Have you ever lost a friend or got into a fight with a family member because of your beliefs?  What about your ideological beliefs?  

A friend of mine recently told a prospective boyfriend, "There's something you should know about me before we take this any further.  I'm pretty sure I'm a liberal and if that's going to cause problems for us down the road, we need to end this thing right now."  Sound crazy?  Maybe not!  


According to a survey done by neuropolitics.org,  most people do consider political beliefs as a criteria in mate selection.  I guess that does make sense as people tend to marry others like themselves. Do you really want to spend your life disagreeing about major issues with your partner?

If you believe in something, you're going to stand up for it.  If you really think you are right about an issue, you might try to convince others that they are wrong.  But where do we draw the line in our human relationships?  Would you move out of the house because you and your mom voted for different candidates?  Would you refuse to serve food to a friend because he was a Conservative and you planned to vote Green?  This podcast from "This American Life" tells the story of how political beliefs can ruin friendships and family life and suggests some strategies to overcome that problem.

Taking the opposite view, when uncle died,  my aunt told me that after his death,  she discovered they had been effectively cancelling one another's vote for the past 50 years.

What do you think?  How much does ideology influence your identity? Would you choose or reject a life partner based on ideological belief?

In the news this week we read the story of two teenage girls.  Both bullied and tormented: one girl dead and the other clinging to life.  

Amanda Todd of British Columbia took her own life after a string of events led to her public humiliation at the hands of a sexual predator and subsequent acts by her peers over social media.  Malala Yousufzai, a fourteen year old youth activist in Pakistan was shot in the head by the Taliban for her much publicized attempts to encourage education for girls.  The media has played an important role in both of these cases.

Watch  Malala Yousufzai in the clip below. This is a girl who is passionate about her rights.  A girl whose bravery cannot be ignored.  As the clip below shows, her views were broadcast around the world over the media- and for these views, she was shot.  She has been flown to Great Britain where there is a good prognosis for her recovery.

Malala used the media to promote her views around the world.  Most of us think that is a good thing.  On the other hand, it was the abuse of social media that contributed to Amanda Todd's death.  As a 12 year old girl, she was lured into exposing herself on camera and these images were broadly and anonymously shared to a wide audience, leading to her depression and death.  I think  everyone believes that is a bad thing.  

We like to think that girls experience all the same rights and freedoms as boys, but do they?  How likely is it that a boy would be shot for his views on education?  How likely is it that images of a boy's private parts would be spread over Facebook without it being reported as abuse?  One person exerting power over another is what politics is all about.  Ideologies were invented to curb the abuse of such power.  In our media today, why is more attention paid to one of these girls over the other?   

So the other evening I was randomly googling images of myself, (don’t ask why) and what should I find but the photo of another Nicola Ramsey on the South Carolina Mugshot Database.


The other Nicola Ramsey lives in South Carolina.
The other Nicola was arrested for accepting stolen property.
I am not THAT Nicola Ramsey. 
 

But the site got me thinking.  
What if I was THAT Nicola Ramsey?

That would have been MY face plastered over the internet in an orange jumpsuit, looking like some kind of convict, when in fact I had not been tried or found guilty.

That would have been ME who would have to pay some unknown and unnamed corporation $99 to have my image removed from their site. 

Oh yes, the fine print might say THAT Nicola Ramsey is presumed innocent- but the big print suggests otherwise.

There aren’t any similar websites in Canada, although the Canadian press does publish pictures of people who have been arrested in high profile cases.  Governments in Ontario and Alberta maintain galleries of images of people who have failed to provide child support payments. Is that any different?  For a commentary on the Alberta Maintenance Enforcement site, see this column from the Calgary Sun. 

What about “innocent until proven guilty?” What about a person’s right to privacy? Who owns your image anyway? Is it in the public interest to publish photos of people who have been charged with a crime, if they have not been convicted?  And how does it relate to the role of government in liberal democracies where elected officials and those who vote for them struggle to find a balance between individual rights and the common good?