Sue-Ann Levy = Sarah Palin

Sue-Ann Levy is Jewish and a Lesbian. Some in the MSM are acting that this is all voters care about.

The Toronto Star has said:
The Tories see Levy, a staunch fiscal conservative and fierce critic of Mayor David Miller’s stewardship, as “a dream candidate.”
Jewish and gay – she came out on the Sun’s front page to mark Pride Week in 2007 – Levy lives in the riding, which boasts a thriving Jewish community, with her new wife, Denise Alexander. She has an MBA from the University of Toronto.

The Globe and Mail has said:
In a political era where identity is scrutinized as closely as policy, Ms. Levy is everything the provincial Conservatives could dream of. For a party beset by a frumpy, rural image, she is the rarest of candidates: gay, Jewish, fiercely conservative and a resident of downtown Toronto, all in a feisty, combative package.

and in another column reiterated:
Councillor Case Ootes, (Ward 29, Toronto-Danforth), who is a city hall veteran, said that as a fiscally conservative, gay, Jewish woman, Ms. Levy will make a “very interesting” and “good” candidate.

All of this reminds me of the John McCain ad in the 2008 election that had a woman claiming to be a Clinton Voter now switching to vote for McCain/Palin. A huge overtone in the ad and in Senator McCain’s bizarre pick of the first term governor was “She is a women, therefore women will vote for her.” This is a very sexist assumption and also a stupid one.

The same philosophy seems to be behind the constant mentioning of Mrs. Levy’s sexual orientation and religion. There is a different assumption behind Levy’s candidacy that no one would accuse Gov. Palin being, that she is a moderate. Women didn’t flock to McCain/Palin because they found out that both of them supported policies that would be detrimental to women (and they saw her tv news interview.) Sue-Anne Levy is very much a “Sarah Palin” in this respect. Mrs. Levy is running for a party that seeks to destroy the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, the very instrument Jews, women and gays would use to get justices if they are discriminated against. Tim Hudak, PCO Leader, believes, like McCain did, that voters will support his candidate because of her sex, religion and sexual orientation which is insulting to the people of St. Pauls and Ontario. Being a hapless pawn is not Mrs Levy’s similarity to Sarah Palin. Just read her articles and you see how Mrs. Levy sees the world as “real Torontonians” versus the “elitists” in City Hall/Queen’s Park. Like Palin, Levy is a gun-nut who hates the environment. As the PCO has no policy Levy has acted like Mrs. Palin and started making things up about her opponent in hopes that she can scare people into supporting her.

The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada may have nominated a candidate who is the polar opposite to how they are viewed (a group of tired old white guys) but this doesn’t mean that they have earned the “Progressive” in their party name. Sue-Ann Levy is a demagogue picked to trick voters into ignoring the issues because Tim Hudak believes voters only care about their own gender, or religion, or sexual orientation and not the issues. Sue-Ann Levy is Sarah Palin, lets hope she quits journalism after losing this election.

Sue-Ann Levy is a big part of the problem

Sue-Ann Levy is an ignorant fascist with dinosaur-brain and a heart smaller than the Grinch’s.

Ad Hominem attacks are very easy to make and can be effective as they rely on emotion instead of logic, reason or facts. The statement in bold above may seem ludicrous but it is in no way different than statements that Mrs. Levy has made in her articles in the Toronto Sun calling Mayor Miller a Communist or the disrespect she has shown her opponent and Premier McGuinty during the St. Paul’s By-Election. When Sue-Ann Levy wrote for the Toronto Sun she used personal attacks in almost all of her articles. The Ryerson Review of Journalism said a survey of city councillors found that Mrs. Levy was rated lowest among the 18 city hall reporters for accuracy, fairness and knowledge. As a journalist Sue-Ann Levy repeatedly worked to lower the level of discourse in Toronto Politics by putting ideology before the facts and tearing people down for disagreeing with her instead of trying to find common ground.

Many commentators have said that Sue-Ann Levy is the perfect candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario as she can “appeal to moderate voters.*” I agree that Sue-Ann Levy is the perfect PCO candidate but not because I believe she is moderate (in fact I know she is not.) Mrs. Levy is the perfect candidate for her party because Tim Hudak has no ideas/policies. While this would be a hindrance to any other candidate Sue-Ann Levy wouldn’t be able to run in the by-election with policies, facts and principals getting in her way.

Mrs. Levy hasn’t changed since she became a candidate in the St. Paul’s By-election. With no platform to run on she has brought the same bag of childish insults, false premises, logical fallacies and bald-faced lies she dug into so frequently as a “journalist” into the St. Paul by-election. Mrs. Levy’s introduction video offers no vision of what she would seek to accomplish if she were elected to parliament, it is filled with attacks only the Premier, not her opponent in the riding whom she avoids like a coward. The “Vote Levy” policy section is 21 sentences long. Mrs. Levy’s blog has a scant number of posts and again features misreading/false attacks on the Premier and Liberal opponent.

Why does any of this matter?

As a journalist Sue-Ann Levy did a disservice to Toronto by making politics about cheap insults and ignoring the facts. However, she wrote for the Toronto Sun and was therefore only an annoyance with little real power. Now Mrs. Levy wants to be a member of parliament. As an MP she would bring her abrasive, angry and ill-informed debate style into question period and the law-writing process. As a member of parliament Mrs. Levy would negatively affect the civility and intelligence of the policy debate for the whole province. Politics in Canada has been drawn in by the laziness of the television media who favour cheap sound-bite politics over substantive discussion and a newspaper industry who ignore issues they believe their readers will find to complicated.

Sue-Ann Levy is Toronto’s very own Glen Beck. It is extremely important for Canadian democracy that she is allowed to write as many cliche filled/truth bereft articles as she wants. A free-press is vital to democracy. But it is extremely important for Canadian democracy that voters elect candidates who seek to put forth and intelligently defend ideas that will better the country not candidates who have no ideas and focus on attacking their opponents character with infantile cliches and deceptive fabrications.

Sue-Ann Levy has repugnant views on many issues but it is the way she makes debate divisive and simpleminded that makes her a threat to democracy.

* Moderate apparently being defined as: anti-environment voters, voters who don’t like homeless people and Jewish Torontonians who vote based solely on their religion.

Politics is People!

Recently an article in the Ottawa Citizen entitle Ignatieff’s big problem suggested that is the Liberal Leader wants to become Prime Minister he needs a “savage response team” which the author described as “twitchy, obsessive partisans with no personal lives, no particular need for sleep and a pathological loathing of Conservatives.*”

I am 100% behind this idea. The Liberal Party needs to start hitting back against the Conservative/Prime Minister Harper Hate Machine. On a daily basis I feel like Robert Thorn yelling “Don’t you see? Prime Minister Harper is incompetent! Tell them, the Conservative government is incompetent!” which I am hauled away on a stretcher. To list a few items where the PM that 5,208,796 thrust upon the rest of us has shown himself to be a huge hypocrite: Senate reform, Infrastructure spending, Canadians held abroad, the Environment, the list goes on.
Every time the Harper government breaks a promise, sacrifices average Canadians for partisan gain or acts in the opposite of Canadian interests, Dimitri Soudas comes on television and says “Aw shucks” and no one in the media cares.

Many germs thrive and grow in the darkness. The best way to kill those germs is to simply aim the sunlight at them. The Liberals do a solid job and aiming a beam or two on their website but it is time to throw open the curtains.

* Me. The author is describing me in great detail.

A Catholic Critique of Sue-Ann Levy

Very recently in an editorial on the website Catholic Insight a Priest, who lives in the riding of St. Paul, said he would not be voting for Sue-Ann Levy in the upcoming by-election. The reason he cited for his aversion to Mrs. Levy was not her terrible prose style, or her clichéd use of the phrase “pissing tax money away as if it is water” in many of her articles. The priest who commented on the Catholic Insight website is not going to vote for Sue-Ann Levy because she is a lesbian. I have a problem with this for a couple of reasons. The first is that Jesus spent time hanging out with the people society looked down upon. “Jesus made himself a friend of men, even of the tax collectors and the worst of sinners. He set a new precedent among the Jews by accepting and associating with the tax collectors. He ate with them (Mark 2:16), He offered salvation to them (Luke 19:9), and He even chose a tax collector (Matthew) as one of His twelve disciples (Matt 9:9).” Nowadays it is not only the tax collectors*/prostitutes who are at the margins of society. That group has grown and includes homosexuals; there are still many countries where people are put to death for being gay (some of these are countries where converting to Christianity is also punishable by death.) If God decided to send his son to earth today (I can’t write ‘alive’ as Jesus is alive as he resurrected from the dead) he would be hanging out with gay people as well as Revenue Canada employees and celebrity heiresses. Another reason I disagree with Fr. Alphonse de Valk is that I draw from Christ’s teaching that God created everyone in his image and loves everyone he created that one’s sexual orientation in no way impairs God’s love. I am a practicing Catholic and I don’t care about a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religion when I vote for them. Besides, there are plenty of reasons to not vote for Sun-Ann Levy if you are a devout Catholic. Here are a few:

Sue-Ann Levy is Against Gun Control:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”
—Matthew 5:38-42.

Mrs. Levy is opposed to banning guns in Toronto and also believes that “Crime Prevention” programs are a bad idea. Catholics are very much opposed to guns and violence. Sue-Ann Levy doesn’t support programs that would get rid of guns and lead to less violence. The crime prevention programs she detests help young Canadians turn away from crime and start on a righteous path.

Sue-Ann Levy Hates The Environment:

“Today the subject of development is also closely related to the duties arising from our relationship to the natural environment. The environment is God’s gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations and towards humanity as a whole…Nature expresses a design of love and truth. It is prior to us, and it has been given to us by God as the setting for our life. Nature speaks to us of the Creator (cf. Rom 1:20) and his love for humanity. It is destined to be “recapitulated” in Christ at the end of time (cf. Eph 1:9-10; Col 1:19-20). Thus it too is a “vocation”[115]. Nature is at our disposal not as “a heap of scattered refuse”[116], but as a gift of the Creator who has given it an inbuilt order, enabling man to draw from it the principles needed in order “to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15).” – “Caritas in veritate” – Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Benedict XVI.

Mrs. Levy has written many articles about why she is against government plans to protect the environment. Sue-Ann Levy is against Greening the Ex, the Green Bin project, Greeining City Hall, Recyclable Coffee Cups, Charging 5 cents for Plastic Bags, funds to assist people in buying Green roofs, Bicycle Lanes, Protecting Trees, and Promoting walking instead of driving down-town. Mrs. Levy dismisses any attempt to act with an environmental conscience. God made the earth and we are to be shepherds of the planet.

Sue-Ann Levy Wants The Government To Stop Helping The Homeless:

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” – Luke 6:20.

Mrs. Levy is against building affordable housing for the homeless. As I mentioned before she believes that money shouldn’t be spent on crime prevention programs (many of them help homeless teens.) Levy hates beggars and believes they should be arrested. The Progressive Conservative candidate thinks that counting the number of homeless people in Toronto is a waste and also opposes using social workers to help them. The Church teaches that we must help the poor and fight for social justice.

The 8th Commandment, King David, and Those Who Are Separated:
The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario has no platform so Mrs. Sue-Ann Levy is campaigning with no real promises. On her blog she refers to the HST as “Dalton’s Sales Tax.” Here Mrs. Levy is Bearing a lot of False Witness. Her blog post implies that Dalton McGuinty thought of/implemented the HST on his own which is a lie. Prime Minister Harper and the Conservative Government are the ones who created the HST.** During this by-election campaign Sue-Ann Levy has acted like a Pharisee as she has made up policies/attacks on the government of Ontario just as the High Priests in Israel made up lies about Jesus and spread them when he was not around. She has repeatedly attacked the Premier and is running again him instead of the Liberal candidate running against her in St. Paul. This is very cowardly and is a dishonourable way to campaign. Even though David was outmatched by the more powerful Goliath he faced him head on knowing he has God, truth and righteousness on his side. The Catholic Church has a great intellectual tradition and appreciates rational arguments and philosophy. Mrs. Levy is running with no platform, she is giving misleading quotes/speeches and is not offering positive solutions, only negativity.

Conclusions:

Jesus and Holy Scripture teach us to love our neighbour as our self, to abhor violence and live a life dedicated to the truth while protecting the planet that God created for us. Just as reading Jesus’ words gives us insight into God’s great truths we can read Mrs. Levy’s articles to determine her philosophy. Sue-Ann Levy is extremely individualistic and cares not for the community or the environment, and she seeks to punish the poor and would halt any activity that stops crime at its root.

As a Catholic my political opinions are very much informed by the morality of the Church. I vote for a candidate who is prudent, compassionate, intelligent and has integrity. Mrs. Levy, unfortunately, does not possess a single one of these qualities.

* Though Mrs. Levy looks down upon tax collectors.

**Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty is the one who convinced Ontario’s government to go ahead with the HST. He is married to Christine Elliott who is pictured above. If they are campaigning in St. Paul together maybe Mrs Elliott could explain this to Mrs. Levy.