I share Margaret Wente’s confusion about the media treatment of the Vancouver conjoined twins, which amounted to a giant “awwwww” when “pity and sorrow,” in her words, might have been more appropriate. I certainly do not share her contention that “we need to face the fact that not all babies are worth saving, even if we could afford to do it.” We can afford to, just for starters.

She starts out reasonably enough:

Ten out of 10 people interviewed for this story said that, if it had happened to them, they would have terminated the pregnancy.

From time to time, I’ve argued against the growing trend of terminating pregnancies because of minor fetal defects (such as deafness or a club foot). The sharing of a brain is not a minor defect. Sure, some conjoined twins, when separated, do quite well. But craniopagus twins are different. …most such people — mercifully small in number — are destined for (truncated) lives on the margins of society.

This distinction between preventive abortion for deafness or club feet and that for “a shared brain” is obvious, though unquantifiable. But I lose the plot somewhat here:

Did anyone suggest to Ms. Simms [the twins' mother] that, for the sake of her family, proceeding with the pregnancy (she learned of the twins’ condition at 20 weeks) might not be such a hot idea?

Instead of being portrayed as feckless (a reasonable interpretation, under the circumstances) [yikes -ed.], Ms. Simms has been depicted as a model of maternal love, courageously prepared to take on whatever fate has in store. Except that she won’t have to. That will be up to the state, which will inevitably step in when she can’t cope. The state will also pick up the bills.

And completely here:

Developed nations around the world are wrestling with the ethics and stunningly high costs of trying to save seriously premature infants, who (if they survive) have a high chance of developing severe mental or physical handicaps. They’re God’s children, too. But, sometimes, it’s more merciful to let nature take its course.

What we have here is two totally separate issues. The choice with “seriously premature infants,” as Wente puts it, is between exhaustive medical procedures with little chance of success, and either passive or active euthanasia. Ceasing all medical treatment save anesthesia can reasonably be viewed as letting nature take its course. You could do the same with the conjoined twins.

But Wente was previously drawing a distinction between abortions for different kinds of “defective” fetuses. To put it bluntly, going in for an ultrasound, finding you’re carrying two fetuses joined at the head, and then vacuuming those fetuses out and disposing of them is pretty much the exact opposite of letting nature take its course. I think Wente should probably have just stuck with “I do not think that anyone in authority had the right to tell Ms. Simms what to do,” a point she did actually make in the midst of this otherwise unfortunate piece. This would have avoided her suggesting that two newborns in a very perilous situation might be much better off dead.

Thrilled by my discovery of The Housemartins on YouTube, I’ve been searching out all sorts of other childhood musical nuggets. Particularly since it’s such easy filler, I think I might do a few of these. Number 2: “Rat Race,” by The Specials, live from Japan.

The New York Times has a pretty devastating editorial on the Republican stance on gay marriage, which concludes thusly:

If the last month has taught us anything about the Republican Party, it is that homophobia is campaign strategy, not conviction. Congressmen who trust their careers to gay staffers vote for laws to enshrine second-class citizenship for gays in the Constitution. Gay appointees and their partners are treated as married people at official ceremonies and social gatherings. Then whenever an election rolls around, the whole team pretends it’s on a mission to save America from gay marriage.

Mr. Bush and his faithful acolytes seem perfectly willing to stoke fears that create division and sorrow in a country that doesn’t need any more of either. The president has just a little more than two years left in office. You’d think that for once he’d want to consider devoting his time to making things better instead of worse.

… goes to Borat at his London premiere: “I have brought here with me my 11-year-old son, his wife and their new-born baby, who I am hoping to sell to singing transvestite Madonna.”

I wish I could say this was absolutely unbelievable, but such is the Age of Idiocy in which we live. Canada’s New Government did indeed “stand up for Canada,” and its ambassador to Washington has lodged a prototypically hypersensitive complaint about this ad, which is potentially offensive for many reasons but does not, in my considered opinion, insult Canada.

(What it does do, if anyone cares, is insult the idea that an American politician would leave North Korea to Canada because we’re not busy. This is funny, though considerably less edgy, for the same reason that David Cross can get away with saying: “The other thing that really pisses me off and makes me angry… is niggers.” He’s playing off the ridiculousness of the idea that someone like him would actually say or think that in this day and age. But I digress.)

I could attach all sorts of adjectives to this complaint — whiny, neurotic, childish — but in a way I think “Canadian” encapsulates them all quite nicely. (E.g.: “Man, that Thom Yorke is so Canadian. He needs to chill out!)

“Is this what Canadians should be expecting as the outcome of cozying up to Mr. Bush by the prime minister and his Conservatives?” asked Liberal MP Omar Alghabra.

“I have a question for the prime minister. Will he call his mentor, President Bush, and demand this insulting ad be pulled from the airwaves immediately, and stand up for Canada, but for real this time?”

The Canadian House of Commons, ladies and gentlemen. Plenty of room in the public gallery… anyone? Hello?

Look, I know the Conservatives are just trying to placate Canada’s humourless urban hang-wringers, but it won’t work. They are by nature unplacatable. And this isn’t a particularly strong effort anyway:

Although the Conservative government enjoys a warm relationship with the Bush administration, a Canadian official* wasn’t shy about condemning the ad.

“We would like to remind the Republicans that Canada is playing an important role in rebuilding Afghanistan,” the official said

“(Wilson) reiterated that only with positive exchange can we rebuild a strong relationship.

“Insulting one another does nothing to improve it.”

* Flashback to Star Public Editor Sharon Burnside’s Saturday piece: “The Star does not quote unnamed sources who make critical comments about others — and that’s as it should be, since readers would have no idea who the sources are, nor if they had motive for mischief-making.”

For some reason, when I was a kid I had an inordinate number of babysitters with really good taste in music, Britpop especially. I don’t think I’d heard The Housemartins’ “Five Get Over Excited” for about 20 years, but it used to be one of my favourites and I love it all over again. Mad props to whichever babysitter had the LP.

I’ve argued ad nauseum that the same-sex marriage debate is very different than the polygamy debate (to the extent one exists). One of the key differences is that while same-sex marriage augmented the rights of a group of law-abiding people whose lifestyle the state had no official quarrel with, polygamy is a matter of whether to officially accept a lifestyle that has until now been criminal. Personally I see few parallels between the two debates, especially since so few people would benefit (and only then from ceasing to live every day outside the law) from striking down the law against polygamy and since, to my knowledge, not a single actual polygamist is petitioning for such a development. At the very least the debate is premature — as premature as same-sex marriage would have been in 1968.

Marriage was working just fine, for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s a coarse aggregate in the concrete foundations of Canadian society. And after all that time, its definition was suddenly and significantly altered (not for the first time) after the briefest tornado of rhetoric, misdirection and both homophobic and human rightsy high dudgeon. If the government does indeed have a role to play in setting the generally accepted definition of “marriage” — something existential, that is, not just the granting of various rights — then it owed Canadians a far more serious examination of those foundations.

(For the record: I don’t think government does have such a role no matter how fervently it believes it does. I also think homosexual couples should have all the same rights as heterosexual ones, which is why I have no problem with SSM as it’s now enacted even though I loathed the terms of the debate.)

Today’s Ottawa Citizen editorial, entitled “Three may not be a crowd,” proposes the same superficial treatment for polygamy:

Canadian legal experts say it’s time for the government to crack down on conjugal relationships with more than two partners, but their argument rests on the dubious proposition that practices that are often bad must always be forbidden.

Well, their argument also rests on the law. Not all “often bad” practices must “always be forbidden” (though that is certainly the current guiding principle of Canadian government), but clearly at some point Canada, and the entire western world, decided that polygamy was, in fact, always bad.

Oh phooey, says the Cit:

The international agreements are meant to stamp out polygamy (the term for the general situation of more than two people in a relationship) and polygyny where it’s used deliberately to subjugate women. Yet to the Canadian researchers, cultural context is irrelevant. Polygyny, they suggest, is inherently degrading to women, in each and every case. They offer dozens of examples of degrading polygynous situations, but the examples are inextricable from the societies in which they occur.

Cultural context is irrelevant to the authors of this editorial, too. They hardly even address the single polygamous culture in Canada — Bountiful, BC, led by the now-incarcerated Warren Jeffs. Bountiful is home to what might be the single group of people who are the most extricable, and extricated, from Canadian society, but the Citizen sees it more like Nelson or the Gaspésie — a little different, sure, but still just another part of Canada’s vast bumbleberry pie. “Women have an array of legal remedies available if they are defrauded [? –ed.] or otherwise abused,” they burble, which is true. It’s also true that tragic numbers of educated metropolitan women who fall victim to abuse fail to avail themselves of those remedies. Can we expect fuller participation from poorly educated women and girls who live under an oppressively paternalistic and (the Cit’s word) “cultish” religion, who “marry” in their teens, who live entirely and deliberately apart from Canadian society?

The Citizen then comes about violently and suggests that “the fact that it [polygamy] is illegal means that when it does happen, those who do it necessarily do it illicitly, without protection if things go wrong.” Wait, what happened to all those legal remedies?

Stories have emerged from Bountiful of young girls brought up in this cultish environment being married off to much older men against their will. Where such crimes are committed, they should be prosecuted.

But that’s exactly the point. They aren’t being prosecuted because British Columbia is too afraid of the Charter to go in and investigate, not because it’s impossible or unethical.

This Charter terror is usually phrased in roughly the terms the Citizen uses:

But if more than two genuinely free, mature people — men or women or any combination thereof — choose to share their lives, can the state legitimately tell them no? The whole argument in favour of same-sex marriage rested on the premise that consenting adults have the right to enter any relationship they like.
…
If “adult” and “consenting” are the key words, then it would be contradictory to turn around and outlaw polygymous arrangements that were freely entered into.

Sounds reasonable — so why is polygamy illegal across the entire civilized world. Inter alia, because the ideas of freedom and consent, to say nothing of social stability (which is one of the primary goals of governments’ historical promotion of monogamous marriage), have long been held to be incompatible with polygamy.

As I’ve said before, when one Canadian man and three Canadian women who do not live in Bountiful, British Columbia decide they want to get married, then let them mount the Charter challenge. It is madness to suggest striking down a law on behalf of hypothetical people when, as the Citizen admits, very predictable and very troubling social problems continue to emanate from the only known people in Canada currently running afoul of the legislation.

I could probably live with legalized polygamy if I knew that young women weren’t being trafficked across North America to be the wives of men they’ve never met, that young men weren’t being left penniless and unloved by the sides of highways, that everyone was free to leave if they so wished. All the evidence suggests that none of those conditions currently exist in Canada, which is bad enough. But the worst part is that we don’t even have the stones to go in and find out for sure. This is certainly not the time to soften our stance on this lifestyle.

An interesting finding: “More than 75 per cent of [hockey] players who made the Canadian national under-18 teams in the last five years had birthdays before July.” The implication is that coaches of age-based teams are weeding out late birthdays because of a bias towards bigger, stronger players. Off the top of my head, I can’t see a solution to this disparity: older players aren’t just bigger and stronger than younger ones — they’re better, too. That said, 75 percent seems remarkably high even for such a limited sample, and if the disparity filters up to pro hockey then it stands to reason that somewhere along the line at least a few talented players have been unfairly left behind.

It does seem to filter up to the NHL, as it turns out. Based on a less-than-exhaustive analysis of the forwards and defensemen listed on nhl.com (which include some retired players and don’t account for a few foreign-born players who are really Canadian), I can report that the bias towards pre-July 1 birthdays is in the mid-50s and pretty constant across players of different nationalities: overall (921 players) 57.8%; Canadians (488 players) 59.2%; Americans (167 players) 56.9%; and those (mostly European) who are neither (266 players) 56.4%.

It strikes me that this is something that’s probably been studied before, and that might logically extend to other sports and even non-athletic endeavours as well. Still, there’s no logical reason to be happy with this phenomenon.

The National Post reports:

A Republican attack ad stirring controversy in the U.S. mid-term elections does a drive-by smear on Canada, suggesting America’s northern neighbour is a do-nothing country on world affairs.
…
Produced by the Republican National Committee, the ”man on the street” ad features a hefty man wearing suspenders and a ball cap, commenting sarcastically on his view of Democratic foreign policy.

”Let Canada take care of North Korea. They’re not busy,” the man says.

For the love of god, it’s a joke. It’s a bad joke, but it’s not at Canada’s expense. If anything the good old boy’s sarcasm implies that Canada is busy. Behold:

The Post continues:

Just how Canada got caught up in the mid-term mudslinging remains a mystery. The Republican National Committee did not respond to calls from CanWest News Service. [Laughing too hard at Canada, perhaps -ed.]

But the ad fosters stereotypes about Canada’s engagement in international affairs that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has tried hard to dispel.

Meanwhile, Canadian Cerberus decided he’d use this to partisan advantage:

The Republican ad, which apparently makes all of the nasty Liberal and Conservative ads from the last election look like playschool (including the obligatory sexual innuendos against the Democrats’ candidate), shows the Republicans are willing to stoop to any low level, even risk an international incident, just to win a few votes.

Which raises the question: Is Prime Minister Harper going to just take this from the Republicans or is he going to stand up for Canada?

Cripes. Well, at least we still have thicker skin than Kazakhstan. Whoops, no we don’t.

The Star’s got all your news right here, pal: “No free tacos for Canadian baseball fans.” This article was written by a computer, an ESL student, or someone in an extreme hurry:

Taco Bell, the U.S. fast-food-chain that serves Mexican morsels, is promising a free, seasoned, beef crunchy taco to everyone in America if either a Detroit Tiger or a St. Louis Cardinal hits a home run into the left-field or centre-field stands during tonight’s World Series Game Three.

As Canada is not part of the United States of America, Canadian baseball fans won’t be able to collect if someone happens to hit such a homer.

There are even graver implications:

While Taco Bell has already scored big with free publicity, the corporation has seen similar promotions in basketball go woefully wrong.

The Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association were accused of running up the score in a 2001 game after the taco-maker promised fans coupons for 99 cent chalupas if Dallas scored 100 points in a game against the Cleveland Cavaliers.

A shoving match broke out when Cleveland players objected to the Mavericks’ hunger for points and their fans’ hunger for free Mexican food.
…
Pizza Pizza offers free slices to fans attending the game any time the Toronto Raptors score more than 100 points.

Unlike the United States of America, there is never any trouble in Canada.

Well, not since 1812 anyway.