The southern Ontario animal rights community has a new scapegoat

Last summer, the southern Ontario animal rights community was rocked by serious accusations against one of our own. This man was accused of serious crimes, including rape; if this is indeed the case, the crime(s) should be reported to the authorities to be investigated, tried, and punished. Instead, a small group of activists appointed themselves judge and jury, deciding behind closed doors that this man must be guilty and should be ostracized; they responded with fury to requests that the police be notified, and were unwilling to explain how they determined this man's guilt.

Now, something similar is happening, although the accused and possibly the accusers this time are different people.
A person (or group of people) has organized an online cyberbullying campaign against another local animal rights activist. These people are arguing that since this activist has made videos and online comments about sex that they disapprove of, he should be banned from all animal rights activism.

First they started a Facebook group, ostensibly to “out” vegans who have done bad things, but which is focused almost exclusively on this one person. Now they have started a petition to have Vegan Outreach ban this activist from distributing their leaflets.

Now, I am not one of these people who thinks that all animal rights activists have to agree with each other and we should never criticize another activist. I became involved in animal rights to help animals, not animal rights activists, and if someone is promoting something that harms animals, such as so-called “humane meat”, I will certainly call them out on it even if they self-identify as an animal rights activist. I think it is important to discuss which strategies are most effective.

However, this campaign against this one man has gone far beyond a healthy discussion.

• They demanded he remove all the Facebook posts and videos they disapproved of, yet when he did delete some of them, they reposted screenshots they had taken of them. If these people are concerned about his videos and posts turning away non-vegans, why are they archiving and reposting them?
  
• They repeatedly make false, indeed libellous, accusations that this man is a pedophile, promotes bestiality, and thinks it's okay to murder people, despite the fact that he has repeatedly explicitly said that he is opposed to all of these. Although this activist is an atheist, he seems to subscribe to a “hate the sin, love the sinner” philosophy, which these people are sadly twisting. In their paranoia, they interpret a brief childhood experiment, quickly ended and regretted, as a sign of lifelong deviance which can never ever be forgiven (the experiment was one many people have probably attempted and harmed no one). One video, which explained that masturbation is normal and okay, is being misrepresented as being an attempt to “teach children to masturbate” (as if they need to be taught); the activist removed the video after people said that this material should be left to professional sex educators, but the haters keep their distorted interpretation alive online.
  
• They make personal attacks based on his age and employment history (he devotes most of his time to unpaid activism), which have nothing to do with improving his activist work.
  
• When this activist apologizes (sometimes unnecessarily, I think), they refuse to accept his apologies. It is clear there is nothing he can say or do that will end their campaign; they just want to vent their hate and ostracize him.
  
• Now they are trying to stop him from distributing Vegan Outreach leaflets. This doesn't make sense, unless their goal is to dramatically reduce the number of people reading VO leaflets (but then why just target this one person?).
  

The irony is this one activist is one of the most prolific Vegan Outreach leafletters, and has probably done more to help animals than all his critics combined.

It seems to me that this campaign is not motivated by a sincere desire to help animals, since just about anything you could do would help more animals than spending hours obsessing over one activist. Might I suggest donating to a sanctuary, such as Cedar Row, or distributing leaflets from Vegan Outreach or another animal advocacy group, or organizing an information table in your community, or protesting against a practice which actually harms animals, such as meat eating. I think rather it is either the result of some kind of personal grudge against the activist, or due to general anxiety about sex. Lots of people are uncomfortable talking about sex and that's fine, but the rest of us aren't. You have no right to censor everyone to try to make us conform to your vision of sexuality (or asexuality, perhaps), especially when you can very easily ignore this one activist's postings and videos about sex by not following him on Facebook, and not watching his videos (the ones about sex are easily identified by their titles).

Some of the critics may be survivors of sexual abuse who find discussions of sex triggering. I would encourage anyone in this category to get help in overcoming the trauma you have experienced. I am sorry that you suffered abuse, however campaigning against an innocent man will not help anyone.

As for the activist involved, I think he should stop apologizing in cases where he has done nothing wrong, block commenters who are unreasonable and abusive, and get back to his activism and art. (Also if he ever wants a new career he could consider training as a sex educator, since he is one of a very small proportion of the population who is comfortable with public speaking and is comfortable talking about sex.)

Petition to Wal-Mart about Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and other magazines that sex-negative people object to

Through Morality in Media I learned of this petition asking Wal-Mart to require their suppliers to cover up magazines with "ANY nudity OR sexually explicit language on the cover". The petitioner, Angie Smethers, started the petition because she was upset when her daughter saw the 2008 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover, shown.

Smethers believes that children need to be "protected" from images like this (without explaining why).

I, on the other hand, believe that children need to be protected from harmful ideas like that the body is shameful and must be hidden. What kind of message is this mother giving her daughter, when she indicates that while males routinely wear topless swimsuits, it is a terrible thing for a woman to do the same thing?

Wal-Mart is so huge that if they were to develop a policy requiring magazines to censor their covers to satisfy people who are unhappy and frightened about sex and nudity, it could well result in many magazines being censored--magazines are unlikely to produce a separate uncut edition for other retailers.

So please, take a minute to sign my petition asking Wal-Mart to continue selling law-abiding magazines such as Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition rather than censoring them.

Save the morula!

Someone left a copy of the Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) newsletter on the subway today (probably hoping that a curious person like myself would pick it up--I do the same thing with animal rights magazines.)

The lead story? "Ontario easing access to abortifacents", referring to the emergency contraception pill (ECP), a.k.a. the "morning after pill".

Now, obviously, this newsletter is intended to preach to the converted, for they don't really explain what is wrong with the ECP. Their objection is that because the ECP, which is taken within a few days of possible conception, prevents a fertilized egg from implanting, which they consider a form of abortion.

I am not without sympathy to some "pro-life" claims--certainly, in my experience, my son showed signs that he was a sentient being with his own lively temperament by the second trimester. But the ECP does not abort a baby--it keeps a ball of undifferentiated cells (the morula) from implanting!

Of course, the CLC does not mention that the morula is not even remotely a baby, has no nervous system, no "beating heart" to be stopped by abortion. Probably they are counting on the ignorance of their readers, or maybe they are ignorant themselves (consider the riduculous image at the left, purported to be an 8 week old embryo, at the Nuremberg Files anti-abortion site, and compare to an actual image of an 8 week old embryo. At this stage, the embryo is only 15-20 mm long!)

So why is the CLC wasting its energy worrying about this--a treatment which would prevent abortions of more developed embryos who do have the beginnings of nervous systems and beating hearts?

I don't know for sure, but I have my suspicions.

On page 2 of the newsletter, they have an article titled "Provinces extend same sex 'rights'". What does this have to do with abortion? You would think that anti-abortion people, if they had a stand on homosexual relationships at all, would encourage them--how many exclusively homosexual people get abortions?

But no. (Surprise.) CLC says,

The unique position that marriage has traditionally held in society has been slowly eroded and this is the most aggressive attack on our most vital institution; when the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman is broken, any sexual coupling (or, as some have argued, why stop at marrying just two people) becomes worthy of recognition and rights in the eyes of the law.

So this is what it really comes down to. The CLC is concerned not so much about the "rights" of the morula which will not implant if the woman takes the ECP, but rather wants to enforce its view that sex is only legitimate if the participants are married and willing to have a(nother) child.

The CLC has a couple of "Action Items" which I would like to counteract with Action Items of my own:

1. Ontario residents should contact Health Minister Tony Clement (clement@titan.tcn.net 80 Grosvenor Street, Hepburn Block, 10th Floor, M7A 2C4. Fax: 416-326-1571) in support of the Ontario Women's Health Council study on the use of the ECP when provided at pharmacies without a prescription. The study currently involves 40 pharmacies in Toronto, and is funded by the Ontario Health Ministry.
2. Manitoba and Saskatchewan residents should right to their MLAs to support the recently introduced same sex rights bills (which the CLC refers to as "expansion of special privileges for homosexuals").