Right to go topless in public still open to childish debate

Last week, I was at an out-of-town event when someone came up to me and asked, “Do I know you?”

When I told him my name, the lights came on.

“Of course!” he exclaimed. “You had me on your radio show years ago debating whether women should be allowed to go topless in public.”

Turns out he’s a Kamloops pastor, and I did, indeed, have him on Mel Rothenburger Live (a call-in show I did on CFJC during the ‘90s) along with a women’s equality activist debating that very issue.

The question revolved around whether women were discriminated against because they were legally not allowed to take their shirts off in public, while men were.

A Maple Ridge woman named Linda Meyer (whom I also interviewed on the radio show) had been charged with violated a municipal bylaw that banned females over the age of eight from baring their nipples in a public place.

Having one law for men and one for women became a tough thing to enforce, and the charge against Meyer was eventually dropped. Years later, Meyer was reported still cycling around Maple Ridge topless — or, as supporters of her cause prefer, top free.

Out in Ontario, a woman named Gwen Jacob staged a similar protest, and was charged with indecency. Her conviction was overturned on appeal, and being topless is no longer considered indecent under the Criminal Code.

So why, last weekend, were there rallies of bare-breasted women all over North America demanding equality for women on the topless front?

Because in some places it’s still against the law, and in Canada, some women want it as a constitutional right.

Go Topless Day was supposed to raise awareness of the issue.

I suppose, to some extent, it succeeded — news reports indicated the top-free parades attracted a lot of men, with cameras.

Whether the women succeeded in getting people to take their cause seriously is another matter. Websites attracted the predictable clever comments, such as, “She said she was going topless. It was her divine right. The left was pretty good, too.”

The male brain simply has trouble wrapping itself around the issue, and the top-free movers and shakers (sorry, that’s the kind of immature pun we fall into) are largely preaching to the converted.

“Only a perverted mindset thinks that exposing a female breast is more humiliating than exposing a male breast,” Go Topless president Nadine Gary tried to explain. “Female breasts are as beautiful as men’s and they likewise come in all sizes.”

Who would argue with her?

“Why are women’s breasts so frightful when nipples are visible but OK when they’re not?” asked the Feminist eZone blog.

Logically, there’s no argument; there really isn’t. Hormonally and prudishly, it’s a different matter. It took a long time before it became socially acceptable for women to breast-feed in public, but now nobody has a problem with it.

On many European beaches, and some in Canada, women go topless, or top-free. Everybody’s comfortable with it.

But the street is another matter. In one U.S. city, a couple of politicians are suing police for failing to enforce the law, alleging that a “sexual act” had occurred during one of the parades.

If you had asked me 13 years ago, when the Linda Meyer case came up, whether we’d still be arguing about it like children in 2012, I’d have laughed.

Yet, it remains top of mind for some.

armchairmayor@gmail.com

armchairmayor.wordpress.com

Being nice, at least for a little while

There are days when I think the next person who says to me, “So, the countdown is on!” will be on the receiving end of a kick in the shins.

This “countdown” thing is usually expressed as a statement rather than a question. A given, they think, that a person who has set a retirement date must naturally be “counting down the days.”

No countdown. Not counting. Just enjoying it here at work until the middle of next month. Doing what I do now. Then I’ll be doing other things. Lots to do.

But they feel compelled to ask: “What are you gonna do?”

This, often, in a worried tone, as though happiness or even life itself must surely be coming to an end. You know, the “is there anything I can do to help?” kind of inflection, spoken with a suitably sombre facial expression.

I’m pretty sure this aura of concern about what poor ol’ Mel is going to do with himself comes from knowing most people have made no plans for life after work.

They plan retirement in terms of time and money — close to 40 per cent of people in their 50s, for example, are now convinced they’ll have to work past the age of 65. The benchmark for retirement used to be 62; in 2012, the average retirement age is 63. It’s expected to reach 67 within a few years.

I waited until 68, not because I planned it that way, but because I decided a long time ago I would keep working until I didn’t want to anymore, and then I would do something else.

I ran into a former colleague of mine the day before yesterday who has been retired for quite a few years now. Not long ago, he checked the Falklands off his bucket list. He’s a bit of a political junkie and history buff, and had always wanted to visit the Falklands; he enjoyed it immensely.

I have no bucket list, I have no schedule. I just have stuff I want to do — a lot of it. And I’ll start doing it the day after I officially retire from here on Sept. 14.

In the meantime, I’ve come up with a pretty good way of dealing with those “countdown” comments and “what are you gonna do?” questions. I head them off by being nice — it totally throws people off stride.

I started it here inside the Daily News bunker. If I sense that retirement is going to come up in the conversation (which it pretty much always is), I might tell the person he or she is looking very nice today, or thank them profusely for handing me a memo, or respond enthusiastically when they ask me to help them out with something.

“Of course I can do that,” I told a co-worker from the opposite end of the building the other day. “I’ll be right there!”

She was surprised, and a little suspicious, when I appeared at her desk promptly.

“That looks perfect!” I said brightly after checking over her work.

“What’s going on?” she wanted to know.

“And may I say how much your work is appreciated around here,” I continued. “What you do has value.”

“OK, Buster,” she said. “I’m calling the cops.”

See what I mean? Being nice can be quite entertaining. I wonder what Crankypants would do if I said something nice about him.

Maybe I’ll find out, because I’m going to keep on being nice right up until the 14^th of September. Have a good one!

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

The end of spelling, but not of the International

Saying goodbye, Evan and Richard wish the International well after having her in the shop for the past seven years.

This was an exciting week at the Rothenburger household, at least for me — the International is, at long last, back on the road.

“You scared the dog,” Syd said after I rumbled into the yard and parked my beloved 1955 cornbinder (it used to be my Dad’s), seven years after the boys at Jay’s Service started tinkering on it, and 22 years since the last time it drove anywhere under its own steam.

As today’s pickup trucks go, the International is small, but solid. After being in the elements for her entire 57 years, she has surprisingly little rust, at least not much that’s eaten right through.

Times have changed a lot, though. While I looked forward to once again manually shifting with its three-on-the-tree stick, I’d forgotten about turning corners. Big skinny wheel the size of a hula hoop, and no power steering. No power brakes, no ABS.

I’ve never driven a Sherman tank, but the International must be comparable.

Coincidentally, I received a piece in my in-box yesterday about things that will disappear in the next 10 or 15 years.

A website called NowandNext.com looks at statistics and trends and predicts when stuff will happen. It’s posted a new infographic suggesting that spelling and blogging will be things of the past within the next decade.

So will the Maldives, a country near Sri Lanka that consists of atolls and coral islands, none of which is more than six feet about sea level.

There’s no explanation as to why spelling will become extinct by 2020, but considering the state of the English language I’m not so sure it will take that long.

By 2030, according to the graph, lunch, FM radio, free roads, intimacy, work-free weekends, Taiwan, Paris Hilton and Kim Jong Il will also be extinct. A few years later, wallets, British royalty, Glaciers, Bangladesh, spam and a good night’s sleep will be gone, too.

The family room will hang on until around 2045; ugliness will disappear about 10 years after that. Without ugliness, of course, there will be no more cosmetic surgeons.

Looking backwards, one can see some logic to such predictions, as slightly bizarre as some of them seem. It points out, for example, that passenger airships, the Titanic and Queen Victoria left us in the early part of the last century, and that by the mid-1970s there were no more moon landings, cheap oil, steam locomotives or Jim Morrison.

Even the Berlin Wall came down in the late ‘80s, along with Space Invaders, Studio 54 and then, in the ‘90s, Betamax, Sunday lunch, the Concorde, and black-and-white televisions.

During my own lifetime, I’ve witnessed the demise of the 78-rpm record and its successors — the 45 rpm, 8-track, cassette tape and Sony Walkman. The Kik Cola I drank as a kid is long gone, and the Crumbles breakfast cereal I lived on hasn’t been on the shelves for decades.

Nobody handwrites letters any more, and when was the last time you met a typewriter salesman?

The good news is that printed newspapers will be around for another 50 years — much longer than a lot of media analysts have been predicting.

By then, though, there will be no more motor-carrier routes getting that paper to your doorstep because gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles will be a thing of the past.

What will I do with the International then?

Roadside spandex blooms in the spring

I may be imagining it, but cyclists and motorists seem to be treating each other with more respect. Must be Bike to Work Week.

Put another way — the armchair mayor is writing about cyclists again; it must be spring.

Indeed, the first sign there’s been a change in weather is the sudden appearance of cyclists, proliferating along rural roadways like dandelions and purple haze, a very profusion of colour in their spandex and Lycra.

Goodwill is in the air. I’ve not once seen a driver, in the past couple of days, refuse to give a cyclist an appropriate berth when passing, or heard one honk with annoyance upon pulling up behind a furiously peddling two-wheeler.

Bike to workers are, of course, quite different from the weekend speed demons who spread along our roads on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Those who bike to work are in it for a very special purpose — to get from A to B without being killed, and to save 20 bucks on fuel. It is a noble cause, this going green and clean.

Drivers for whom cycling to work from Barnhartvale or Heffley Creek just isn’t practical, or who would rather die than exercise, respect what the bike-to-workers are doing (and here, I must salute our own Daily News B2WW team).

I suspect, sadly, that next week the workday cyclists — except for Donovan Cavers, of course — may well hop straight back into their gas guzzlers and wheel downtown to the office just like they always did.

But not the weekend road warriors. They’ll be out there come rain or shine in their skin-tight togs tearing along roads that are under built for automobile traffic, let alone bicycles.

They come in flocks, like multi-coloured mandarin ducks migrating north, their only sound the humming of their wheels or the yelling they do at each other as they glide along side by side taking up an entire laneway, ignoring the bumper-to-bumper traffic that has lined up behind them waiting for a straight stretch to pass.

A second species of road hog is the lone ranger who refuses to pull over and allow traffic to pass whether or not there’s a shoulder to rely on.

We shall not, on this day, reprise the many complaints cyclists and motorists have with each other, nor dwell on the dangers they mutually create. We could get into the debate over making cities and countrysides more bicycle friendly, but we all know they were built with the automobile in mind and we’ll have to share the woefully inadequate infrastructure for a good long while yet.

Instead, let’s get along at least for the rest of the week, and continue to demonstrate the good behaviour we’ve started out with.

And, speaking of Bike to Work Week, and that postponed official opening of the Valleyview multi-use pathway overpass, I received a message from MP Cathy McLeod after Saturday’s column, in which I had noted she hadn’t yet confirmed her availability for next week’s event.

Seems she only received her email invitation on Friday. Unfortunately, she must be in Ottawa on June 5 (the date to which the opening was postponed after MLA Terry Lake couldn’t make it on the day that had originally been chosen). An assistant will attend in McLeod’s place.

Somewhere, there’s got to be a manual for these things.

Is there a God? Well, yes and no…

The amazing thing about this past weekend’s Imagine No Religion 2 conference at the Kamloops Convention Centre is that it happened at all.

A few short years ago, it would have been, well, unimaginable in this community. Time was if you were asked, “Are you a Christian (or ‘religious,’ or ‘spiritual’) person?” and you could not answer yes, you were regarded as unworthy.

Now, the theist-atheist debate is on, and neither side has a monopoly on righteousness or wisdom.

Friday night’s debate — “Does a God, or Gods, exist?” — started things off for the conference and I was fortunate to have been invited to moderate it. The evening lived up to expectations, as philosophy instructor Michael Horner and ethics prof Paul Chamberlain debated for the “Yes” side, and humanism activist Christopher DiCaro and atheist Matt Dillahunty for the “No” side.

They were worthy adversaries, if that’s the word, though the debate was waged without the hostility and verbosity that sometimes characterizes the issue. In my view, the most effective debater was Chamberlain — not because of the views he expressed but because of his ability to speak and question forcefully. During the cross-examination, he relentlessly pursued Dillahunty, who seemed frustrated at times in not being able to shut him down with a zinger.

That’s as far as a neutral moderator (and a neutral observer of the issue itself) will go with analysis of the debating techniques, and overall neither side won on either the question or their sum-total success in the argument.

Inevitably, though not by direct reference, the debate wasn’t just about theism and atheism, but about the very meaning of life. A few quotes:

Chamberlain: “You cannot judge a viewpoint by its neglect.”

Dillahunty: “You cannot solve a mystery by appealing to a bigger myster.”

Horner: “The universe is not eternal.”

Chamberlain: “There is no good reason to believe God does not exist.”

DiCarlo: “”Just because the universe had to have a beginning…. This just happens to be the universe that succeeded. That doesn’t mean it got a push from a big god.”

 

 

 

To pray, or not to pray; that is the question

It’s not uncommon, when public institutions hereabouts hold a ceremony to open a new building or mark a milestone of some kind, to invite elders from our local First Nations to offer a prayer.

Such a prayer usually consists of a thank-you to Creator for giving us all that we need, and for bringing us together on this important occasion.

The elders are asked to take part in acknowledgement that Aboriginal peoples were here first. Opening a gathering with a prayer or grace is common anyway, so this simply combines the two.

Yet native prayer at public gatherings has been brought into question elsewhere. A recently released letter from Taskeo Mines Ltd. president Russell Hallbauer asks the Harper government not to consider native “spirituality” in its deliberations on the proposed mine.

Hallbauer wrote that the federal environmental review panel “does not have any right to attribute significance to the spirituality of a place per se,” and aboriginal prayer ceremonies should not be allowed at hearings on the mine’s revised proposal.

This has not gone down well with First Nations leaders. I suspect neglecting to invite local Band reps to civic ceremonies in our own city wouldn’t go unnoticed, either.

The issue isn’t just whether First Nations prayers are appropriate at such events, but whether prayers of any kind are appropriate. We do, after all, live in a country and society where freedom of religion includes the freedom not to have any religion or spiritual belief at all.

For my part, I’m a pacifist on such matters. My agnostic-channelled self takes no offence to someone of faith expressing it at a public gathering, whether it be native elders thanking their creator or a service club member giving thanks to his god for lunch or dinner.

I respect their right to believe what they want, and to express it in a public way. At the same time, I trust they will not be offended if there are some in the room who don’t share those beliefs and, therefore, don’t feel inclined to stand and bow and close their eyes in homage to a higher being.

Those familiar with my past musings on this topic may remember the story from long ago about a non-believer pupil banished to the hallway as his classmates recited the Lord’s Prayer.

It would have made so much more sense for the teacher to just let the kid sit passively at his desk while the rest stood and prayed.

So, demanding that First Nations prayers be removed from public hearings on a mine doesn’t, in my view, make any more sense than it would to insist they be banned from civic ceremonies. We just need to re-set our approach a little to recognize that we don’t all think the same way.

Tomorrow night, a very interesting weekend event gets underway in Kamloops. Hosted by the Kamloops Centre for Rational Thought, it brings together atheists who will ponder the concept, “Imagine No Religion.”

The first evening will feature some top-notch speakers debating the existence of God; I’ve been asked to moderate this debate, possibly in view of my neutral position on the matter (agnostic fence-sitter that I am).

I’ll boldly predict the debate won’t settle the issue. But maybe it will contribute to understanding that having different beliefs — if they’re respectfully expressed — is OK.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

Kamloops’ first pride parade attracts enthusiastic crowd

Ready to march.

The city’s first ever pride parade went off without a hitch today. Loud and proud but respectful and fun. Lots of good speeches, signs and banners, and a crowd of about 300 enthusiastic marchers enjoying a good day for a walk — rain threatened at the last minute but held off.

Few politicians there in support, though. The mayor was absent, attending to other business. Councillors Donovan Cavers and Nelly Dever, bless ‘em, did attend. NDP candidates Tom Friedman and Kathy Kendall also.

More on who was there and who wasn’t, and why not, in Saturday’s Armchair Mayor.

Beauty pageant rules need to be fair

Jenna Talackova.

I have no trouble with a transgendered woman being allowed to enter the Miss Universe Canada competition. Vancouver-born Jenna Talackova should be able to compete without limitations as long she follows the rules and the rules are fair.

What I’m wondering about, though, is why boob jobs, tummy tucks and botox are considered fair in beauty pageants. Would there be anything so wrong in staging a pageant in which entrants were required to be all natural, right down to the roots of their hair?

Body building competitions (and most other sports, for that matter), don’t allow the use of steroids, because they give one competitor an advantage over another (not to mention, of course, that they’re dangerous).

Having different sets of rules for competition isn’t unusual. There are different events for men and for women. Different tournaments for athletes who are paid and those who aren’t.

Different sets of rules aren’t bad per se, just so long as they aren’t based on isms or phobias. The issue with Talackova is one of fairness more than sameness.

Counting the pros and cons of the lowly penny

I paid for a sandwich at a drive-through this week. It was $5.99.

I handed three toonies through the window.

At this point, there is always an awkward moment. Does one wait for a penny’s change? Does one say, “Keep the change” and risk a “Gee, thanks, big spender” from the teenager at the till?

Or do you hit the gas before it becomes an issue?

Mostly, I’m able to avoid the problem by keeping a $10 bill handy for just such occasions. There’s no shame in waiting for two toonies and a penny in change. It all goes into the ash tray — the toonies add up and you use them the next time.

Unfortunately, the pennies add up, too. That sigh you just heard was the fast-food till tender after she’s been handed a fist full of pennies.

Counting pennies does not come naturally to someone who has been educated with a built-in i-pad calculator and trained on a pre-programmed cash register.

Meanwhile, I feel the eyes of the customer in the car behind me burning into the back of my head like a laser, for it is a capital offence to slow the lineup.

Everywhere, there are pennies. Each day I return home with pockets full of metal coinage, some of which goes on the kitchen counter, some in the change bowl, some in various drawers, and the rest simply disappears into thin air (although I caught Syd poking around in my change bowl Friday morning, ignoring anything smaller than a toonie — this might be a clue).

Every once in awhile we do a complete sweep of the place and dump all the change into a bucket. Eventually, the quarters get used up on parking meters, the bigger coins on staples. The problem then becomes what to do with a bucket full of pennies.

It’s estimated that it costs 1.6 cents to make a penny. I’ve never seen a study on the labour cost involved in taking a bucket of pennies and putting them all into those little paper rollers, but I do know it’s not worth it.

The announcement Thursday that the Canadian penny is on the way out has, of course, provided an opportunity to employ every trite penny saying known to man or woman.

People are lamenting the fact they’ll no longer be able to offer “a penny for your thoughts,” or be secure in the knowledge that “a penny saved is a penny earned.”

When we refer to someone as a “bad penny” he or she won’t know it’s an insult. There will be no more “pretty pennies,” and we can no longer chastise the government for pinching pennies or being “penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

No more penny ante schemes. When the penny finally drops, what will it matter?

None of us, not a single one, will have a penny to our name.

What’s next, the loonie — the very symbol of all things Canadian? The toonie? Where does it end, rounding everything to the nearest five dollars?

No, when you count the pluses and minuses, there’s more bad than good in this. And that cashier I gave the three toonies to the other day? She didn’t even offer me my penny’s change. So I just drove away.

If I had a nickel for every time that’s happened….

Prostitution debate isn’t over, not by a long shot

I’d like to think the lull in street prostitution in the downtown and Tranquille business districts is permanent, but I’m not optimistic.

I don’t totally get the Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that says sex trade workers should be able to hire bodyguards and work in brothels but communicating for the purposes of prostitution is still not OK.

In Canada, as we know, prostitution itself isn’t illegal, but talking about it is. It’s a very practical approach, since catching people making a deal is a lot easier than catching them in the act.

What I’m wondering about is how, if the Ontario ruling becomes the new way of doing things, the prostitution business will work. How does someone set up shop with support staff and an address but not tell anybody about it and then expect to make a profit?

It would be like having widgets for sale but keeping it a secret.

The mayor of Kamloops says the issue of brothels has never been discussed by City council. That’s not true, not by a long shot.

Street prostitution, and the alternative of brothels, has been a matter for debate inside and outside City Hall since the 1990s (during which business-licence fees were boosted for escort agencies) and led to the Task Force on the Sex Trade in 2000.

At that time, and for years after, the very focus of the prostitution debate was the impact of the visibility of the street trade versus the alternative of keeping it out of sight in brothels.

“Various possibilities are routinely suggested: legalization, decriminalization, red-light zones, neighbourhood brothels,” I wrote in a column in February of 2000.

“There isn’t much new under the sun, and most of these have been tried somewhere in the world. Red-light zones have flopped in tragic ways as they become magnets for criminal activity. Legalization has sometimes proven just another way to create a corrupt bureaucracy. And who would want a brothel next door to where you live?”

Indeed, zoning for brothels would result in some very interesting public hearings. Ultimately, though, there isn’t much civic governments can do about prostitution except try to reduce the harm it causes.

“Several cities have passed prostitution bylaws only to have them thrown out of court because they are beyond municipal jurisdiction,” I acknowledged in the same column.

“My own feeling is that we should use the tools at our disposal: Do the best we can to keep prostitutes safe, but go after the sex trade and clear it out of the downtown. If it moves somewhere else, follow it wherever it goes.”

If, as Ask Wellness Centre director Bob Hughes suggests in a story elsewhere in today’s Daily News, the “stroll” is a thing of the past, all to the good.

I hope he’s right, and that prostitution won’t make a return to the streets. But here and elsewhere, the issue will never go away, and we’re going to be talking about it — including so-called “chicken” or
“bunny ranches,” the safety of sex-trade workers, and the attendant social issues of drug addiction and violence — for many years to come.

So if the current council hasn’t turned its mind to it yet, maybe the Ontario ruling is a good place to start.