Wednesday, February 22, 2006

It's not often that I agree with the anti-abortion folks at LifeSite, but they're right to be appalled at this:

Forced Abortion on Poor Ethnic Women Proposed in Holland

Marianne van den Anker, an alderman in the Rotterdam city council in charge of public health and security has proposed forced abortion and forced contraception for teenage mothers whose origin is in the Antilles and on drug addicts and people with mental handicaps. The alderman suggested that such mothers are nearly always guilty of child abuse.


(An article at Expatica says van den Anker has only "called for a debate in Rotterdam on compulsory abortion and contraception" for these women, but there's not a huge leap from there to "proposed.")

Here's where LifeSite gets the story wrong, however:

While several reports have referred to van den Anker and her Leefbaar Rotterdam party as "right wing", the alderman is the furthest thing from the right side of the social conservative spectrum. In addition to being pro-abortion, van den Anker has set up a program in the schools to counter intolerance of homosexuality.

That mix of immigrant-bashing and sexual liberalism will remind some of you of the murdered gay Dutch sort-of-fascist politician Pim Fortuyn. And, in fact, Leefbaar Rotterdam is the local branch of Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), the party Fortuyn formed shortly before his death (as noted here and here).

Hmmm ... I'd be curious to hear a comment on this from Andrew Sullivan, who spent much of May 2002 telling us that Fortuyn was really misunderstood buy us awful P.C. liberals.

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Meanwhile, it looks as if the Muhammad cartoons will be published in England after all -- in leaflets being distributed (clearly with the intent to provoke) by the far-right British National Party, according to Reuters. They're already up on the BNP Web site, Reuters tells us (the site is here, if you care, though I can't get it to load right now).

Hey, Islamists and Eurofascists -- you know what? Why don't you just have yourselves a nice clash of civilizations and leave the rest of us the hell alone, OK?

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