Posted on 10/15/2006 9:08:27 AM PDT by Heartofsong83
In PM's world, girls will be herded back to the kitchen, and gays back to the closet, says Linda McQuaig Oct. 15, 2006. 01:00 AM LINDA MCQUAIG
When it comes to equality for women, Stephen Harper is all for it — as long as the women are in Afghanistan.
Last May, the Prime Minister told Parliament that ensuring equality rights for women was one of the key reasons Canada is waging war in Afghanistan.
Certainly Harper's claims of championing the rights of burqa-clad women have helped him sell that unpopular war to Canadians.
But when there's no war to peddle, Harper doesn't give a piffle about women's equality. Indeed, he seems downright opposed to it.
In a recent move that got relatively little attention, the Harper government actually removed the word "equality" from the list of goals of Status of Women Canada, ending decades of advocacy for equality on the part of that federal agency.
Such advocacy itself is now under attack. The Harper government has cut off funding for advocacy done by women's organizations, which have fought hard to overcome discrimination that has, for instance, left women earning substantially less than men, regardless of occupation, age or education. Canadian women earn 72 cents for every dollar a man earns.
This pay gap exists despite federal and provincial pay equity laws, and would undoubtedly be bigger if it weren't for women's groups pressuring governments to enforce and strengthen these laws, despite opposition from business.
The Conservatives have also stopped funding women's groups that carry out research about women's status. Evidently, the less women know about their inferior status, the better. These moves are aimed at appealing to Harper's base of social conservatives and religious right wingers, but are wildly out of sync with the Canadian mainstream.
Pollster Michael Adams notes that, while Americans have become more deferential to patriarchal authority in recent years, Canadians have gone dramatically in the opposite direction. As Adams writes in his book, Fire and Ice: "Canadians' more egalitarian views regarding the status of women and the structure of the family ... seem to lead them to a more relaxed view of what constitutes a family."
No wonder the Harper crowd is apoplectic. This "more relaxed view of the structure of the family" implies the very things they oppose — single-parent families, working mothers and gay marriage.
Hence Harper's decision to cancel the national child-care plan, created by the Liberals last year after decades of advocacy by women's groups.
It's hard to explain this cancellation — Canada is flush with a $13 billion surplus and there are more than 1 million preschool children with working mothers — other than as an attempt to drive working women back into the home.
In Harper's world, it looks like girls will be herded back to the kitchen, just as gays are herded back to the closet.
Once we all get our roles straight again, in some sort of 1950s Father Knows Best rerun, everything will be fine.
So, for women, the good news is — burqas are out. The bad news is — so are careers.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linda McQuaig is a Toronto-based author and commentator. lmcquaig@sympatico.ca.
Please send me a FReepmail to get on or off this Canada ping list.
The issue now is how society gets back to equalibrium from its presently over-feminized condition.
The Liberals have been promising a national day care system since my daughter was born.
She's 20 now.
This is just ha-ha, silly. That a grownup, a newspaper "reporter" or columnist, could write such childish stuff is remarkable in this day and age.
Sounds like something you'd read by some silly sophomore in a high school paper.
In a recent move that got relatively little attention, the Harper government actually removed the word "equality" from the list of goals of Status of Women Canada, ending decades of advocacy for equality on the part of that federal agency.
Could it be because it's no longer needed? Nah!
The radical loser
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
http://www.signandsight.com/features/493.html
[note: long article, but very good]
(Snip)
But anyone wishing to understand the radical loser would be well advised to go a little further back. Progress has not put an end to human suffering, but it has changed it in no small way. Over the past two centuries, the more successful societies have fought for and established new rights, new expectations and new demands. They have done away with the notion of an inevitable fate. They have put concepts like human dignity and human rights on the agenda. The have democratized the struggle for recognition and awakened expectations of equality which they are unable to fulfil. And at the same time, they have made sure that inequality is constantly demonstrated to all of the planet's inhabitants round the clock on every television channel. As a result, with every stage of progress, people's capacity for disappointment has increased accordingly.
"Where cultural progress is genuinely successful and ills are cured, this progress is seldom received with enthusiasm," remarks the philosopher Odo Marquard (book): "Instead, they are taken for granted and attention focuses on those ills that remain. And these remaining ills are subject to the law of increasing annoyance. The more negative elements disappear from reality, the more annoying the remaining negative elements become, precisely because of this decrease in numbers."
(Snip)
They do not, however, have the right to tell me what constitutes equality, or the right to tell me what I should earn or keep.
Yes they do! They are much smarter, caring, & better people than you or I are.
Typical Feminazi nonsense - the Homemaker is the enemy!
Indeed.
In Linda McQuaig's wacky world, simply mentioning the fact that men and women differ in numerous fundamental ways is tantamount to advocating feminine servitude.
Castrate them all, says this femino-nazi!
Canada has the equivalent of the Equal Rights Amendment previously attempted in the USA. In Canada this has empowered the ridiculous to become political correctness. Sluttishness and aggression has been tolerated by the entire Canadian nation as "women" ( feminonazis can never qualify to be women, nor should they be addressed using that term)act as if ANY criticism is prejudicial or sexually discriminatory. Witness the recent conduct of Belinda Stronach as a third party in the Domi divorce, and the liberals thought her a possible leader of the party?
Femino-nazis have no integrity. They want to screw their way into upward social mobility, and then decry their critics as discriminatory against women. A man conducting himself similarly, would be cashiered by his organization as lacking integrity and trustworthiness.
Canada, thank goodness, is now seeing some daylight thanks to Harper, who means to end this sick form of feminine culture, and not too soon for me and the majority of Canadians. May the Pu$$y whipper leftist-socialists femino nazis soon disappear like the dinosaurs they are.
May Canadian men and women truly learn again to love each other , trust each other, and marry each other and have strong heterosexual children!That does not mean that girls will be herded into the kitchen. It just means that we realize just how stupid and inappropriate feminonazi crap like this article truly and irrevocably IS.!
Well, you conservative guys are just lucky. You get the best looking women with the most common sense. Any conservative gal can tell you, without feeling degraded or inferior, that men and women are different....and be glad of it!
Where are these women. All the women I work with expect and get the same wage as their male counterparts.
BUMP!
This is absurd, coming from a woman who supports appeasement of Islamic terrorists.
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