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Conscience Clauses and Religious Bigotry
There was an article written recently in The Telegraph, a British paper, discussing a statement by Lady Hale, the UK Supreme Court Deputy President, that there should be some sort of “conscience clause” put into law to protect religious folk who wish to exercise their beliefs, and not be at risk of losing their jobs over…
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Langara College and the Bullshit it Peddles
When I first came to Vancouver from Ireland, I found out about the student loan program that was available in Canada and discovered that I could actually afford to go to University. I’d just missed the enrollment deadline for the University of British Columbia, but a helpful advisor there suggested a number of avenues I…
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Lester B. Pearson School Board, Bastion of Small Thinking
Montreal teen, Lindsey Stocker, was suspended from her school (Beaconsfield High School) for having an opinion. Her opinion was that the school (Beaconsfield High School) was policing the clothing of the girls of the school rather than policing the unacceptable behaviour of the boys in the school, and thus contributing to a culture whereby women and…
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Tenure, and the Bizarre Case of the University of Saskatchewan
On May 14th, it hit the news that the University of Saskatchewan had done the unthinkable: they had fired a tenured professor for the crime of ‘having an opinion’. It’s worth noting here that the opinion wasn’t racist, mysogynist, called for the armed overthrow of the Canadian government, declared that the Moon People were our…
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Alltrials Petition
One of the biggest problems in medical research today is that we don’t have complete access to the clinical trials that a company did when testing their new products. While this may seem to be an issue of privacy (for the company), it’s more correctly viewed as a public health issue. Why? Because lies and…
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Unpaid Internships Need to Go
As the job market becomes more and more competitive (i.e. there are more and more people in the world), people in the recruiting world seek quick and easy ways to distinguish candidates from one another. If you’ve got a stack of 500 resumes in front of you, and the bulk are simply people who have…
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Anti-Abortion Arguments, Including the Secular Ones, are Uninformed Drivel.
I’ve had something of a writing block for the last month or so, so I’m thankful to Hemant Mehta over at Friendly Atheist for providing me with some fodder to dissect. I’ve always figured that there had to be some folk out there whose anti-abortion stance wasn’t built on a foundation of religion, as the…
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Astrology Now!
I’m a big fan of science education, and those institutions whose reason for being is the furthering of knowledge, and the encouraging of the young to follow math-based ambitions. That stuff is hard, and requires a whole heap of enthusiasm and motivation in order to slog through. Conversely, it’s somewhat shocking when I find a space…
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Integrity: Something Catholic Schools *Shouldn’t* Teach?
Sometimes, I read something that’s really quite awesome, like a bunch of High School kids protesting against the firing of the Assistant Principal of their school. Why was he fired? Because he was gay. I think that it’s a credit to those kids that they felt they should stand up against an injustice and a…
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Equality of Outcome
One of the tensions in the economic arguments about the world is whether we should focus on equality of outcome, or equality of opportunity. The short version of each reads as follows: Equality of Outcome: It describes a state in which people have approximately the same material wealth or in which the general economic conditions…
