STACKHOUSE SOAPBOX (Yorkton This Week Jan 19)

We had a really bad week in the area of common sense in our country and it’s sad.

First of all, the Dire Straits song Money For Nothing has been banned from radio stations across the country for using a slang word that could offend homosexuals.  One person lodged the complaint with the Canadian Broadcasting Standars Council and that one person has gotten away with being able to dictate what the rest of us can and can’t listen to.  Next up should be Every Breath You Take by The Police.  It’s a song about stalking.  I’m offended.  You can see there is no limit on political correctness.

In Ontario, a convicted cop killer has been awarded $9500 in damages after he complained that being asked to stand up once a day so that inmates could be counted amounted to ‘adverse differentiation’.  The cop killer was involved in a motorcycle accident as a young man that damaged his spine.  He was also in several other accidents after that.  Standing up is a problem for this guy, but escaping from the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre in 1983 and shooting a police officer while on the run isn’t much of a hardship, apparently.  This same prisoner won a human rights award in 2008 from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network for helping to educate other prisoners about preventing HIV infection.  The sick irony is that the police officer that was killed in 1983 had his human rights taken away, but this convict can continue to conjure up ways to utilize his own human rights to the fullest.

Closer to home, a woman who left her newborn in the toilet of a Walmart in Prince Albert is not guilty of child abandonment.  Last week the Appeal Court upheld a lower court’s ruling.  At her 2009 trial, it was revealed the woman didn’t know she was pregnant (I am a guy and have no idea what it’s like to be pregnant, but how can you not know?) and ended up delivering the child in the bathroom.  The baby was blue and not moving.  The woman, scared and confused, thought the baby was dead and so she just left.  Staff later found the baby and it survived.  It wouldn’t surprise me if, sometime in the future, this woman (term used loosely) decides she wants to be a major part of this child’s life and files to have certain records unsealed.  She gets off based on the fact she thought the baby was dead! 

As an extension to that argument, if I see that someone appears to be dead and I fire three bullets into that person’s chest, am I guilty of murder if that person was only asleep?  Or, if I stab a human doll only to realize it wasn’t a doll at all, am I guilty of murder?  The slippery slope has no ending.

I read a lot of news stories and other blogs and always marvel at the brave things people will say in the ‘comments’ section when they are allowed to leave an anonymous name.  These folks have great keyboard courage; but nothing beyond that.  It’s one thing to criticize someone with an actual name, but if you can’t put your own name behind it, then what good is it?  The credibility is zero.  I have had plenty trash me in my days working with the SJHL and I can tell you that when you see your name being slagged by someone not willing to offer up his/her own name, it doesn’t feel very good at first.  In short order, however, you get used to it and you have to remember that the criticism comes from someone who, obviously, can’t look you in the eye and say the same things.  I had some immature person comment about my online blog and really get personal about someone I had written about.  Of course, the comment was left as ‘anonymous’.  How brave.

Nice person mentions this week to Benno Looft, Nicole Gendreau, Sherry Popp, Rick Bradshaw, and Chad Haas.