Guess what? According to the Criminal Code of Canada, Frank Miller's "Sin City" and just about every other violent graphic novel is illegal

I don't have a strong opinion on legalized prostitution one way or another. Victimless crimes are not something that I spend much time worrying about. So as long as the prostitute isn't underage, or a victim of sex traffickers or an abusive pimp (the punishment for whom I think spending decades in jail would be appropriate), and it's done in private and not on my street corner, I couldn't care less.

Having said that, the federal government has just proposed a bill to regulate prostitution that must be the most ridiculous and confusing crime bill in the history of Canada.

It makes the selling of sexual services legal, but not in public places where it remains illegal, and it makes all advertising and communication for the sale of sex illegal. But wait, it gets more confusing by making all purchasing of sexual services illegal.

So what that means is that the only way sex can legally be sold in Canada, other than the traditional way of marrying a rich husband, is if a prostitute, in a private location, telepathically realizes that the person they are with wants to buy sex, and removes the money from that client's wallet or purse without their knowledge.

Yeah, it's that preposterous.

But more worrisome, while reading through the proposed bill, was something I'd never heard of before with its references to the illegality of "crime comics."

The new prostitution bill refers to them as part of Section 163 of the Criminal Code, so I went and looked it up and here is the relevant section:

Corrupting morals

• 163. (1) Every one commits an offence who
  • (a) makes, prints, publishes, distributes, circulates, or has in his possession for the purpose of publication, distribution or circulation any obscene written matter, picture, model, phonograph record or other thing whatever; or
  • (b) makes, prints, publishes, distributes, sells or has in his possession for the purpose of publication, distribution or circulation a crime comic...

• Motives irrelevant

  (5) For the purposes of this section, the motives of an accused are irrelevant.
• (6) [Repealed, 1993, c. 46, s. 1]
• Definition of “crime comic”
  (7) In this section, “crime comic” means a magazine, periodical or book that exclusively or substantially comprises matter depicting pictorially
  • (a) the commission of crimes, real or fictitious; or
  • (b) events connected with the commission of crimes, real or fictitious, whether occurring before or after the commission of the crime.

• Marginal note:Obscene publication

  (8) For the purposes of this Act, any publication a dominant characteristic of which is the undue exploitation of sex, or of sex and any one or more of the following subjects, namely, crime, horror, cruelty and violence, shall be deemed to be obscene.

That is just about the most subjective, preposterous and unenforcable law I've ever read.

What exactly is "undue" exploitation of sex, crime, horror, cruelty and violence, as opposed to say, the amount that the government and courts would consider "due"???

This law seemingly makes graphic novels like Frank Miller's Sin City series, which is both brilliantly creative and rife with all those elements in extreme and egregious amounts, illegal in Canada. The same might be said for HBO's wildly popular Game of Thrones. Are we going to see RCMP raids on Chapters/Indigo bookstores now? The library at my son's high school is filled with Japanese Manga graphic novels which would easily be considered illegal by the Criminal Code's definition. Does that mean that we can expect a mass arrest of the leadership of the Toronto District School Board?  As appealing as that prospect may be considering the other forms of child abuse the TDSB perpetrates, jailing them for stocking school libraries with "crime comics" is absurd.

It's understandable, and even laudable that the government would want to discourage prostitution. But the new bill by which it is attempting to achieve that goal is obviously a predestined failure. Even more significantly, the silly new bill highlights an urgent need to get rid of the deadwood in Canada's legal system.

Ezra Levant in court Oct. 15 over calling Canadian Islamic Rights activist a liar

...Mr. Levant’s posts were critical of Khurrum Awan, a member of the CIC who spoke at the Canadian Human Rights Commission hearings and served as its youth president. In his statement of claim filed to Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Mr. Awan said Mr. Levant suggested he was “a liar, a perjurer, an anti-Semite, a con artist, unfit to be a lawyer and has acted in a conflict of interest.”

“The plaintiff has suffered mental distress, humiliation and loss of reputation,” reads the statement of claim filed by lawyer Brian Shiller of Ruby Shiller Chan Hasan Barristers. “The plaintiff has been shunned by former friends, ridiculed in various publications and is the subject of odium and contempt.”

In his statement of defence, Mr. Levant suggests any damage to Mr. Awan’s reputation was self-inflicted.

None of the allegations have been proven in court. Neither side would comment on the case, except to confirm the court date.

The rest at the Globe and Mail 

"Ass-Gate" is an uncomfortable reminder that sometimes women do lie about sexual assault

Sexual assault is a horrible crime. It not only is a subjection of the victim to violence but of an invasion of dignity and of person in a way comparable to no other crime.

The perpetrators of this crime are reprehensible and deservedly become reviled by their communities..

Due to the personal and humiliating nature of the act, and because it often takes place without witnesses, the victims sometimes do not report the crime against them, fearing that not only will they not be able to prove their case, but will be demeaned a second time in the process of pursuing justice. In order to prevent this revictimization and to encourage complainants not to fear coming forward, it has become gospel for a number of fields which deal with this crime to unquestioningly accept the accounts of those claiming to have been sexually violated.

Operating from the standpoint of complete credulity is part of the training for social workers, counsellors, and those in the medical profession. The exceptions are the police and courts, which require actual evidence of a crime having been committed in order to lay charges and secure a conviction.

And a good thing that those in the position to inflict the most harm on a person's life and freedom are still subject to some measure of standards that protect an innocent person who has been falsely accused.

Because one of the sad facts of life that Social Workers are trained to ignore is that sometimes, and more often than any of us would like to believe, women do make false and malicious accusations of sexual assault.

It happens so frequently in Family Court by women hoping to leverage their cases that judges often won't take such a charge seriously unless there are police charges or a conviction to back them up.

Unfortunate as it is, there are unscrupulous women who make these charges out of sheer vindictiveness or mental instability, or other reasons of personal gain.

Which brings us to the "ass-gate" scandal that has emerged when Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was accused by a political rival of having fondled her buttocks at a fundraiser last week, a charge he categorically and vigorously denies.

No one, other than Sarah Thomson, who claims to have had her posterior groped, and Rob Ford likely will ever  know with total certainty what happened. Still, that hasn't stopped battle lines from being drawn and people choosing sides based mainly, not on what the facts show happened but on their political sympathies with the respective parties involved.

There have been a couple fatuous articles, tweeted by Thomson's fellow failed provincial Liberal candidate Bernie Farber, one by Ivor Tossell at Macleans and the other by the girlfriend of Liberal Party strategist Warren Kinsella, which essentially make the same disingenuous points that pretend to take no position while implicitly convicting Ford.

In essence, they wrote that we don't know what happened but they don't like Ford, that sort of groping happens to women in politics all the time, and we should take Sarah Thomson at her word.

The problem with the people who have convicted Ford based solely on Thomson`s allegations and their own disdain for Toronto's fiscally conservative mayor is that none of it adds up.

Yes, as Thomson reminded her coterie of admirers, Ford has done some embarrassing things in the past about which he lied and only admitted them when confronted by a number of witnesses.

But this time, witnesses are coming forward to back Ford and say it is Thomson who is the liar.

While most sexual assaults take place where only the perpetrator and the victim are there and may be difficult to prove, Ford`s alleged groping of Thomson was said to have occurred in the middle of a party, with the two of them surrounded by people.

One person who witnessed their exchange said Thomson is lying. Two others said that she informed them in advance she was planning to `set up` Toronto`s mayor and use it against him in her own future campaign.

Thomson has had an ax to grind with Ford since her pathetic mayoral campaign and while bemoaning how her credibility is now being attacked, it begs the question, what credibility?.

One can also legitimately wonder why, when surrounded by people, if Ford did fondle her rear, why Thomson wouldn`t simply have said `get your hand off my ass!` then and there and be able to establish what had happened. By all accounts, she was smiling and joking with Ford during what she later claimed was a sexual assault, which would be a bizarre reaction if she were telling the truth.

Instead, Thomson who seems desperate for the limelight, made her accusations via her facebook page and then has fluttered from one media outlet to the next, talking to just about everyone that would give her airtime. In some cases, making multiple appearances.

As to Thomson versus Ford`s credibility, by the accounts of everyone who knows him, the sexual groping Thomson accuses him of would be both unprecedented and totally out of character for him.

Thomson, on the other hand, is someone with a history both of being sleazy for political advantage and of changing her stories when it suited her. She abused the system during her provincial campaign and she tried to expunge her scathing remarks about one-time rival George Smitherman when she did an about-face to endorse his mayoral campaign against Ford.  Thomson changing her story from day to day and interview to interview isn`t helping to make her more believable either.

Indeed no one does know beyond all doubt what happened between Ford and Thomson. But unlike her Liberal party colleagues, I am willing to take Ford, and the two Richmond Hill Counsellors and the witness who saw the interaction between the Women`s Post publisher and the mayor at their word. On the other hand, Thomson is increasingly sounding like someone who got caught in a lie from which she can't extricate herself without loosing face.

Throughout this sideshow, Thomson appears to be grotesquely trying to position herself as some sort of `role-model` for women. It would be sad for Canada`s women if she was whom they had to resort to for a role model. Fortunately, Canadian women can do a lot better.



UPDATE; This may help put things in  perspective:

 "When Thomson was asked if she’d ever taken cocaine herself, she said she didn’t know, as she spent time on the street in her youth."

You have to have done a lot of drugs to lose track of what you've taken. Perhaps the lasting affect was more than anyone realized until now.

Log Cabin Republicans deliver on what Obama couldn't (or wouldn't)

The Gay Republican group, The Log Cabin Republicans, were one of two plaintiffs in a case calling for an immediate injunction so the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in the US armed services could no longer be used against any U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world.

They were successful today when U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips ruled in their favor.

She said the Log Cabin Republicans "established at trial that the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Act irreparably injures servicemembers by infringing their fundamental rights." She said the policy violates due process rights, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guaranteed by the First Amendment.