Weekly Update: to

by | March 9, 2019

Here’s your Canadian Atheist Weekly Update for to .

  • [] Halifax chiropractor gives up licence, admits to professional incompetence

    Wow, Nova Scotia is really leading the charge of stamping out medical pseudoscience. They’re making the rest of Canada look bad. Also, you gotta love what they made her admit to: professionally incompetent as a result of incompetence arising out of mental incapacity.

  • [] ‘Dangerous’ claims that homeopathic remedies prevent infectious disease under review by feds

    This article was published the same day as the one above about Nova Scotia, and it illustrates how badly most provinces are at dealing with medical pseudoscience. It took Health Canada and the CBC stepping in to get these BC naturopaths to even bother to make the effort of scrubbing their websites of incriminating claims.

  • [] For Avril Lavigne and others, religious music can bring earthly rewards

    It’s no big secret in the music industry that a lot of big name acts moonlight as Christian bands. It’s a big market, and they’re starving for content that isn’t horrifically shitty. Whether this is an honest devotional inclination or just washed-up or middling talent milking an undemanding demographic probably depends on the individual artist. But I’m curious what our readers think about it.

  • [] Teacher shown door after Christian school discovers she had sex ‘outside of a heterosexual marriage’

    Should religious employers be allowed to use employment contracts to enforce religious precepts on their employees? The answer is not obviously “no”, because a free society requires that groups be allowed to make and place requirements on their membership, and that includes religious requirements. However…. Should that include not just group membership, but employment? And whether the answer to that is yes or no, should the government be required or even allowed to support organizations that force religious obligations on their members or employees? There is a lot to talk about on this topic, but I’m not seeing it discussed.

  • [] The secret network that helped Rahaf Mohammed escape

    Rahaf Mohammed’s story was dramatic, but she was never alone. This a look at the very brave people who supported her, each of whom has a dramatic story of their own.

  • [] Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study

    We didn’t really need more evidence, but here it is anyway. This is the biggest study on vaccines and autism ever conducted: over half a million kids – virtually every child born in Denmark between 1999 and 2010 – with 5 million person-years of follow-up work. The conclusion? You know what the conclusion is already: no link between vaccines and autism. In fact, vaccinated children were slightly less likely to be diagnosed with autism (though that wasn’t statistically significant).

  • [] Quebec class action alleging sexual abuse in Jehovah’s Witnesses can proceed

    We’ve known about the rampant abuse within the Jehovah’s Witnesses for a long time, and for a long time we’ve been awaiting a public reckoning. It’s looking more and more like it might actually happen.

  • [] Quebec Media Contribute To A Climate Of Hate And Intolerance

    There’s a lot of troubling information in here about the amount of islamophobia in Québec media. The worst part is that Québécois seem to realize they have a problem, but the government is not only doing nothing about it, they’re actually making things worse.

  • [] What you need to know about private schools getting taxpayer cash

    This explainer is attached to the story about the teacher fired for being unmarried, featured in an item above. It’s good because not only does it give a solid explanation of the facts, it also goes to some length to try to explain the complexity that comes up when you start thinking about how to fix it.

  • [] Some ‘snitch-line’ tips on teaching about same-sex marriage are flagged as alleged professional misconduct

    Ugh, I thought this story couldn’t get any more disgusting, but the Ford government has sailed clear under my expectations once again. Okay, the background is that in order to satisfy their far-right, social conservative supporters, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives scrapped the modern sex education curriculum which teaches about “controversial” topics like consent and the existence of LGBTQ people. Teachers universally protested the move (along with just about every organization devoted to education, human rights, and every other progressive topic), so the Ford government set up a “snitch line” for people to report teachers who continued to use the modern curriculum despite also saying that there was no rule against teaching it (because the old curriculum is so obviously outdated). Pretty bad, eh? Hold on to your hats, it’s about to get worse. That’s because the CBC did a freedom of information request to find out what the “snitch line” had actually accomplished … and it turns out that the Ford government actually flagged complaints about teachers telling their students that same sex marriage exists and is legal as allegations of professional misconduct. And in fact, they filed those allegations alongside allegations of using racial slurs in the classroom, and making sexual advances toward students. Yes, seriously: if a teacher taught their students that gay people exist – again which the province says they can do – and a parent snitched on them for it, that teacher would face the same disciplinary investigation process as if they’d said the “n-word” in class or tried to seduce a student. To quote Emma Teitel, they would be written up alongside bigots and alleged sexual predators.

  • [] Substantial gender pay gap exists in Canada: analysis

    March 8 was International Women’s Day, so it behooves us to take an evidence-based look at the barriers to equality that continue to exist in Canada. The gender pay gap is a big one, and as the Waterloo researchers mentioned in the article found out, it’s still pretty bad. But their findings also included some interesting positive news.

Canadian Atheist’s Weekly Update depends on the submissions of readers like you. If you see anything on the Internet that you think might be of interest to CA readers, please take a minute to make a submission.

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