It’s been a fairly interesting week. Lots of international buzz due to terrorist topics. Besides the death of a key terrorist in the middle-east, there was an event that hit a little closer to home. A group of 17 Canadians planned an attack on several Canadian monuments, including the CN tower and Peace tower, and allegedly planned to storm parliament and behead Stephen Harper. You really don’t hear that too often; the call to behead our Prime Minister. Makes you wonder what Stephen Harper has done to invite a beheading…he’s only been in power a few months. Could it be his increase in military spending? Extension of the Afghan mission? Closer relations with the US?

Harper has been inviting groups to speak out against him since he stepped into office. From cutting funding to aboriginal initiatives, daycare, repealing income tax cuts, and backing off the Kyoto accord, it’s not surprising that people are standing up against him. Now, despite a clear and decisive majority in last year’s vote, as well as several of his own caucus telling him it will never pass, he’s going to waste time again and have a vote on Same-sex marriage. And why not? Everyone knows that same-sex marriage treatens the traditional family…even though it has nothing to do with religion and has provisions to protect the churches. Wait….I can’t even be sarcastic about it. I am disgusted with Harper for bringing this up again. Actions like this are why I will never support the Conservative Party. It is not acceptable to use parliament’s time to shore up social conservative’s support.

I’ve talked about this topic before and I’ll touch once again on it. Marriage traditionally was not religious. It was a contract between families and joined communities. It was several hundred years after Christ before it became part of the Church. It’s not even a sacrament and is a human institution (unless you are a christian denomination that makes up doctrine like papal infalibility and assumption of Mary). Same-sex marriage does not erode families, it just creates families. I can’t wait to see some stats in a few years comparing percentage of same-sex marriages that end in divorce compared to opposite-sex marriages. I will bet that same-sex marriages will survive more often.

When people talk about the “slippery-slope” and the “activist judges” I want to puke. The most common saying same-sex marriage is a gateway to polygamy. They are two completely different topics. It’s analogeous to if we were back in the 1800’s and giving visible minorities the right to vote and arguing that it will be the gateway to women having the right to vote. If our laws are bound to legalize polygamy, it will happen either way, NOT as a result of same-sex marriage. They are independant of one another. I have extreme faith in our Judicial system (which had a majority of conservative appointed judges throughout the 90’s when many landmark rights cases were made) to be non-partisan. We aren’t the US and our judges are picked for their qualifications, not their political affiliation. (Look at M. v. H., Vriend v. Alberta, and Egan v. Canada for decisions during a majority conservative appointed supreme court)

You get the point…so no need to continue more. In other news, the Leadership Campaign is heating up. There will be debates in Winnipeg this weekend which will be interesting. Also a satrical site about Volpe has appeared. He had it shut down, but it was moved to a different server (which apparently is out of their reach now). With this whole campaign funding fiasco it makes it even more clear it was the right decision when I rejected him for Comuzzi supporting him. Seriously…accepting thousands of dollars from kids? You are just asking for bad press. I’m surprised that election law doesn’t close that gap. It’s clearly a loop hole. How many of those kids truely made the decision themselves to support Volpe? It’s just exploiting them by their parents as a way to funnel more money for lobbying. Shame on them and shame on Volpe.

Ending on a high note, all of Canada should be pleased with the performance of Finola Hackett, who placed 2nd in the National (American, but open to international people) Spelling Bee. It’s amazing how far she went (improving from the year before) and is a wonderful example of youth education in Canada. It’s nice news to hear in between the beheadings and the religious nuts.

***EDIT*** News today, Canada’s Unemployment Rate drops to 6.1% (32 year low).

Currently Listening to: Office Chatter

Random Wikipedia Article: Warchalking