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Gus Aquinas was a play on two
theologians, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
The Family Jackboot Party was a
reference to The Family Coalition Party, a weird "family
values/anti-abortion" fringe party that sprung up in Ontario a
number of years ago. We used to make these fake political ads for it on our comedy radio
show.
Ghengis Kabalka was a reference to a
Family Coalition Party candidate with the last name Kabalka. I forget his
first name. He was actually a University of Windsor student
and would write letters to the editor of the Windsor Star and The
Lance against abortion.
I actually had him in a critical
thinking course once. Critical thinking involves examining bad arguments
and explaining why they're based on fallacious reasoning. A lot of the
course involved reading letters to the editor, which were a rich-and-ready
source of bad thinking. During an in-class exercise, Kabalka was assigned,
quite randomly, an anti-abortion letter that trotted out all the bad
arguments anti-abortionists used. It was funny watching him having to
confront these bad arguments and actually have to pick them apart yet at
the same time trying to defend them.
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