Here are the top 5 issues being hotly debated south of the border that are thankfully not really on the radar screen in our election:

1. The war in Iraq. Because, well, we’re not actually fighting in it. The war in Afghanistan is, of course, an issue here, but it’s not nearly as divisive as Iraq is for Americans.
2. Terrorism and national security. Canadians are just plain less worried about this issue than Americans are, no matter what side of it they are on. Whether it’s because we’re more rational or more naive, the fact is that most Canadians don’t really believe that there is an imminent threat of terrorism, and the issue really isn’t showing up in our election discourse.
3. Gay marriage. It’s been legal nationwide since 2005. Since then, thousands of same-sex couples have tied the knot in Canada, our wedding industry has benefited from an influx of marriage “tourists” from the US, and everyone else basically yawned and went on with their lives. Even Stephen Harper isn’t bothering to rehash the issue in this campaign, recognizing the futility of beating a dead horse.
4. Abortion. Yeah, there have been a few rumbles, which have mostly consisted of scare-tactics by the Duceppe camp against Harper – who has stated that he has no plans to re-open the issue. As explosive as the issue is in the US election, here, it’s basically a non-issue, just as it has been in virtually every Canadian election campaign since the 1970s.
5. What our candidates look like. While Americans choose between their first-ever African-American president and their first-ever female VP, us Canadians have an election that’s about the candidates’ politics and not about their skin colour or background. Of course, that’s because they’re all a bunch of white guys (except for Elizabeth May). But I suspect that even if our PM candidates were a bit more representative of the country, we’d still manage to talk less about their skin colour or gender than the Americans do. Besides, Kim Campbell won’t exactly go down in history as a great Canadian leader, but I’d still rather have her than Sarah Palin any day.

The economy is, without a doubt, the #1 voting issue for both Americans and Canadians. As it should be. Polls have shown that the other top election issues for Canadians are healthcare, the environment and poverty. We can hopefully expect these issues to dominate tonight’s debate, and the above issues to hardly rate a mention.

Sometimes, it’s good to be Canadian.

Palin is a true-blue representative of her party. She is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and against gay marriage. Her opposition to abortion extends to cases of rape and incest. The women who backed Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the nomination for presidency don’t generally ascribe to those values.

[ . . . ]

Tokenism is an insult, an insidious one whose effects are difficult to erase over time. People will forget that there were other options on the Republican table, capable, long-serving, proven women like Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas – and that McCain ignored them in favour of doing something headline-grabbing. That effect is already starting to wear off. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll this week found, “Three quarters of all voters think McCain chose a female running mate specifically because he thought adding a woman to the Republican ticket would help him win in November.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the otherwise politically-savvy selection of Palin. Choosing a candidate solely because she’s a woman is no better than systematically denying opportunities to qualified people because they are women.

And while McCain no doubt sees Palin’s stance on issues like abortion and gun control as qualifications, not drawbacks, given the socially conservative voters he’s trying to attract, the fact remains that Palin is much less qualified than the myriad other choices that McCain had – of both genders. She was chosen for her youth (to contrast McCain’s age) and her gender, proving that tokenism is no better than discrimination, after all.

• Constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage won approval in South Carolina, Tenessee, Virginia and Wisconsin, with similar amendments on the ballot in 4 other states also expected to pass once the votes are tallied. This would mean that a total of 28 states – more than half – will have banned gay marriage in the U.S., delivering a serious blow to the hopes of people in favour of equality and civil rights.
• Arizona passed measures against illegal immigrants, including making English the state’s official language.

On the other hand:

• Missouri passed a measure to guarantee stem cell research would be permitted.
• South Dakota’s voters rejected an attempt to restrict abortion in the form of proposed legislation.

Some analysts have further noted that, though Democrats made significant gains, they may have done so at the expense of ideology, since many of the newly-elected Democrats are much more moderate than Liberal while many of the defeated Republican incumbents were on their party’s more moderate wing. So the House (and possibly the Senate) may have shifted to the left, but both parties actually shifted to the right in the process.

What will it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine.

Whatever my reservations about the Tories, I can’t imagine that they would take steps to restrict a woman’s right to choose. And although the attack is supposedly coming from an independent source, it’s difficult not to read between the lines and attribute this to the Liberal strategy of trying to paint Harper with the U.S. right-wing fanatic brush. Martin might think he’s scoring points, but the scare tactics are looking much more like desperation tactics at this point.

WASHINGTON, DC — In a press conference Monday, President Bush named a 72-day-old gestating fetus as his nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat that opened following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

“Already, this experienced and capable embryo has demonstrated during his or her in utero existence a deep commitment to the core principles of the Constitution,” Bush said. “It is with great pride that I nominate this unborn American patriot to the highest court in the land.”

If confirmed by Congress, the bean-sized vertebrate would be the nation’s first prenatal Supreme Court justice.

I bet if Bush could find a way to do it, he would.

Rehnquist was a conservative, so it’s not as though Bush is replacing a liberal with a conservative. Still, by some accounts, Roberts is much less moderate than Rehnquist was, and his confirmation could spell the end of an era in U.S. judicial policies:

Everything known about Roberts suggests he would join with the most conservative justices to change the law in a conservative direction. As deputy U.S. solicitor general, Roberts coauthored briefs expressly urging the court to overrule Roe vs. Wade. As an attorney in the Justice Department, Roberts drafted an article arguing that there is no constitutional protection for privacy.

Other opinions are less doomsday-ish:

Roberts is not Scalia or Thomas. He is not a right-wing judicial activist eager to chisel away the liberal expansion of the Constitution in recent decades in order to restore some halcyon original intent on the part of the Constitution’s authors.

That’s a bit too chaotic for Roberts, who seems to revere the law’s ability to provide society with a sense of order and predictability. The most-parsed statement by Roberts came in his 2003 confirmation hearing to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, when he said that the 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling establishing a constitutional right to an abortion based on the right to privacy is “the settled law of the land.” Critics say he will think it’s less settled when he is in a position to overturn it, but that seems implausible. In fact, send me a self-addressed envelope within a week and I will mail you $1 (and pay for postage) if Justice Roberts votes to overturn Roe.

All of that is speculation at this point. All we really know is that Bush is stacking the court with two more staunch conservatives, and that certain hard-won rights and liberties may – may be in jeopardy. Depending on what side of the aisle you’re on, I guess this is either a golden opportunity or the greatest catastrophe imaginable.

Even the so-called safeguard of confirmation hearings that exists in the U.S. and not here in Canada (and is often advocated in Canada to avoid political appointees here) can’t curb the power of a President to pick political appointees when his party also has a Senate majority. Here’s hoping that Roberts is a lot more moderate than he seems, because a Chief Justice will continue to influence a country long after any given president is long out of office and busily engaged in book tours.

Republican senator who has questioned whether an abortion opponent could win approval to the U.S. Supreme Court must agree to back President Bush’s nominees if he is to head the committee acting on those nominations, the Senate’s Republican leader said.

Bush has four years to fill Supreme Court seats with basically no opposition. He doesn’t have to think about future re-election anymore. He has a majority in both houses and a huge debt to the far-right conservative Christian groups. Stacking the court to overturn Roe v. Wade may be only the beginning.

The trouble is, the combination of results that have given the Republicans another four years in the White House, significant gains in Congress and a virtual lock on the Senate all at the same time. That means that one side pretty much dominates all three houses – as opposed to the tenuous hold they had last term. And no matter what side the power is concentrated on, that is too much power for one team in a nation that is very much bitterly divided.

The GOP doesn’t have much to hold them back now. Despite the fact that nearly half the country didn’t vote for them, they have a popular vote win, a win on “their” issues in many direct questions, and pretty much a free rein to move the country even further to the right for the next four years – and, with Supreme Court appointments, for a long time after that.

Gay marriage is not an issue that should be decided by popular vote – because a majority shouldn’t get to decide to deny rights to a minority. But look for the Republicans to push ahead for a nationwide constitutional ban on gay marriage, for no good reason other than because many people find the idea distasteful. In fact, this issue probably helped Bush win the election, by encouraging Conservatives to go cast a vote. Similarly, abortion is once again in trouble. We can probably expect a woman’s right to choose being gradually chipped away in the next few years.

Many Kerry supporters are disappointed because they fear another four years of what they perceive to be devastating international policies by the Bush team. Personally, I’m much more concerned about the domestic American scene. In fact, the Democrats most likely lost this election by assuming Iraq was the only issue, and failing to make a strong case for their liberal values at home.

And with so much power concentrated on the Republican side, I admit I’m worried. I’d be just as worried if all the power were concentrated on the left. Either way, too much power in one camp with too few checks and balances is a dangerous thing.

A federal judge on Thursday ruled against the government’s ban on so-called partial birth abortions, saying the measure was unconstitutional because it failed to provide an exception to protect a mother’s health.

I wonder if I can use the novel’s ending to predict what will happen next in reality.

I headed down there over the weekend, and I managed to squeeze some city exploring in between the business I had to do. It’s been a number of years since my last visit, and I can’t get over how much the city has changed. Not just the conspicuous absence of a couple of towers. But also how much more patriotic everyone seems. And how clean the city is in general, compared to what I remember from my last time there. Still expensive though. That hasn’t changed.

At any rate, I missed a bunch of news over the weekend, and rather than play catch-up, I’ll post a few links:

Allison, Lynn, and Harry commemorate Yom HaZikaron. Barry has been all over the North Korean train crash story. David weighs in on the abortion debate. And Meryl tries to take back the F-word from the nutbags. (In case you’re wondering, the F-word in question is feminism.)

In other news, seems like the only Habs fan cheering these days is none other than Vinny Lecavalier. *Sigh*.

The U.S. Senate, after an emotional debate, easily passed legislation on Thursday to make it a federal crime to harm or kill an “unborn child,” an issue that spilled into the battle over abortion rights.

On a 61-38 vote, the Republican-led Senate sent the measure, earlier approved by the House of Representatives, to President Bush.

Bush applauded the Senate vote and said he was looking forward to signing the legislation into law.

This legislations specifically excludes abortion, and thus doesn’t infringe on abortion rights.

BUT (and there’s always a but) anti-abortion groups are applauding it as a “step” towards granting the unborn the same rights as the living.

Don’t get me wrong – I think violence against a pregnant woman is despicable and anyone who commits it ought to be punished to the full extent of the law. But there are ways of stressing this without giving a fetus the same legal status as a person. A fetus has the potential to be a person, and thus deserves rights… but a fetus is not yet a person, and this murky legal definition is really just a political victory for those who would seek to deny the right to choose to all women regardless of belief.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved a ban on “partial birth abortions,” bringing anti-abortion forces within easy reach of a long-sought victory.

The U.S. Senate is expected to act within weeks, sending it to President Bush, who plans to sign it.

The procedure, often distorted by anti-abortion activists and misunderstood by most (male) legislators, is really only used when a fetus is severely deformed and there’s a risk to the life or health of the pregnant mother. But this new law aims to eliminate it, without providing an exception to protect the health of pregnant women:

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional because it does not provide an exception to protect the health of a pregnant woman. Some also argue that the bill will actually apply to other more common abortion techniques, not just one particularly troublesome one.

New York Democrat Louise Slaughter said that backers of the ban are distorting it to suggest that it is a common procedure undertaken cavalierly on healthy fetuses. She argued that it is most often used when there are severe fetal deformities. “These are not children who will be born and run around the room,” she said.

I’m no fan of abortion but I think that the worst thing a government can do is to restrict the rights of a woman to choose. And this bill isn’t even aimed at people who callously abuse abortion as a form of birth control. Instead, it’s aimed at women whose health or even life may be at risk from a troubled pregnancy.

This is Congress practicing medicine – and not too well, for that matter. Legislators should stay away from meddling with the private reproductive rights of women.

One of the most interesting books I’ve read lately is Protect and Defend by Richard North Patterson. It’s political and legal fiction set in the future, but the central issue examined in the book is that of partial-birth abortion. It deals with a case of a fifteen-year-old girl fighting for the right to abort her hopelessly defective fetus in aims of preserving her reproductive health and ability to bear future children. Due to a fictional “Protection of Life Act”, she needs parental consent for this procedure, which her staunchly pro-life parents refuse to give, so she takes them to court. Meanwhile, a new president is fighting to get his nominee for the Supreme Court confirmed by senate, and the very political future of the country hinges on the case of this fifteen-year-old.

The surrounding issues in the book – viability of the fetus, physical and mental health of the mother, parental consent laws, and, most importantly, how the issue is used by politicians to advance their own careers at the expense of privacy – seem almost prophetic, given today’s announcement. In fact, the following quote is almost identical to one contained in the novel:

California Democrat Barbara Boxer said “partial birth” is not a medical term, but a political one.

“They made up the term partial birth abortion,” she said. “There isn’t such a thing. … It’s a very emotional term but what we’re talking about here is a procedure that is used in situations where any other procedure might cause grave harm to the woman.”

For the record, I’m not “pro-abortion” in the same sense that I’m not “pro-war”. Abortion, like war, is always regrettable. But I am very definitely pro-choice. I don’t believe that the state has any right to meddle in the reproductive rights of a woman. Each and every situation is different, and the woman is always in a better position to weigh and judge the situation than some legislator lobbying for votes.

It may surprise some regular readers of the blog, but it’s precisely reasons like this one that turn me off from the right-wing political contingent both in the U.S. and here in Canada. A political party that presumes to dictate its own version of “morality” to the public – often at great expense – is not one I’d want to have anything to do with. Foreign policy and the war on terror has overshadowed some of these issues, but they still exist. And for the women caught in the middle of the debate, their hard-won rights are being curbed a bit more every day.

By an 8-1 vote, the high court said in an opinion by Chief Justice William Rehnquist the judgment that the anti-abortion activists had violated the racketeering laws must be reversed.

The civil lawsuit against Operation Rescue, the Pro-Life Action League and three of the league’s leaders was brought by the National Organization for Women and others. At issue were tactics that included violent demonstrations to block access to clinics.

This is yet another miserable example of the courts engaging in social engineering. What does it say about the U.S. judicial system, whereby judges are appointed by the administration in power and make decisions in line with the party who appointed them?

If violence and intimidation are being used on a case-by-case basis, the perpetrators should be prosecuted for those crimes. But when these tactics are being used on an organized, planned basis across a country, then individual prosecutions are no longer sufficient. That was the intention of racketeering laws (usually used against organized crime organizations such as the Mafia) – to prevent wide-scale use of threats and intimidation to coerce people or businesses into closing or committing illegalities.

Apparently, women seeking abortions – or doctors performing the service – aren’t seen as deserving of these protections, according to the Supreme Court. Disgusting.

I guess now would be a good time to re-state my positions on certain issues: Pro-choice, against religion in public schools, pro-gun control, and pro-social programs.

I will resist being labelled until the end!

Now, the gun registry’s got problems and it might not be the most popular viewpoint out there to oppose those opposing it, but come on, this is far from the most controversial topic that’s come up here! So I wondered why it’s getting so much attention. Then it came to me: because I’m pro-Israel, people assume I must be right-wing in my politics and that I’m therefore a supporter of what our neighbours to the south call the “right to bear arms”.

Simply put, I attracted a right-wing readership with my main topic of discussion, and then alienated them by doing a 180 on an issue that I happen to disagree with them about. Don’t get me wrong, I agree to disagree – some of the smartest bloggers I know want to toss the gun registry out the window (check out the links on the lefthand side of this page) and it’s not like I don’t understand where they’re coming from. But I have to ask sometimes: what does wanting more restrictions on gun ownership and licensing have to do with supporting Israel?

Anyone notice anything strange about those combinations? They don’t logically follow. And I categorically reject the idea that we need to pick a side and go along with all the pet issues that have come to represent one side or another.

In my FAQ, I specifically state that I don’t identify with either the Left or the Right. My views are simply my views, and I think that the real hypocritical thing is to change them simply because the political stage has shifted in one direction or another. If I said I was a Liberal, and tomorrow all Liberals decided that their new pet issue was opposing all people with orange socks, and I disagreed with that, then it would be silly to go along with it simply because of a label, wouldn’t it?

I take issue with the Left for its overspending of our tax dollars, its hatred of anything with a profit motive, and its absolutely disastrous foreign policy – especially when it comes to the Mideast, but in general as well.

I take issue with the Right for butting into our private lives in issues of abortion, gay rights, and religion, and its insistence that the right to own a gun is more important than the right for the next guy not to get shot, and its refusal to associate rights and freedoms with responsibilities.

Most of all, I take issue with people who assume that it’s a spectrum of “either-or” and that everyone has to pick one side or the other.

So I’m just going to keep on saying what I think, without worrying about whether it’s fashionable on the Left or on the Right, and trust that people out there reading can recognize the difference between labels and views. I also happen to hold an inkling – maybe naively idealistic – that if we can just get past these labels, and pick and choose the good from both sides, maybe we can get somewhere closer to where we want to be as a society.

Yeah, right. This guy has been murdering doctors for years.

Kopp is wanted in Canada for allegedly wounding three doctors. He is charged with the 1995 attempted murder of Hugh Short, a doctor shot at in his home in Ancaster, Ont., near Hamilton.

He is also wanted for questioning in the shooting of a Winnipeg doctor, another in Vancouver and has been implicated in a similar shooting in Rochester, N.Y.

And he also fired his original lawyer, apparently because he “had pledged not to turn the trial into a forum for the abortion debate”. I suppose he thinks he has a better chance with an anti-abortion lawyer, who will attempt to turn the trial around and put abortion rights on trial. The only question is whether this a calcluated legal strategy to better his chances for acquittal, or whether he’s delusional enough to think that he’s somehow entitled to kill doctors who perform abortions?

I’m fervently pro-choice, but I can (somewhat) respect the views of people who merely believe abortion is wrong. As long as they stick to verbal arguments rather than violence, they’re entitled to their views as much as I’m entitled to mine (so long as they don’t impose them on others). But I’m frequently amazed at the hypocrisy of any movement calling itself “pro-life” whose members go around KILLING people.