And the minni interesting furri animals
…including the majestic møøse
I get that the KRF is anti-abortion, and I’d have a problem with that for the same reasons outlined by other people in this thread. Other than that, are they anything like American far-right politicians, e.g. tea party Republicans–basically fiscally libertarian, pro-small-government and in many cases fond of thumping Bibles?
(Side question: Is there still a strong temperance (anti-alcohol) movement in Norway and does the KRF support it? )
No wait, that’s Sweden
The Norwegian Christian Democrats are not even remotely classifiable as “theocratic”. They’re no more socially conservative than your average mainstream Republican and economically far more sensible to boot.
We already do have it in a way. In 2009 and -10 Democrats held a nominal majority in both houses of Congress, and many of the people who had voted them in complained that they didn’t accomplish more. After all, we had not only both houses of Congress but also the White House, right? But it wasn’t like they all voted in unison. There were traditionally left wingers, more centrist Dems in the tradition of the DLC, and relatively conservative “Blue Dogs” from a few of the agricultural states. To get anything approved it was necessary to appeal to all these factions, at least to some extent. In Norway or France these three “flavors” of Democrats would be three different parties. More recently we’ve been seeing much the same thing with regard to relatively moderate Republicans as opposed to tea party Republicans. Under a proportional parliamentary system I think they would be at least two distinct parties as well. A few years ago you didn’t hear or read anything about different factions of Republicans, but you sure do now.
[QUOTE=Qin Shi Huangdi]
I get that the KRF is anti-abortion, and I’d have a problem with that for the same reasons outlined by other people in this thread. Other than that, are they anything like American far-right politicians, e.g. tea party Republicans–basically fiscally libertarian, pro-small-government and in many cases fond of thumping Bibles?
(Side question: Is there still a strong temperance (anti-alcohol) movement in Norway and does the KRF support it? )
[/QUOTE]
Qin Shi Huangdi has the right of it (although the “average mainstream republican” is frightening enough to me). They don’t like abortion in general, but are not actively working towards a ban at the moment, just restrictions. They don’t like gay people, although conversion therapy has not been mentioned to my knowledge (appears to be an american preoccupation). They are not good, but not horrible, on gender issues.
On the other hand, they aren’t really that fiscally conservative. They actually pretty good about preaching “thou shalts” as well as “thou shalt nots”. Their flagship issue is World Poverty, so they are really in support of aid to developing countries, as well as homeless shelters etc. They also have fairly decent, no joke, family values. As in, affordable childcare, maternity leave, school funding, tax breaks for married folks and people with kids, programs for single parents, support for adoptive parents etc.
As for temperance, well KRF isn’t actively working towards a ban, but they are fairly open about wanting society to be as dry as possible, and want more restrictions on sales etc.
They did manage to push through a smoking ban in public places about a decade ago, I guess that’s more or less the same mindset. There isn’t a mainstream temperance movement nationally, but several areas of the country are majority teetotal. I hope that helps.
Not really. One of the most extreme Norway-centric Norwegian man (famous for not loving very much wooden churches and communist Samis) ended up marrying a French woman and siring four children with her.
That really isn’t evidence against the beauty of Norwegian women, rather it’s evidence that they are also intelligent, too intelligent to marry neo-nazi vandals.
Don’t know about that, he (Vikernes) received plenty of marriage proposals while in jail. Breivik gets them now, from men and women both, apparently. Takes all kinds, I guess.
To get back on topic, and on the bright side, all the new ministers have been announced, and FRP has a serious “Old Tweets”-problem. It’s like these people never expected to be in government 
Our new Minister for Equality apparently believes that women “partially” to blame for rape, while our Minister for Culture wants to close or privatize all libraries and spends his days burning newspapers he doesn’t agree with.
While I think people have a perfect right to a personal opinion which may or may not agree with their official policy, you’d think professional politicians would keep stuff like that private in this day and age.
Oh well, funnier news for us, I guess.
They’re not making mistakes, they’re testing the waters. See how hard the blowback is on that kind of stuff. If they don’t get pushed back hard on it, believe me, they’ll be enacting it. Here in the US we have the Republican Party in Texas adopting a plank in their platform that opposes teaching critical thinking skills in schools, because that leads to “opposition to authority.” We have some halfwit in Congress calling for a lawsuit against gays. Believe me, you don’t jump on that shit HARD early on, you’ll be struggling to keep it from being enacted into law down the road.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
They’re not making mistakes, they’re testing the waters. See how hard the blowback is on that kind of stuff. If they don’t get pushed back hard on it, believe me, they’ll be enacting it. Here in the US we have the Republican Party in Texas adopting a plank in their platform that opposes teaching critical thinking skills in schools, because that leads to “opposition to authority.” We have some halfwit in Congress calling for a lawsuit against gays. Believe me, you don’t jump on that shit HARD early on, you’ll be struggling to keep it from being enacted into law down the road.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, their tweets NOW are squeaky clean and toeing the mainstream line. But they were tweeting all sort of insane things 2-3 years ago (before their polls started looking good), and seem astonished that the internet remembers this stuff. Apparently the ladies in charge (who, to give them credit, have had the good sense not to tweet dumb shit at any point themselves) are ever so slightly annoyed at the ministers “skeletons”, as we’ve taken to calling it.
Anyway, yeah, the blowback is blowing pretty hard. Both ministers have a so called “PR problem”. Retractions are flying etc. We’ll see how it goes. They haven’t had time to actually do anything yet. We’re pretty good at running a decent protest, so if they start messing with rape laws we’ll have their heads. I’m a bit more worried about the libraries, since there is actual money to be saved there.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
They’re not making mistakes, they’re testing the waters.
[/QUOTE]
And the CNP just proposed a waiting period for abortions. FUCK!
(although the “doctors can refuse to refer for abortion” thing got thrown out right quick, so there is that).
Can we have an election soon? Please?
Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
You can have ours so long as you promise to take all of it with you.
Just to be clear, Norway’s abortion laws are already significantly to the right of Texas.
Sure, but it’s widely available, essentially free, and not controversial. Something these nutters would like to change, hence the pitting.
Can Boxing on Segways be far behind?
To clarify here as a native Dane - first of all, we do not (at least not to my knowledge) have such a thing as dedicated abortion clinics. Abortions are performed at state-run-and-operated hospitals upon referral from your private physician, with whom you can make appointments entirely free of charge that said physician then bills the government for. I suppose in principle you could get an abortion at a privately-run clinic, but in practice I have never heard of this done and these clinics very rarely deal with reproductive health.
Secondly, resistance to the right to free abortion (at the very least within the first trimester) is not a publicly acceptable opinion in Denmark outside of the most backwards rural communities, of which there, given the state of the country, are very few. We have our own issues with dangerously fervent nationalism, racism, and infringement on the right to free speech, but religious nutbags are generally ridiculed loudly and publicly for their positions and cannot realistically make careers as high-level politicians without concealing the the full extent of their beliefs from the public. Evidently, this is different in Norway. To put into perspective how different it is, our equivalent of Norway’s “Christian Party” cannot even muster enough votes to pass the barrier for entry into Parliament.