The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
As any member of the medical profession will confess, all the brethren in the doctor gig know who are the lazy doctors and the incompetent doctors. Just as, in the legal trade, other lawyers will tell you who of their brothers are the most despicable and downright layabouts in their profession. It takes one to know one. And so, as a living and breathing card-carrying member of the black art Ð as Kipling called it Ð of journalism, this scribbler must admit to being appalled, and embarrassed, by the conduct of my mates over these past many months. This would be because of the inordinate amounts of innocent forests being devastated to provide for the front-page newsprint dedicated to the subject of same-sex marriage. I doubt the Holocaust got such coverage. Canadian newspapers got their knickers into a knot over the subject, worrying and chewing over the bone whether Parliament or the Supreme Court should have the jurisdiction over this crucial decision that apparently was more important than the separation of Quebec or whether Paul Martin was actually a serious man. All of the serious research has shown that the number of gays and lesbians in our population Ð both Canada and the United States, leaving Latvia out of it Ð is at the most five per cent of all of us. (We will leave aside, for the moment, how my mates in the media have allowed homosexuals to have kidnapped and stolen the heretofore good word 'gay' Ð which The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language defines as "of Teutonic origin, swift, excellent, excited with merriment or delight, merry, sportive, frolicsome" and on and on. Why destroy a good word? I digress.) The point is that the 95 per cent of Canadians who are heterosexual Ð dare I mention the word Ð were surely puzzled over the amount of otherwise dull newsprint was dedicated to this pressing problem. Was this really the most pressing problem troubling the Ottawa Press Gallery? One supposes it would take more effort Ð than reading Supreme Court judgments Ð for the fellow scribblers to actually chase how much gelt our new prime minister saved from paying Canadian taxes to have his little ships registered in far-off tax havens. And how this compares, ahem, to how much Frank Stronach saved in moving his millions to another tax haven in Switzerland. It gets worse. The Economist, the most serious magazine in the world out of London, has as its cover story this week: The Case for Gay Marriage. It is based on the vow of President Dubya Bush that he is going to press for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. See 'Founding' P.# Con't from P.# Which, as all the wise American academics and pundits point out, is nonsense. The shrewd Founding Fathers of the globe's greatest democracy Ð Washington and Jefferson and the gang Ð knew what they were doing. An amendment to the U.S. constitution requires not only a majority agreement from both houses of Congress but also an okay from two-thirds of the states. As Sam Goldwyn used to say: "In two words Ð Im Possible." Dubya, of course, knows this too. He is simply (because his handlers have explained it to him) that he has to play to his fundamentalist Christian flock, mainly in the South, to beat off Ð while his polls are dripping Ð the rising Senator John Kerry, who looks like an Abe Lincoln who can't enjoy a drink. While the Prez tries to play this fake constitutional card, we might remember that the Brits, who are the mothers of our own Trudeau-invented paper, still do not have a written, enshrined constitution. They just Ð as with their cooking Ð muddle through. X x x AND ANOTHER THING While Lord Black of Crossdressing has being whipped by a solid judge in Delaware, where all the corporations bank their fortunes, Barbara Amiel Black has been carrying on an inexplicable, never-ending letters-to-editor war with The Spectator, the most intelligent magazine ever (and still 'owned' by her husband) over a dinner party six years ago where they turfed out a poor maiden who had been invited only to fill an empty chair. One John Hart, of Malvern, Worcestershire, has written The Spectator. "Sir: Barbara Amiel Black would have done herself a good turn by taking a tip from Disraeli: Ð never explain." In fact, what Disraeli said was, "Never explain. Never complain." Bobby Kennedy, the nasty in the Kennedy clan, expanded that: "Never explain. Never complain. Get even."
