinion. There used to be this unthinking support for public service strikes, because of the nation's consensus on ever-growing protection in every aspect of people's lives. We used to favour social justice over liberty. No longer. I feel a real revolt, a desire for more freedom, less State intervention in either economic or private lives. Since the post-war years, France has never had a Thatcherian revolution, or the realistic reforms that Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder achieved in Germany."

"We started with reforms in 2007. Nicolas Sarkozy lowered taxes then, started a programme of reforms. Then came the financial crisis, and we had to keep things together, save the banks from bankruptcy, govern in a time of recession. The impetus for reform never came back."

You can see the video of the panel discussion featuring François Fillon, “Whatever happened to Liberté”, by clicking the below image:



Writing on the prospect of what a Fillon Presidency might look like for CapX, Gaspard Koening said:

"In French political debate, “Thatcher” is used in the same way as “the Vichy regime” – as a label that disqualifies an opponent from office forever. Open and avowed Thatcherites in Paris are a fringe movement of degenerate right-wingers, tolerated purely as a sign of open-mindedness, in the same way as advocates of cannibalism or sado-masochism.

"But there Mr Fillon was. All of a sudden, a Gaullist with a fondness for the “French social model” (translation: the transfer of hefty amounts to rent-seeking Baby Boomers) had morphed into an unrepentant free-marketeer, promising to slash taxes and liberalise the labour market with a forcefulness that would make the IMF blush."Free-markeeters should not be too over-optimistic though. As Bill Wirtz wrote recently forCapX:

“Before we get too excited about Fillon’s free-market credentials, note that his spending cuts will be offset by a 2 per cent increase in sales tax. His win may also derive more from his social conservatism than his economic liberalism: he supports the War on Drugs, wants an annual cap on immigration, would like to ban the burkini, and backs reintroducing mandatory sentencing in criminal law cases.

“Also, Fillon was Sarkozy’s prime minister from 2007 to 2012, a period marked by tax increases and a massive bank bailout.”

Emmanuel Macron, former Socialist Prime Minister, has also announced he will be a candidate in next year’s election after quitting the hugely unpopular left wing party. Wirtz believes he also provides some cheer for the growing sense of liberalism in France.

“Macron opened up the inter-city bus market, a measure that created competition on the market, lowered transportation costs and created 13,000 private sector jobs.

“He also reformed labour regulations regarding work on Sundays: not only by extending the exceptions made to allow businesses to open on Sundays, but also by increasing the total number of permits granted by local authorities.”

Read more:

• Daily Telegraph: 'France has never had a Thatcherian revolution'
• Centre for Policy Studies: WATCH: Whatever happened to Liberté
• Gaspard Koenig, CapX: François Fillon: The man bringing Thatcher to France
• Bill Wirtz, CapX: France’s election is getting exciting. Here’s what you need to know

Centre for Policy Studies: 

http://www.cps.org.uk/

Our mailing address is:
Centre for Policy Studies
57 Tufton Street
London, SW1P 3QL
United Kingdom

Erdoğan hopes to win a referendum next year to dramatically increase his presidential powers.

Turkey's Erdoğan Continues Harsh Repression of Political Opponents

by Stephen Schwartz and Veli Sirin


Turkey's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, appears as the sole person in his country's politics who knows what he wants. Erdoğan seeks absolute power and acts against all obstacles to his ambitions. He is eager to identify new "enemies" whose purported conspiracies he believes justify his harsh rule.

Through the end of October and most of November, Erdoğan has carried out a spree of enhanced repressive measures. This latest onslaught reflects his current fixation on a referendum, proposed for spring 2017, to ratify or reject constitutional amendments that would provide a dramatic increase in his presidential powers.

To hold the referendum, Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) must first gain a parliamentary majority authorizing its placement on the national ballot. The party needs 330 legislative votes, out of 550, to permit the referendum. AKP won 317 deputies in the national elections of November 2015. AKP lacks the two-thirds majority, or 367 parliamentary seats, to allow immediate enactment of the constitutional changes.

Erdoğan is promised a coalition majority of 357 for a referendum by joining with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which has 40 seats. MHP is an extremist party with a background of anti-secularist violence during the 1970s and anti-Kurdish agitation.

From 2012 to 2015 the Turkish authorities conducted a "peace process" with the Turkish Kurds. Erdoğan sought backing from the Kurdish-dominated People's Democratic Party (HDP)—the third biggest force in the national legislature, with 59 deputies, after the November 2015 election—for his reinforcement of the presidency. When the HDP declined to support him, the ceasefire collapsed and fighting resumed in Turkey's Kurdish southeast.

On November 4, HDP chairperson Selahattin Demirtaş was arrested, as noted by the Guardian, with at least 10 of his colleagues in the party's leadership. The HDP representatives' parliamentary immunity from prosecution was abolished this year.


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Read more here: www.meforum.org

Osservatorio Gender - L’ONU porta a casa un altro risultato, tutto arcobaleno

ULTIME NOTIZIE - Bollettino n. 49 del 26 novembre 2016 Formia: gender a scuola con il progetto “Scuole attive contro omofobia e transfobia” Il gender arriva anche nelle scuole di Formia con il progetto “Scuole amiche dei diritti umani”. Il copione è sempre lo stesso. L’iniziativa, promossa dall’Assessorato alla Scuola del Comune di Formia con gli Istituti scolastici della città e la collaborazione della Sezione Italiana e del Gruppo di Formia di Amnesty International, introduce infatti l’indottrinamento all’indifferenza sessuale […]     Weekend di propaganda LGBT+ negli stadi inglesi Il weekend del 26/27 novembre la propaganda LGBT+ scende sui campi di calcio inglesi con la campagna “Rainbow Laces”. La Premier League, la Lega Calcio inglese e la Federazione hanno espresso infatti il loro pieno appoggio al piano di “normalizzazione” omosessuale invitando tutte le squadre del campionato ad indossare i lacci arcobaleno in segno di sostegno alla causa LGBT.       Gli attivisti LGBT francesi voteranno alle primarie del centro-destra: quali interessi? Domani si svolgerà in Francia il secondo turno delle primarie del centrodestra, dove vedremo sfidarsi per la candidatura all’Eliseo Francois Fillon e Alain Juppé, entrambi ex primi ministri.       Un condom a forma di aureola, l’ultima provocante campagna LGBT Un’aureola a forma di condom con lo slogan “Mettitelo in testa”. Questa la “geniale” e provocante idea di una campagna pubblicitaria contro l’AIDS apparsa nella metropolitana di Torino in vista del 1° dicembre, giornata mondiale della lotta contro il virus dell’HIV.       La Centrale del Latte di Brescia cavalca l’onda gender per promuovere i propri prodotti La Centrale del Latte di Brescia cavalca l’onda lunga del gender, lanciando una campagna promozionale con l’immagine di un uomo truccato da donna assieme ad una bambina con lo slogan, “la famiglia ha un nuovo formato“.       L’ONU porta a casa un altro risultato, tutto arcobaleno I paladini dei diritti LGBT possono gridare ancora una volta trionfo mondiale. L’Assemblea Generale delle Nazioni Unite ha difatti da poco votato a favore del proseguo dell’attività lavorativa dell’esperto nominato per monitorare le “violenze e le discriminazioni basate sulla denigrazione sessuale e sull’identità di genere”, di cui già parlammo qui qualche mese fà.       Dai trans-gender ai trans-abili, logico compimento della “trans-società” L’ultima confine dell’incessante moto rivoluzionario si chiama “trans-abilità“. La nostra è infatti una società in perenne transizione e divenire, il cui tratto principale sembra essere quello di voler abbattere ogni sorta di barriera etico-culturale, additata come un castrante limite di cui è necessario sbarazzarsi. L’uomo contemporaneo in preda ad un delirio di onnipotenza pretende dunque di rimuovere ogni tipo di veto o remora […]     I vescovi italiani non hanno dubbi: gli attivisti gay entrano nei piani pastorali Se sulla esortazione apostolica Amoris Laetitia quattro cardinali hanno espresso cinque “Dubia” (dubbi), vale a dire delle domande di chiarimento che vanno al cuore della fede cattolica, chi non ha assolutamente dubbi è la CEI, la Conferenza episcopale italiana. Lo scorso fine settimana ha radunato ad Assisi oltre 500 responsabili diocesani di pastorale familiare per […]     Messico: Ateneo dei Gesuiti appoggia campagna pro ‘nozze’ gay L’Uia,Università Iberoamericana fondata e retta dalla Compagnia di Gesù, ha dichiarato pubblicamente il proprio appoggio alla campagna «#SíAcepto un México para tod@s», che prevede l’approvazione delle “nozze” gay nel Paese nordamericano. Lo ha fatto sul proprio sito web, nonché con un video sul proprio profilo Facebook. In conseguenza di tale adesione, il Vicerettore, Alejandro Guevara […]     VISITA IL NOSTRO SITO WEB: Osservatoriogender.it SCRIVICI: info@osservatoriogender.it