Matthew Belanger

Today in the Toronto Star, Rosie DiManno talks about the current Supreme Court challenge that’s happening in B.C. against Section 293 of the Criminal Code – the one that makes Polygamy illegal.  Polygamy being, of course, marriage to multiple partners.  She is arguing that this law should be upheld, because while of course it’s none of the Government’s business what you do in your private life (her words), they should still make laws about it.  You can’t make this stuff up.

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The Reading List is a series of posts in which I track the books I have read – fiction and non-fiction – and give a short review.  Hopefully you find the change of pace interesting.  I will do my best to avoid plot spoilers, although some minor ones are inevitable.

I recently read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller.  It was Miller’s only novel – although he wrote other short fiction – and was published in 1959.  The story starts 600 years after a nuclear war wipes out civilization, although not humanity, in an Abbey deep in the Southwestern US desert.  This Abbey was started by a man named Leibowitz, who created it in an effort to preserve human science and knowledge after the war, when there was a backlash against all technology, and people rose up and started destroying books and killing technical experts.  The story follows this Abbey over 3 distinct time periods, several hundred years apart, as human civilization rebounds from a new Dark Age in to a new era of technology.

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Last week, I had a Letter to the Editor published in Oshawa This Week.  It was a short, simple message about addressing child poverty.  I’ve included the letter, as well as the one I was responding to, below.

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In 2004, the Federal Government of the day, under the Liberals, made some changes to the Elections Act.  The most notable changes were to reduce the donation limits of Corporations and Unions, and increase the tax payer funded subsidies.

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In April, 2004, the Federal Government passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which seeks to regulate medical practice and technologies around in vitro fertilization, fertility treatments, and other related issues.  While parts of the law relating to specific medical procedures have since been overturned by the Supreme Court as under Provincial jurisdiction, most of the act is still in force.  Many of the things banned in the law are reasonable, rational laws, that meet the Libertarian litmus test for valid government activities – they assist individuals in protecting their person or property, by banning activities such as embryo use without consent, human cloning, implanting non-human embryos in a human, creating hybrid creatures, as well as preventing the altering of genes, which is potentially harming to the child, and their descendants.  There is more to this law, however, that has no place in a free society.

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