green

I am both pro-choice and pro same sex marriage. Both of these are legal rights in my country, nevertheless, problems can arise in small towns and rural areas. Women have found that they were denied access to the morning after pill by the only pharmacist in their small towns and they have found that they have had to not only make medical arrangements but travel to distant cities in order to have their abortions. Recently a same sex couple was denied a civil marriage by the local civil servant deputised to carry out this function in a small prairie town because this offended his sense of morality. I am inclined to view these issues as being somewhat akin in so far that these individuals find themselves unable to follow through with the laws of the land by virtue of their personal sense of ethics. None of these people were punished under Canadian law although these particular instances were mentioned in the media. The gay couple chose to sue the individual who found that he couldn't marry them. A couple of the doctors who disagreed with the local hospital's refusal to permit abortions quit practising medicine in that small town. As it happens the only local hospital is a Catholic one and as for the loss of these two doctors, well, this was a real loss to the residents of this small town; it's difficult to attract doctors to work in the boonies. And then there is the case of the pharmacist who refuses to hand out the morning after pill.... My knee jerk response is to view this kind of morality as being inflexible and punitive. When it comes to the right to choose, I figure that the rights of the individual who is already here trump that of an existance which is still largely theoretical. I also figure that to be anti-choice is kind of sexist; it is, afterall, the woman who pays the price. And I believe that same sex couples must have the right to civil marriage. But these are my beliefs. I cannot put myself in the shoes of the opposition. I really don't know how to view these problems. Certainly these are not problems which are going to afflict city folk.

It is ironic that Leatha is crying foul by claiming that bigotry against Christians is acceptable when the forces of political correctness protect everyone else these days. It is ironic because the United States is a country where the population is overwhelmingly Christian. Yup, Christians are the majority in America! If a member of one Christian sect finds that his religious afiliation is impeding his chances of being elected to public office this may mean that other Christian Americans are prejudiced against his sect or that they simply don't like his politics. In the case of liberal Americans, many if not most of whom are also likely to be Christians, their hesitancy to vote for certain individuals may well be based on the belief that this particular adherent will be unable to leave his God at home and not to engage Him in affairs of state; many folks are justifiably wary of one's religion becoming one's personal agenda. I believe that a liberal Mormon politician would be just as attractive as Obama, Ms. Clinton, or any other politician sporting an acceptable political platform to a liberal voter. Now, should an atheist run for the presidency, that individual would not have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. The average American is deeply mistrustful of atheism and would prefer Muslims over atheists. (I will try to find and supply you all with this link to the survey which describes all of the above.) It seems, I would assume, that many folks cannot imagine how a human being can manage to live a moral and ethical life in the absence of the Greater Hall Monitor. As for Leatha's initial post, well, it seems to me that it has sparked some interesting discussion and that is always a good thing.

Ahh, it is scary when bimbos think....:help: Thanks for sharing.

Omigosh! I did both! :faint: and then I ate a lot!:hungry:

Welcome to the site, Sharon L. You will find it very, very informative. Remember that your lapband doc won't operate if he feels that there would be a serious risk; this is because no doctor wishes for a tragedy to happen during his watch. He will make a thorough assessment of your health before he begins to cut. Doctors sometimes require that their patients do some dieting first in order to get themselves fit for the operation. The operation itself is an easy one to recover from.:biggrin1: Like BJean, I have lost a bunch of weight that didn't want to leave before I got the band. I was 200 and going up and now I weigh 170. I was banded last September at the age of 57.

And I agree with both of you on this issue. It would be interesting if the government could get over itself and treat drug use in the same way that it treats alcohol and nicotine use: tell us that it is bad for us but allow us to buy drugs and tax the hell out of those of us who want them. Then the government would be reaping tax dollars instead of spending tax dollars on an ineffective war. This money could go toward to improving society in ever so many ways and all without placing a greater burden on the taxpayer. It is interesting to note that the use of opiates was widespread in Victorian England and yet that society was an extraordinarily productive one.

All of the above are addictions and addiction should be recognised as being a medical problem, not a legal or a moral one. However I am in favour of female drug addicts being offered $300 in order to wear an IUD. The money is an inducement and will of course be used for drugs but she will be using drugs anyhow until she manages to break free of her habit and it is better that while she is using that she avoid having children who will likely be born with health issues, land up in foster/group homes and then go on to live similarly unhappy drug-addicted lives. We are looking at the rights of the community as balanced against the right of the individual, an ailing individual, not an immoral one. Allowing a drug-addicted woman or an alcoholic for that matter to go on to have a raft of children is somewhat akin to allowing an individual who is infected with the AIDS virus to knowingly have unprotected sex. It damages the rights of others in the community. Certainly it is true that offering the 300 bucks to drug addicts in order to halt their reproductive activities may be viewed as elitist, and possibly even racist, but the truth is that rich, well-educated drug addicts tend to be less likely to have babies while using. I am in favour of decriminalizing simple drug use and treating drug addiction as a medical and a social problem. Let the law concentrate on nailing the drug businessmen.

In my case, I was the grrl who kept silent about the amount of money she had for many, many years. It has only been over the past few years that I have been coming clean about my finances with my mate, and we have been together for over 20 years now. This is due to two factors, I believe. The first is that my parents were always extremely cagey about money matters even though they were open about everything else including sex. Throughout my teenage years I believed that we were living on the edge of bankruptcy even though I was in boarding school.:faint: Then I had a bad marriage when I was in my twenties. This taught me to keep my financial information to myself. Recently a few things have happened to make me open up. I was off work on long-term disability due to depression and my mate was very generous in carrying the majority of the costs of living. Then my mother died and left me a whack of cash and I was offered a cash buy-out as part of an early retirement package. I have come to finally entirely trust my wonderful common-in-law husband because of his love and generosity to me and I have broken free of my paranoia - I guess you could call it that - about my financial affairs.

Well, I am appalled to hear this. A practising Catholic must be given the proper funeral rites. Mr. P is thinking exclusively with his little head, isn't he? What a selfish, shallow man!

That's fantastic!!!! Congratulations, sez Green. What a wonderful BMI!

Thanx for the really kind remarks. As it happens I really enjoy reading your posts, too! So there!!! And No, I have never, ever watched surgery of any sort. Green is a real sissy grrl. She has never cleaned up vomit or changed a diaper. Ugh! Indeed there was a time when she was boasting about having never changing a diaper to one of her work mates. He had young kiddies and was only semi-amused. He squinted at her and said: live long enough and you'll be changing your own diapers! Ugh!! He does have a point.lol

Oh wow, this is all really interesting info. I am quite a fan of coated aspiring. I guess I am gonna have to talk to TLBC land. Thanx.

Hi and welcome to you. I thought that I would answer your question even though my answer will not be typical, I believe, of most of the gang who post here. It is true that I am an atheist but my parents, a Jewish father who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, and my mum, a Scot who had tried many spiritual avenues including witchcraft, were people who were fairly loosey-goosey by the time that we showed up. I figured that the parents had us done up Episcopalian/Anglican for we were born during the Eisenhauer era and this bizness of religion was still a big deal at that time. We could say that we didn't believe in any of it and that we prefered to sit at home and watch cartoons and chat with our father. We would sit around the kitchen table in our pajamas while mamma Green would haul herself together, put on her most responsible clothes and set off for church, ignoring her childrens' pleas that she not go, that she stay at home. She never made my dad go to church and much, much later on in my life I discovered that he was a Polish Jew, one who had survived the Holocaust, and a guy who was comfortable in his atheism. Occasionally she would drag me, the oldest kid, or my second born brother to endure these dreadful churchy experiences. In general she did leave us alone and would strike out on foot for these churchy events on her own. She never derived any joy from them and much later on, long after the times became more liberal and she had dropped her church going ways, I became aware that she had been the only one who was valiantly carrying the flag of normalcy for those crazy Greenz during the 1950s. Though my parents have pulled some pretty crazy stunts with respect to us, their brats, I find myself quite fascinated by both the social and spiritual revolutions which must have marked their early years. My two kid brothers never had any exposure to religion and even though I was shopped off to an Anglo-Catholic boarding school, one that was run by Anglo-Catholic nuns, at the age of ten, religious passion never did manage did make sense to me. It is important that fellow LBTers understand that I have often regretted my lack of the religious gene or whatever you want to call it but I still don't git it. Our weddings and our funerals are held without spiritual/religious types. My parents were deeply offended when their friends began to die off and these rent-a-minister types would show up in order to mouth a few platitudes during the funeral rites. They felt that it was disrespectful. We swore that we never pull the same stunt and we haven't.

Oh yah, I am certainly on the same page as BJean. I have been served excessively hot coffee from chain store restaurants from time to time when I have been on the run. I have helplessly watched the servers heat their caffienated beverages up to centre of the earth temperatures and I have not been pleased. Because I am an adult I end up throwing this scalding crap out if I am anxious to go somewhere else ASAP and then I never order it again from any of these dumps. I would certainly never, ever hold hold an item which was drifting into thermo-nuclear heat values near my own personal set o genitals. This would be an act of serious blondeness. (I figure I gets to say this because I have been blonde all my life. :heh: :heh: :heh: So hah, hah, hah, etc.) It is understood that it is important that people understand that they must stand up on their own two hind hooves and take responsibility for themselves. I suspect that because Canada has maintained a much more intimate relationship with Britain throughout the first and second world wars the emotional and intellectual philosophy which animates our courts and the considerable differences in our legal systems is in part that of common sense and stiff upper lip. This is why it is much more difficult to pursue a lawsuit north of the border.

We have recently gone through an interesting case up here. A Jehovah's Witness couple became pregnant with six kiddies. They were born prematurely and began to die off because JW folk do not believe in blood transfusions; it is against their religion and folks who choose to contravene the caveats of the church will find themselves shunned for life. A couple of the kiddies did die before the provincial government intervened and forced, through a court order, that the surviving infants received blood transfusions if necessary. This business of where civil law begins and religious rights end is not only an issue in the United States. Canada struggles with this question, too, and so do the western European democracies. When I left France in early 1984 the big debate in France hinged upon the civil right of cultural minorities to circumcise their female children. There was a big court case going on at the time when I left. With respect to this JW couple, they went through the trouble of having artificial insemination (and not through legal Canadian channels because the excess kiddies would have been culled), they then washed up on the Canadian medicare system, gave birth to their children prematurely and refused, for religious reasons, blood transfusions. It is to the credit of the local system that the names of the couple and their children never were made public. Where I find myself adrift hinges entirely on the event itself. I don't think that it was such a good thing that this grrl was loaded up with so many babies in the first place and I am uncomfortable about the role my government chose to play with respect to forcing transfusions on the remaining children. The family does belong to a religious group which holds a passionate conviction on this very issue of blood transfusion. I find myself terribly confused and would welcome the comments of others....if ya want to, eh.:phanvan

As I understand it BubbleButt is choosing to do something which is very, very cool. She is saying that although she personally would be unable to tolerate abortion as an answer - in fact she finds abortion to be repulsive - she recognises that this is her moral and emotional response. She recognises that if she were to vote according to her personal visceral response she would vote against the right of women to choose or, to put it more bluntly, she would be against abortion. She, however, has chosen to recognise that this is her moral axis and indeed her recognition of those situations which might drive other women to elect to undergo abortions is finally outside her purview. She has chosen the honourable path. She has stated her preferences but has also allowed that this is an issue which is far too complicated for her to opt to control on the behalf of other women. I am pro-choice of course. I am one of those women who believe that the final choice must be left up to the indivual, that the targetted woman must always have the right to decide for it is this poor chick who will be the one who will have to shoulder the consequences, physically, socially, emotionally, and - should she opt to keep the kid - financially. I would argue that there is a long history of infanticide, a post birth form of abortion, and that the material in the Old Testament concerning abortion and infanticide is kinda ambiguous with respect to the attitude of the Diety towards this activity. As an atheist I am comfortable in saying that the needs of the potential mother, the critter who is already here and who has already embarked upon her crazy, mixed-up welcome to the 21st century life, trump that of a clumpling of cells. It is her call. Sometimes that shallow, idiotic, and frightened pregnant momma is anxious to follow through the project and feels that she can make sure that the little baby human which she tosses off is going to be loved and cherished and protected. This is cool but this is simply a matter of choice and it must remain a matter of choice. Green is of the opinion that all children should be wanted children.

Though you all may well be irritated by my comparisons of our two countries, it is well known in Canada that Americans are litigous and thus the array of idiocy labels on all products sold south of the border. Many of the law suits which are successfully launched in the United States would not fly in Canada. They would be turfed out of court for they would be deemed as frivolous. The understanding up here is that basic commonsense must apply when an adult is using tools or indeed any other item. A lawsuit can only be launched when the item can be shown to be defective. Thus a bonehead who ends up sawing his leg off with his brand new circular saw, the one that does not carry the caveat that this item is not to be used on limbs, is $h!t outta luck up here. And for the same reason, the famous MacDonalds' coffee case would be unlikely to fly even though their coffee is both horrible and horribly hot.:heh: The courts up here are never sympathetic when products are misused; they are sympathetic when a product is proven to be defective. My layman's reading of the local system is that the courts are most protective of victims who are children or those victims who have been badly injured by those faulty items produced by major manufacturers, the ones who can afford adequate R&D: of course this most usually comes down to the vehicle folk. The pharmaceutical gang are also vulnerable. The industries which produce items, clothing, toys, and such, for children are also vulnerable and in the case of children's items this is not an area that is easily controlled. There are many, many small companies and then there are many off-shore companies which produce items for this market. I don't know how things work stateside but we do have government inspectors and civilian consumer groups examining toys, etc for potential safety problems. As an example: when it comes to young children there is the concern that they might be able to swallow material from their stuffed animals and other toys. And then there is this issue of flammable clothing. By the way, all my comments to do with the difficulties concerning the safety and protection of children are in the way of a side bar and should be considered as being kind of off topic. (Green got carried away, eh:o )

Thanks, Dynamo. I am already committed to this surgery. I have already put a downpayment on the job. Whenever I take action of this nature it seems impetuous but usually comes after I have spent a period of time fretting over something which really annoys me. This is how I got myself banded; I made a preliminary appointment and when I heard that I qualified I immediately wrote a cheque. Of course a certain amount of blind panic sets in later!:faint: Then when the deed is finally done I end up feeling quite pleased with myself for going ahead with it. In fact this is how I have managed to do a number of the most interesting things in my life. When I was 30 and single I decided that I would take a 7 month unpaid leave of absence from my job in order to live in Europe. After I had arranged to do so I was sick with panic. I didn't know anyone in Europe and I only spoke English. And a year later when I was visiting friends whom I had made over in France I met and had a 3-week affair with a Frenchman. We decided that we were in love. I came home, quit my job, rented out my house, and went back to France in order to live with him. Again, I was sick with panic!:omg: And this business finally ended up very badly when viewed on the short term. I came home heart-broken and without a job. Now I am very glad I did it. It was a painful break-up but it was also one of the most interesting periods of my life. It seems I am always juggling a cautious, almost timid side of my personality with a daredevil side. This is probably not a bad thing - I am 57 and I am solvent.:heh: As for the facelift, I have been warned that I am going to look like a victim for at least three weeks post surgery. This is why I am thinking burqa. And I live down in the heart of the city. As BJean can likely tell you from living in Montreal, Canadian cities are more like European cities or like the American cities of San Francisco and New York. That is to say that urban life is very lively here and our ghettos are more likely to be confined to certain suburban high rise zones. But although life is easy and lots of fun here it will, on the other hand, be much more difficult to hide my face while I am recovering.:cry That is gonna be a downer and very damn difficult. And my mate will have to do a lot of gophering for me during this period of time. He is OK about this stuff. He has discovered that it comes along with having a mate and he has now become used to me, the older of us two by 9 years, presenting him with a fair amount of neediness. He saw me through the deaths of both my parents and of my younger brother as well as the realisation that I needed my first pair of reading glasses. And of course he hand fed me demerol after I had been banded. Nevertheless, I fear that my latest stunt will be tough on him. This has been a long post but it has been a relief to get all of this off my mind. Thanx to all of you who have been patient enough to endure this.

I know that you must not take pain killers that also thin the blood - such as Aspirin - before surgery. It is important that your blood clots easily after surgery is why. But I take Aspirin quite often. It is an anti-inflamnatory and I have torn rotator cuffs.:cry

Wow!!! The Cirque du Soleil is very, very prestigious!!!! Green is wildly impressed! And the francais that he will be learning will be more useful on this side of the pond. I learned mine through living in France and have great trouble understanding Canadian French, ironic because I am Canadian. And yup, I am no newcomer to this business of vanity surgery! I inherited dewlaps from both my mother and my father's family and apart from them my jawline was getting awfully mushy looking. I also come from a family of no-lips and I wanted to wear lipstick before I died. What the surgeon did was excavate my jawline, give me lips, and fill in the creases that run from the nose to the mouth. This was all micro-surgery and seven years later I still look way better than I should thanx to him. Now - alas - he wants to do big stuff and I was hoping for more micro. Big stuff means a longer recovery and pain! With the micro I had, a week later I was fit to celebrate Xmas and go out in public. It seems with this I will have 3 weeks of wearing the burqa.:cry Note to self: must remember to join local mosque down the street.:biggrin1:

Up here all those other law suits would be considered frivolous and for the law suit against the bartender or host to proceed it would have to be proven that he knowingly continued to serve drinks to someone who was drunk and was going to drive. What many people end up doing is confiscating the drunk's car keys and sending him or her home in a taxi, having someone else drive him home, or having him spend the night if it is a private party. MADD - Mothers Against Drunk Driving have made big inroads on public attitudes up here and now drinking and driving are viewed in much the same way as smoking is. I know that whenever we go to a party we take public transportation or we cab it. The people who tend to party and drive and then crash are most often teenagers. At that age everyone believes that the rules are made for other folk.

All of the above are enshrined in law where I live. Same sex marriage is legal. We do have strict gun laws and both bartenders and hosts who serve their guests too much can be held partially responsible in the event that the individual later drunkenly harms or kills another individual. They can be sued in a civil court of law.

I take coated aspirin all the time and don't have any problems. I dunno if that's any help to you....

I don't know about thermage but I am getting this done by one of Toronto's big name plastic surgeons. He gets written about a lot and he is interviewed on television shows. I figure better to pay extra because you can't hide your face. If it is screwed up it is right out there in plain view. It is not like a botched tummy tuck. Although I could start wearing full Muslim, couldn't I? And I definately don't want the caught in a wind tunnel effect. I am plenty nervous.... He's the same surgeon that did a little work on me when I turned 50.

Wheets, I concur with Bjean. I wanna be 5'11" and I am certain that you and your husband will produce an excellent sprog. If not, well, maybe you can trade him for one of a different style.:omg: And as for your tiny feet, BJean, I am quite envious. This means that you can always find pretty shoes on sale. I never can.:cry