Saturday, December 31, 2005

Cindy Silver Sharon Hayes Endorsement Goes Missing

North Vancouver Conservative candidate Cindy Silver once listed former Reform MP and current Focus on the Family board member Sharon Hayes as having backed her campaign. The endorsement has vanished from her website, but it can still be found. "When I first met Cindy twelve years ago I saw in her a unique combination of skills. Here is a woman whose personal priorities are in place, who gets to the crux of the legal issues and find solutions, who speaks and writes well, and is willing to work with and on behalf of others. As one of the first women elected to represent the Reform/Alliance Party, I would be delighted to see Cindy take the baton and run with it in the next Conservative government." Sharon Hayes Reform Party MP (Port Moody–Coquitlam) 1993-1997"

(Somehow Cindy Silver’s people where able to remove the link from google cache. However, Bouquests of gray, who made news headlines for his work on the Grewal case, was too quick on the draw. http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/why-did-cindy-silver-remove.html )

Presumably one problem with Hayes endorsement was that in an attempt to throw cold water on a UN women’s conference in China Hayes once sent out a news letter alleging that the Chinese government permitted the “consumption of human fetuses as health food”, thereby implying that this practice existed in China. “Chinese doctors” eat them just "like vitamins." In the eyes of Chinese medical community, they "even better than placentas" in terms of the health benefits that can be derived. Even after the controversy broke and even after it was pointed out to her that the basis for the story had long since been debunked, her constituency office continued to send out stories about alleged Chinese cannibalism. (Journalist Murray Dobbin’s old Reform watch site a good place to start looking if one is interested, but there no shortage of Vancouver Sun and Province articles as well. ) The other problem was that none other than Cindy Silver’s then employer Focus on the Family sent a pamphlet to two million American and Canadian households containing the allegation and this reassurance. "For the benefit of the skeptical, let me assure you that every word in this letter has been carefully documented. Nothing has been exaggerated or overstated." As with Hayes, they wanted to disrupt the upcoming conference. Two Vancouver Sun letters to the editor, sent the same day, provide a nice point of contrast between the public’s outrage and the Focus on the Family intransigence.

“The fetus story certainly seems consistent with other policies of the Chinese government in regard to abortion -- and the devaluing of females and families with more than one child. What alarms us at Focus on the Family is not just the track record of the conference's host country, but the agenda of those who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes and in the preparatory meetings at the UN to attack the family. It may make great newspaper copy, but to quote an Anglican woman as saying Focus on the Family is ``the devil in disguise'' and ``anti-women and homophobic'' is certainly inflammatory. It is offensive to us because of its inaccuracy and its potential effect on people who don't know us. Our constituents know us well enough to understand that we support women in the various roles they take in society as wives, mothers, single parents, businesswomen, etc. Our only fear about homosexuality is in regard to its well-documented dangers. JIM SCLATER Focus on the Family”

``Chinese people are cannibals'' by Reform MP Sharon Hayes (Reform MP attacks ``ultra-pro-feminist summit,'' Aug. 21). Born and raised in China, we have never heard of eating human fetuses as medicinal practice. Surely, there are components in Chinese herbal medicine that might seem strange to other cultures, but with a civilization almost 5,000 years old, behaviors such as incest and cannibalism were abandoned even in ancient China. Ms. Hayes' accusation of the Chinese being cannibals is based solely on a Hong Kong tabloid newspaper, the nature of which is similar to the National Enquirer. This accusation has not been confirmed by any other news organizations. Furthermore, we support the United Nations Conference on Women. The goal of such a conference is to try to provide equality to all women in the world and this concept is not ``ultra-pro-feminist.'' …. This type of rash accusation and ignorance form the basis of racism and hate crimes.”

Buckets has posted elsewhere about Cindy Silver

Summary http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/hiding-agendas-cindy-silver-north.html

7) http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/hiding-agendas-7-cindy-silver-on.html

6) http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/hiding-agendas-6-cindy-silvers.html

5) http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/hiding-agendas-5-cindy-silvers.html

4) http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/hiding-agendas-4-cindy-silvers.html

3) http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/hiding-agendas-3-look-ma-no.html

2) http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/hiding-agendas-2-learning-code.html

1) http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2005/12/hiding-agendas.html