The Gender Divide

Great stuff, Remind, but they've moved it and the dang link doesn't work anymore. This will: http://fwd4.me/5z1

'welcome. I just got a chance to read the whole thing and most of the shifts please me, but I’m disturbed by the increased support for capital punishment. Considering the high-profile wrongful convictions that have occurred in Canada in the past 20 years that would have ended in the execution of innocent men if we had the death penalty, you’d think it would be down.

Moira McQueen, the University of Toronto theology professor (and executive director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute) reminds me all over again why my Catholic schooling never took and I embraced atheism.

remind wrote:

Quote:

Only a fool would hazard an opinion as to which gender is more ethical, but it seems the sexes live on different moral planets. Women are far more likely than men to declare it is morally wrong to wear fur, clone animals or humans, gamble, commit adultery, use animals for medical tests, or condone euthanasia, polygamy, pornography, prostitution or illegal drug use. As for the view from Mars, men are more likely than women to oppose abortion, contraception and having a baby out of wedlock—issues following a related, if somewhat contradictory, theme. (In fairness, the number of males in opposition is small: 18 per cent of men oppose having children outside of marriage, for instance, compared to 13 per cent of women.)

The pollster Canseco says women are more attuned to the risks of being “objectified and sometimes exploited” and as a result are less likely to accept issues like porn, polygamy, infidelity and prostitution where there is a perceived power imbalance.

What Canadians really believe

From Macleans

It strange that men and women are completely equal in every way until women are found to be superior.

No kidding, SG. Morality? Really? When I hear the word morality I reach for my sidearm. I see this article as trying to establish a national "morality" that plays into conservative ideology: i.e., morality instead of ethics, hegemonic good instead of the public good. There's absolutely no contextualization of why women might think abortion is good and men don't--the article would prefer to conclude that there must be some kind of essential male-ness or female-ness.

Never read a Ken White publication without a healthy dose of skepticism, if not suspicion.

Not having read the whole thing, I will probably only skim over it.  I find it difficult to follow people who make conclusions about "morality" or ethics by trying to suggest we feel more compassionate towards animals than human life when the questions specifically concern abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia and the death penalty.   I can be pro-abortion and anti-animal testing and that does not mean I have no concerns for the sanctity of human life.   Personally, I feel that supporting those 4 things is showing a high regard for human life.  I prefer to not have murderers set free after 20 years, I prefer to have the quality of some people's lives improved thru stem cell research, and I prefer that women have the right to choose abortion, just as I prefer a world where I can end my life legally should I be so terminally ill that the quality of life is more like a living death.   I think a country that provides that, and has a concern that animals should not be needlessly tortured is a civilized one.  

Some may point to examples were women have held power, have achieved positions of influence, or have obtained a measure of media notoriety such as Thatcher, Rice, Bachman, Coulter and the like, in order to contradict these findings without acknowledging the overriding structures that completely internalize the thought processes and affect behaviour through association.  It may simply come down to individual geo-political preferences, which in itself flies in the face of typical notions that suggest 'they're all the same.'  One of the survival mechanisms of patriarchy involves ascribing towards women its own worst attributes, which conveniently justifies perpetual control.