A very interesting perspective on the Woody Allen allegations

"...Maybe sleeping with your friend’s husband doesn’t earn as many demerits as sleeping with your girlfriend’s adopted daughter, but if you’re waving the “Never Forget” banner in Mia’s honor, let’s be consistent and take a moment to also remember the late Dory Previn. (Or better yet, let’s forget the whole damn thing, considering it’s none of our business.)..."

h/t Kathy S

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Baird: "We must stop child marriage"

"The simple principle that a woman should be able to choose whom and when to marry is an absolute given in this country. But the sad reality around the world is that millions of girls as young as eight or nine years of age are forced into marriage every year. Some suggest the number could be as high as 38,000 per day, which adds up to a staggering 9.5 million a year. This is utterly wrong, and we have a duty to say so."

More HERE 

Someone should tell this to the people at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, who are pushing the idea that adult sexual attraction to children is normal.

OISE's Bodies at Play symposium proliferated more faddish nonsense to the school system

A floor of aged, fading, wood-panelled rooms in the University of Toronto's austere, century-and-a-half old University College seems like an incongruous choice to house something called The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. If the decision to place it there was intended to scare away any Victorian-era ghosts lingering in the Gothic structure, what has replaced them is even more terrifying. The college is now haunted by purveyors of poorly-conceived "Grievance Studies" subjects, such as "anti-oppression theory," for which post-secondary diplomas are awarded and its graduates are dispatched to public schools to proliferate.

On Saturday morning, The Centre, along with the University's politicized teachers' training faculty, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), presented a symposium on childhood education and sexuality called "Bodies at Play."

The symposium provoked a controversy for its choice of keynote speaker, James Kincaid, a professor from the University of Southern California. Kincaid has written a number of books which postulate the highly contentious idea that adult sexual attraction to children is normal, or as he expressed in his book Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting,"..most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise." 

Professor James R. Kincaid

The TV evangelist and president of Canada Christian College Charles McVety launched a petition and unsuccessful campaign attempting to bar Professor Kincaid's entry to Canada based on the incorrect assertion that Kincaid promoted pedophilia. However, Kincaid has never advocated for sex between adults and children, and has in fact condemned it. 

For more serious critics, the issue was not alleged pedophilia on the part of Kincaid. The rancor his hypothesis stimulated is because it is filled with erroneous, unproven assumptions that may indeed give "aid and comfort" to those who see sex between adults and children as acceptable. Making matters worse was that the conference was to be provided to public school teachers of those young children who could easily fall prey to victimizers encouraged by what they perceived as approbation from Kincaid's theories.

The choice of the speaker and subject matter were even more bizarre and problematic, in that co-presenter OISE had only recently been the subject of unwanted attention when one of its senior academics, Ben Levin, was arrested on charges of producing child pornography, for which he is yet to be tried. 

Tall, elderly, yet spry and impish, James Kincaid is affable, witty, intelligent and articulate. His ability to engage with an audience and the seeming speed with which his 45 minute speech breezed by suggests he is probably a very good professor.

All of what he said was well thought out, and most of it was rather uncontroversial. But much of it was of a nature that many would find disturbing if it was absorbed by your child's Grade 1 teacher and affected their approach to their students.

Aside from minimizing the threat of sexual abuse to children when describing the demonization of eroticizing children, he argues that the danger is exaggerated in part "to anchor the dubious notion of the nuclear family," and is "a conservative effort to maintain national unity."

Kincaid projects on society an "obsession with kids and sex," then poses the question of why do that and yet simultaneously be fixated on preserving their innocence.

He asked, "how can the sexual attraction (of adults to children) be both freakish and ubiquitous?"

The flaw in Kincaid's position became quite clear through the types of examples he provided to establish the supposed ubiquity of that attraction. Some of the examples he listed were more than a trifle creepy in that he was projecting eroticism onto popular images of children that most people would never think of in that way, and then extrapolating that erotic loading onto our entire culture.

A Professor of English Literature, Kincaid based his premise on the idea that the modern concept of the child was only invented during a period of European Romanticism and developed to its current state throughout the Victorian and contemporary periods. Based on the examples he provided as "proof" of his theories, it became obvious, to me anyway, that Kincaid's opinions on "the child" and child abuse are not derived from any evidence based in science, like biology or psychiatry, or on a wider survey of law enforcement statistics, but came almost entirely from a review of literature and popular culture. 

I had a chance to speak to Professor Kincaid over a coffee immediately after his talk and asked him if his ideas were derived primarily from a literature review. Not only did he acknowledge that they were, but he seemed genuinely pleased that someone recognized his sources.

I mentioned to him some of the aspects of biology and zoology that differentiates adults from children in the animal world, as indeed we have them in humans in the development of facial hair in males and enlarged breasts in females. In some species certain spots or markings alter, in an evolutionarily developed signal the young transmit to adults to indicate they were not ready for mating until those changes have occurred.

Professor Kincaid said he was not aware of that.

It was quite odd to hear this. It's as if someone were basing an overview of 1950's culture entirely on reading Catcher in the Rye and watching the TV shows Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy.

I liked James Kincaid. He seems like a very nice man. Many of us would find his ideas silly, wrong, and distasteful, but he comes to them from honest beliefs. The shameful aspect, if there is one, to his engagement by the organizers of the Bodies at Play symposium is not Kincaid's but theirs.

His views would be entirely appropriate at a philosophy symposium, or one for psychology or English literature. But OISE, which is notoriously pushing a hyper-sexualized curriculum, was completely irresponsible in presenting theories in a symposium for teachers that could in any way be interpreted as validating adults' sexual attraction to children.

Kincaid noted the over-inflated fear that our culture has about children being molested by strangers. He correctly noted that most sexual abuse of children comes from people they know; from relatives and friends. The one category of frequent abuser he omitted from his list was in the room.

It would take a lot of space to list the many high-profile cases of educators abusing their authority and position to sexually abuse children we have seen in the news lately. As people in the legal and law enforcement professions know well, that abuse by teachers happens far too often.

Overwhelmingly, public school teachers are deeply committed to the well-being of children and are reasonably intelligent, capable people. But the particular type of teacher that would be attracted to the Bodies at Play symposium and the faddish pedagogical nonsense which is characteristic of OISE's ideological biases is not going to be the sharpest crayons in the box, so to speak.

The conversations I heard among the teachers attending the event did nothing to dispel that concern.

No, the Bodies at Play symposium was not a "Yahoo! Let's celebrate pedophilia event" as the Bonham Centre's Director, Brenda Crossman, used as an example to dismiss the alarm of TV evangelist McVety. It was, however, another example of OISE finding a way of disseminating to the public school system more of its unscientific, inane ideologies that in the end diminish children's education and place them in harm's way.  And in some ways, that's almost as bad.

U of Toronto's pedophilia-friendly acceptance of the idea of the "erotic child" is evil

For the vast majority of us who are parents, we see our primary duty as the protection of our children's well-being.

That duty manifests in different ways, among them the need to provide education, opportunities and guidance that will allow our kids to mature into successful, happy, well-adjusted, productive members of society. But at its most basic level, protection means exactly what the word implies, to keep them from imminent harm, be that assault, starvation, abuse or worse.

The way the world works, at some point, to some extent almost all of us have to delegate some of that protection to others. Out of necessity we hand our children over to care-givers and educators. With no small measure of parental trepidation, we place faith that those people we trust share our interests in protecting and nurturing our children.

The worst nightmare for a parent, and of course, for any child so victimized, is when that faith is betrayed in despicable ways. It doesn't happen most of the time. But it does happen.

Next month, The University of Toronto and its Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)  will be holding a symposium for schoolteachers called Bodies at Play: Sexuality, childhood and classroom life in which the keynote speaker will be University of Southern California Professor James R. Kincaid.

The ideas behind that choice suggest are both a betrayal of trust and confirmation that the nightmare we fear for our children is real. Indeed, those fears are being mocked by the very people responsible for shaping our public schools.

OISE's keynote speaker Kincaid says
this is an image
"vacated so we can write our passion there." 

A comment on an earlier article I'd written about the Bodies at Play symposium noted that just as the bank robber answered when asked why he robs banks, "because that's where the money is," to pedophiles, schools are where the children are.

There are people who view children as erotic, sexual objects. That is a view that society, at least mainstream North American society, finds abhorrent and vile.

But the person U of T/OISE has chosen as its keynote speaker takes a different view; that the eroticizing of children is normal. In the introduction to his book Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting,  Kincaid wrote, "..most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise."

U of T and OISE's imprimatur of such values and concepts by promoting their advocate to educators of small children is thoroughly loathsome.

The means by which Kincaid attempts to illustrate his theories are more revealing of his own beliefs than they are about society as a whole. His claim that Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone or the young Shirley Temple "look like cartoon characters: Buster Brown or Betty Boop - images vacated so we can write our passion there" is a bizarre interpretation. In my opinion, anyone who truly believes that should be kept well away from children.

Kincaid suggests that we have created bogeymen of child molesters to the extent that "it raises such fears of touching that any form of intimacy may seem hardly worth the risk." When thinking of normal people, Kincaid is wrong, but it is easy to see how someone who believes that most adults view children as erotic objects might think so.

Children need comfort and assurance and sometimes that can be in the form of a hug or an arm around a shoulder. For a normal, sane person, there is no more of an erotic aspect to that than there is when in patting a dog or cat.

Kincaid is fundamentally wrong in his belief, that "most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children" and even more so in his belief that we are committing some sin by denying it.

For most of us, the acceptable "range of erotic feelings towards children" would be exactly zero. Not so for Professor Kincaid, who wrote we should  "see what might be done by positing a range of erotic feelings with and toward children. Rather than assuming that such feelings exist in only two forms - not at all or out of control - perhaps we could learn something of their differences, manner of expression and effects, allowing them a complex and dynamic relativity."

As a society, we have every interest in deploring and condemning the odious postulations that Kincaid proposes. By normalizing the eroticization of children, it is only a small measure away from normalizing the logical next step of that reprehensible idea. Will the next OISE symposium for educators feature someone who tells us we're overreacting when we condemn actual sex between adults and children?

There are depraved individuals who derive erotic stimulation from children. Evidently, it has eluded the brain trust at OISE that suggesting to educators such feelings are normal is not likely to instill many parents with confidence in them.

While Kincaid's writings may have esoteric philosophical value, the choice of having him as a keynote speaker at a symposium for teachers of young children suggests stupidity at best, and an acceptance of the most repugnant values at worst.  That either is guiding an institution which influences the approach taken to education in Canada is indicative of the appalling state of our public school system.

This week in deranged evil from the Toronto District School Board

The blog Socialist Studies is keeping an eye on the appalling abuses that routinely occur in Toronto's tax-funded public school system.

This week alone, the items include:

• One school endorsing a Holocaust-denying, 9/11 conspiracy theory promoting website and calling Canada's Prime Minister Harper a "fascist" 

• The TDSB promoting cross-dressing and gender switching to children as young as kindergarten age   More on that Here

• A high school named after the greatest opponent of Communism in the 20th Century promoting the communist totalitarian murderer Che Guevara.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg and is part of a huge file that suggests the leadership of the Toronto District School Board should be purged immediately. If the Ontario Public School System system and curriculum are not completely overhauled, these types of travesties will continue and get worse.

OISE professor/Kathleen Wynne advisor arrested on kiddie porn charges

Police have arrested a University of Toronto professor and member of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team on several charges, including making child pornography.

Benjamin Levin, 61, was arrested Monday and charged with two counts of distributing child pornography and one count each of making child pornography, counselling to commit an indictable offence and agreeing to or arranging for a sexual offence against a child under 16.

This disgrace, if true, is only one of the many ways that child abuse is perpetrated at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

The school that produced Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne usually just sticks to finding ways of screwing with the minds of children, but this latest development is not a great surprise, given the other goings-on there. 


OISE is the ideological fountain from which the worst practices at the Toronto District School Board spring. Blazing Cat Fur has a TDSB watch list.

UPDATE: "In a CP24 video from the recent PRIDE celebration, Levin is seen sitting beside federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, Premier Kathleen Wynne and former federal Liberal interim leader Bob Rae." More here

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Afghanistan: 8-year-old bride of mullah bleeds to death on her wedding night

...The story came from a village in Khashrood district of Nimruz province in Afghanistan.    

A medical doctor assigned in the main hospital in Zaranj city, the capital of the province, who wished to remain unnamed confirmed that he was “made aware” of the incident and that it was “too late to do anything for her” as well the “remote area didn’t allow them to do anything”.     

The girl was one of the several daughters of a man in his late 30s. For an unknown reason he gave his daughter to the Mullah of their village for a big amount of money. It is also common in Afghanistan's rural areas or 3rd level provinces/cities to marry young girls to old men, and trading their daughters for their debts or other items. 

More HERE

A failure of justice

The heartbreaking story of Rehtaeh Parsons, who killed herself in the aftermath of a gang rape points to a justice system that completely failed her.

There are other culprits as well, most obviously the rapists. Her ordeal was compounded by deplorable people in her community who rather than offer support, taunted her through social media.

But when someone sends around pictures of a 15 year old being raped, it is distribution of child pornography and there should have been prosecutions.

We need tougher sentencing for sexual assault in this country and police who prosecute violent felons instead of concentrating on those who give cultural offense.

More on this here and here

Islamic sect in Russia discovered living in catacombs

Some of the children, including babies aged one, are said to have spent their entire lives underground and never seen daylight.

The subterranean sect was discovered by police and security forces in the village of Torfyanoy near Kazan in the republic of Tatarstan, the biggest majority-Muslim region in Russia, 500 miles east of Moscow.

Officers were carrying out a routine check of conservative Islamic groups after a twin attack last month in which the moderate Mufti of the republic was injured in a car bomb and his deputy was shot dead.

A strict community led by Fayzrakhman Sattarov, 83, a self-claimed "emissary of Allah", had been known to be living at the property for up to a decade, ..