Happy International Women's Day ... now go make me a sandwich

I was for some reason watching Access TV's coverage of the Legislative Assembly this afternoon just in time to catch Red Tory Gary Mar stand up and make an "impassioned" speech about March 8th, where governments across Canada stand up to celebrate International Women's Day, a day where women around the world hold rallies, marches, protests, town halls, et cetra. Mar ran down a listing of things that are wasting time in Alberta on the subject today, and then quoted a "Chinese leader" (Mao Tsetung, to be precise, the man who murdered tens of millions of his citizens, many of them women) and stated "Women Hold Up Half the Sky" [true...the half that's dark! -ed]-- a quote which the Chinese government used in 1980 in lieu of action. Whatever. Mar's speech, though trite and silly, didn't hold a candle to the next lunatic who stepped up in the Legislature: Laurie Blakeman started off with a rant over her previous silly comments on Women's Day, where she addressed all the bad things that apparently have ever happened to anybody without a Y-chromosome. She rattled off the plight of poor women, aboriginal women, minority women, women with mental disabilities, etc. etc. etc. Then she paid brief lip service to Mar's talk of "celebration" by bringing up all the work that "had to be done" (where's Jim Hacker when we need him? "this has to be done?" "why?" "i'm sorry, i don't understand"). She notes the feminist canard that "women make 71% of what men make" -- and here you can see why that figure is bunk -- and complains how Mozambique and a few other tin-pot African dictatorships have more female representation in their Parliaments than the Alberta Legistlature has in its tin-pot African dictatorship..HA! For this problem, of course, Blakeman has to look at the people she represents...well, perhaps not the people she represents. If Blakeman really wanted more female representation in the Legislature, her party should have let Manjit Dhaliwal beat out Hugh MacDonald in Edmonton-Gold Bar, and they could have asked their good friend Raj Pannu to allow Shannon Stubbs to defeat him in Edmonton-Strathcona. This also would have saved me having to watch Dr. Evil trying to read his speech. Blakeman also offered her demonstration of how women's rights evolve: "what was once maternity leave has now become parental leave". "Leave"ing aside the cost to the economy this brings about, what's Laurie's argument here? "Women's rights are important, because a few years after we implement them and after a few brief struggles, you men can get a few of them too..."

Anyways, for International Women's Day country has to examine its own particular issues of women's rights. For example:
- In India, 25,000 brides are burned to death annually because their dowries are insufficient for the groom's family. The grooms are never held legally accountable
- In Jordan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, raped women are still killed by their own families (so-called "honour killing") to preserve family dignity
- 28 African countries conduct female genital mutilations, many of which having no legal prohibitions to the practise
- Rape has been used as a weapon of war in Chiapas, Mexico, Rwanda, Kuwait, Haiti, and Colombia.
- In America, women wearing revealing clothing with attractive physical attributes are subjected to sexually explicit verbal banter and other forms of harassment including but not limited to being purchased meals and invited to attend social function. [Oooooooooooooooooooooo -ed]
- In Canada, women wishing to murder their babies sometimes have to travel to the abortion clinic by bus.[the animals! -ed]

Update, 2:46pm: The Shotgun blog has a thread on this subject as well. Visiting Western Standard readers are welcome to note we do have a free baseball pool that everyone is welcome to sign up to.