Barbara Kay

Tory attacks and cake

The Citizen‘s Dan Gardner is impatient with the columnists cawing against Justice Susan Himel’s prostitution ruling. This morning he exasperatedly tweeted at them that “You don’t have to agree. You do have to read”—that is, read what Himel wrote. I’m on Dan’s side in this debate, but, hey, isn’t he being a little unfair and obnoxious? Surely respectable writers like Daphne Bramham wouldn’t denounce the Himel decision in such strong terms without examining the evidence:

We were delighted this afternoon to find some rare vintage Barbara Kay on the National Post‘s Full Comment blog, where she suggests that “belief in God is a prophylactic against superstition.” (This, surely, is one of the more mind-boggling contentions an atheist is ever likely to read.) Kay’s evidence comes (second-hand) from a new book from the Baylor University Press, What Americans Really Believe, which is based largely on the absolutely fascinating survey data collected by Gallup on behalf of the university’s Institute for Studies of Religion. We haven’t read the book, we should stress—though we’ve gone through much of component data from the 2006 survey, which is available on the Institute’s website—and neither has Kay. She acknowledges that she’s getting her data from “a review in the September 19th Wall Street Journal,” by which we can only conclude she means an opinion column by one Mollie Ziegler Hemingway.

If staying in Ottawa for any period of time, one is likely to become well-acquainted with the sole steadfast protester who has worn a yellow groove in the Parliament Hill sod. Located, more days than not, to the right of the eternal flame is a man we’ll call the Loneliest Crusader. Not much of a talker, he lets a few rather graphic posters convey his rather strident objection to the practice of abortion—much to the visible chagrin of school kids who wander by on summer field trips.